On November 29 and 30, Your Party (YP) will hold its founding conference. The challenges that lie in front of this fledgling organisation are huge. But its tasks are urgent.
The enemy is at the gate. Reform leads in the polls by a wide margin. Far-right racists are emboldened and on the streets. Starmer’s Labour, facing crisis, cannot respond except by ratcheting up its own punitive anti-migrant policies. Meanwhile, welfare cuts are back on the agenda. The cost-of-living crisis continues and intensifies. Government ministers muster more outrage over a ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s racist football hooligans than over two years of genocidal slaughter in Palestine. Capitalist politicians of every stripe offer only war, poverty, and climate catastrophe. So, the stakes are incredibly high.
Precisely because the stakes are so high, justified frustration and impatience is growing among YP members and supporters. Tremendous enthusiasm accompanied the initial announcement that the party would be launched — 800,000 signed up online, showing the enormous potential. But since then, the far right have put 100,000 people on the streets.
Launch 2026 election challenge on the streets
YP should be responding to this by leading the mass mobilisation of working-class people. We should be linking the fight against racism and fascism with the fight to end austerity and win socialist change. We should be preparing a major electoral challenge for May 2026 — standing widely and pledging that councillors will fight cuts, support needs-based budgets and demand rent controls, not racism.
In our view, it would be a powerful statement of intent if the number one headline emerging from the launch conference was a public and explicit call to action. We say YP should use the November conference to call a national demonstration against racism, austerity and war to launch its 2026 electoral campaign.
In these important elections — council contests across England and elections to the Holyrood (Scottish parliament) and Senedd (Welsh parliament) assemblies — YP should stand or endorse candidates across the board. Socialist Alternative will be using the upcoming Regional Assemblies to build support for this idea.
On 18 October, Zarah Sultana marched alongside the Kirklees People’s Alliance for Change and Equality (a campaign Socialist Alternative members take a lead in) to launch the new party in the North of England. This brought together working-class people from a wide range of backgrounds — local anti-cuts organisers, socialists, Palestine activists, LGBTQ+ fighters and housing campaigners to name just a few of those represented. This is an example, on a small scale, of the approach we need nationally.
Getting back on track
But while activists are taking dynamic initiatives at the local level, the national picture with YP is much more challenging. In the run up to and at the YP launch conference, the task is for working-class people to assert ourselves politically and intervene to put things back on track.
The upcoming conference presents an opportunity for YP to be fully re-energised at a national level and set to work. For that reason, it is useful to engage in some detail with the political proposals being made by the current de facto leadership, and to suggest how activists can fight to steer the party in the most positive direction possible.
Strengthening the commitment to socialism
There are four main documents that have been drafted in advance of the conference. First of all, there is a political statement. This is a short text — no more than a single side of paper. But of everything that has been produced, it is the most encouraging indication of Your Party’s potential. The statement includes a powerful and vital commitment to fighting for socialist change saying: “Its [YP’s] goal is the transfer of wealth and power, now concentrated in the hands of the few, to the overwhelming majority in a democratic, socialist society.” This represents a written commitment to making YP a working-class party fighting for a socialist alternative.
However, this statement could still be strengthened further. As well as a general commitment to socialist change, a brief summary could be added, pointing to what would be needed to bring it about. In particular, we think the statement should call for the banks and the biggest 100 monopolies to be taken into democratic public ownership, under workers’ control and management. Zarah Sultana has pointed in this direction in some of her recent speeches, explaining that she sees socialism as workers being in control of the means of production. Now we need to spell out what that looks like practically.
Standing for liberation
We would also propose spelling out explicitly that YP’s opposition to oppression includes everyone. This means adding a more specific commitment to fighting for the liberation of all from racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia, as well as from all other forms of oppression. A clear stance on trans liberation must be fought for, and all elected officials should be held to account to stand by it, like with all party policy.
Socialist Alternative would also propose that the section of the statement which rightly points to the need for YP to be anti-imperialist should explicitly point to the fact that imperialism itself arises out of the capitalist system. Our internationalism should therefore point towards the need for socialist change to be fought for across the world. This is essential if we are to be able to point to the kind of international democratic economic planning that would be needed to seriously address the climate crisis and all its effects.
Empower the membership
It is a relief for many that a founding conference will be taking place this side of Christmas. However, at the time of writing, many of the promised “Regional Assemblies” to debate the founding documents have yet to be confirmed with dates and venues. Those that have are often at scaled-down capacities.
Fledgling branches have emerged all over the country with committed teams of people investing huge time and energy. Yet these bodies have been given no official status in the founding process, and Your Party HQ is refusing to advertise local meetings, except for a select few handpicked examples. Delegates for the conference will not be elected but chosen by random selection by lottery. Even then, there has yet to be an opportunity for members to express an interest in attending. To put it mildly, this leaves a lot to be desired.
All the decisions about the founding process at this time are officially in the hands of the Independent Alliance of MPs. But Zarah Sultana, who is in this group, has been effectively excluded from it. Indeed, from the very start, this was not the kind of broad representative body needed to steward YP through the founding process.
As Socialist Alternative has consistently argued, alongside the Platform for Democracy which we support, a named conference organising group should have been established early on. Even now, such a group could be set up for the remaining weeks. It should involve a wide range of authoritative and leading activists from across the trade union and anti-war movement, with an appropriate gender and geographical balance.
Grassroots activists keeping the show on the road
The truth is it has been the enormous determination of tens of thousands of activists around Britain which has kept YP on the road in the face of very public divisions in the leadership. But there remains much to fight to ensure YP can fulfill its potential and create a new political home for the working class. Our class needs a party through where the working class can organise and develop its own power — one which gives real space to democratic discussion and debate, and in which leaders and public representatives are fully accountable to the membership.
For this reason, it is wrong that the draft founding documents propose that the Independent Alliance of MPs continue to steward the party up until the election of a new Central Executive Committee (CEC), which it suggests would not be in place until March 2026. Centralising power in the hands of a group of MPs to steward the Party is grossly undemocratic, especially as thousands of delegates are shortly to attend the founding conference where a leadership should and could be elected.
Electing a leadership democratically
It is therefore crucial that a new leadership be elected at the November conference itself. We would also argue that the basis for this be broadened out. The current proposal reserves too high a portion of seats for elected MPs and other public representatives. We would therefore propose increasing the number of ‘open seats’ from 16 to 24, to help make sure that the CEC reflects the views of the rank and file first and foremost. We also suggest that in future, some representation in the CEC should be given to trade unions, as and when their members decide to affiliate to YP.
It’s also crucial that the conference does not agree to a restrictive model for how the party’s official leader (or leaders) is elected. First of all, it is important that the sovereignty of the national conference as the party’s supreme decision-making body is strengthened. This means rejecting proposals to create lots of small committees with unclear and confusing roles like “Policy Implementation.” The party’s elected representatives at every level should be bound by the decisions of the party conference — its leaders included.
But it would also be a serious mistake to insist that the party elect a single individual as leader. The current draft refers to electing a “leader” in the singular several times, appearing to rule out co-leadership. There is no reference made to a deputy leadership position either. Socialist Alternative believes that it would be a mistake to rule out a model where Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana act as co-leaders, as both have an important role to play in leading the party.
For branch-based One Member One Vote
There are important principles at stake at this conference for how decisions will be made in the future. Many of the worst proposals for how this might look are presented as ‘options’ for consideration, but some of the suggested outcomes contain important dangers. For example, one ‘option’ is that delegates continue to be chosen by ‘lottery’ for future YP conferences.
Proposals like this can seem democratic, but their effect is to dis-empower rank-and-file members of the party organised in the branches. Rather than branches having the opportunity to vote for delegates who best represent their own views, people would be selected at random (although the lottery process is far from clear, which is why Zarah Sultana is calling for independent oversight of this process).
This will tend to leave more power in the hands of a leadership, who will hope that delegates selected at random will often have been less involved in grassroots organising and discussion, and potentially be more willing to accept proposals they make without serious scrutiny. Socialist Alternative supports instead putting branches at the heart of the democracy of YP. These should be empowered to agree policy, elect delegates and decide on local initiatives — taking decisions on the basis of One Member One Vote.
No to bans
Socialist Alternative also opposes wording in the documents which it appears could be used to try and exclude members of left-wing, socialist parties from joining YP — or to create a system which might allow for future witch-hunts and exclusions.
Socialist Alternative itself is not a political party. But we are an organisation with a clear set of ideas around which we are organised. We agree that members of pro-capitalist political parties, or parties which would stand against YP in elections, should not be allowed to hold ‘dual membership’. In such cases, there is a clear conflict of interests.
However, we are wary that wording contained in the draft could be used to try and exclude socialist organisations, left-wing parties or even factions. Clearly a party whose membership will hopefully number in the hundreds of thousands will not be a monolith. There will naturally be debate and disagreement about many matters of political program and strategy. People who have a shared point of view clearly have a right to organise together. Everyone in Your Party should have the right to organise around their ideas, so long as these broadly align with the party’s political aims.
Organisations like Socialist Alternative have in fact been pivotal in helping to establish Your Party in many areas of the country where we have a presence. This clause needs to be removed or thrown out by conference.
Accountability and class independence
Socialist Alternative welcomes the commitments included in the documents to supporting mandatory re-selection for MPs and the right of recall for officials. This reflects significant leftward pressure which is being asserted on YP’s interim leadership by thousands of people who have understood some of the key lessons from Corbyn’s leadership of Labour.
We believe these measures could be strengthened further, however. We believe it’s important that public representatives of the party are not allowed to become far removed from the real day-to-day experiences of working-class people or to gain financial privileges as a result of taking elected positions.
We would support adding a call that political representatives of YP take only the wage of an average skilled worker, donating the remainder of any salary to the workers’ movement and struggle. In line with this, and crucially, we also believe that landlords should not be MPs or councillors. Anyone who owns a property portfolio who wants to represent Your Party should be required to give that up in a way that protects the rights and interests of the tenants. This is an important part of fighting for Your Party to stand in a clear way for the independent interests of working-class people.
Between the interests of workers who produce the wealth and bosses whose fortunes come from siphoning off a portion of that as profits, there is no ‘third way’. Your Party must stand with the working class. Most of all it must stand with the working class in struggle. And to do that consistently, in the view of Socialist Alternative, it must stand with the working class in fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society along socialist lines.
