On the banks of the Mersey, across from the shipyards and gasworks of Birkenhead, an alphabet soup of hard-Left activists has emerged to man stalls and pop-up tents bearing weighty tomes. The SPEW, the SWP, the CPB, the CPGB(ML), the SL: from where they came, nobody quite knows, but this is not what you could plausibly call the mainstream Left. We instantly recognise even the reddest of Labourites, or perhaps a Polanski-loving Green. But this is a more subterranean species, rarely seen in the cold light of national conversation. Today, these veteran Leftists are beheld by confused journalists who are more used to the rituals of PMQs than the socialist rally, and who are blissfully unaware of the difference between the RCP and the RCG.
We’re in the same venue that, just months ago, hosted government ministers and their hungover special advisers at the Labour Conference. But now, we’re here for an event to mark Your Party’s official foundation, and the vibes are unsurprisingly different. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having had the whip removed by Keir Starmer five years ago, is establishing a new electoral vehicle with that other former Labour recalcitrant, Zarah Sultana. It’s worth remembering that both would still be languishing on the backbenches as Labour MPs were it not for the Prime Minister’s Stalinist approach to party management. After all, Corbyn stayed in what Peter Mandelson boasted was a “sealed tomb” of the Labour Left, all the way through the Iraq and Afghan wars, privatisations, PFI. But today, finally, the Left hopes to break from its Labourist sepulchre.
Outside the confines of a heavily scrutinised party of government — with in-built constitutional connections to politically moderate trade unions that represent millions of workers — all the neuroses of the Left come to the fore here in Liverpool. This is Glastonbury for people who unironically quote Lenin, an airport-hangar-sized space teeming with aging members of all manner of sects, and who thrive during the most arcane and interminable of debates. Motions, seconders, points of order: this is the language they speak. After Corbyn has opened with one of his woolly, meandering speeches, full of odes to “communities”, “people coming together”, “peace”, “the homeless” and “refugees”, the journalists are banished from the hall, and the revolutionary proceduralism is turned up to self-parodic levels.
When the CIA declassified its Simple Sabotage Field Manual, it revealed how its agents would infiltrate activist organisations to hamper their activities. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions”, it reads; “Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions”; “Talk as frequently as possible at great length”; and “bring up irrelevant issues”. Your Party’s delegates seem to have imbibed this advice — not because they’re intelligence operatives, but because they have an incredible knack for the reverse Midas. Within minutes of the first session, the chair is being heckled and booed as she begs security to eject a shouting participant. “LET. HER. SPEAK!” goes a sporadic chant from the audience.
It’s as if the entire exercise has been conceived to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the hard Left. And when not concerning themselves with how many kulaks can dance on the head of a pin, the two actual issues that provoke the giddiest of cheers are the twin obsessions of Palestine and transphobia, questions that motivate vanishingly small numbers of voters. Most of them, perhaps, are in this room. The night before, one speaker at a pre-conference rally diagnosed a pre-revolutionary mood in the country, as in Petrograd in 1917. Britain, he claimed, was simmering with renewed class consciousness. The war in Gaza has “united the working class” and opened their eyes to the true nature of “capitalism” and “imperialism”. Any day now, the whole edifice could come crumbling down.
Well, maybe not just yet. Demographically speaking, scanning the room of delegates, Your Party appears to largely be retired boomer activists, who cut their teeth in the heightened political tensions of the Cold War, or else in the municipal struggles of the New Left in the Eighties. Some have been involved in the Stop the War Coalition, and many seem to be members of parties that define their politics according to their relation to the work of three or four Russian and German thinkers who died over a century ago. Alongside that cohort are some younger, millennial socialists; the downwardly mobile graduates with no future, angry at high rents, low wages and all of the contemporary identity struggles that consume the hyper-online.
A third cohort had been earmarked by Corbyn, but has been significantly alienated by the first few months of the party’s eager self-immolation: the Muslim working class, represented by the four so-called Gaza independents, two of whom have quit the founding process after falling out with Sultana over trans rights. Corbyn’s strange ability to articulate the vague, platitudinous ethical socialism redolent of a non-conformist preacher could have allowed his Your Party colleagues a semblance of unity. But they have all fallen badly at the first hurdle, humiliating themselves and their movement, turning themselves into a national joke that just keeps on giving.
“They have all fallen badly at the first hurdle, turning themselves into a national joke that just keeps on giving.”
The former Labour MP Sultana has courted the support of the myriad revolutionary Marxist groupuscules after a pair of botched, unilateral launches threw the nascent party into disarray. After the political operatives around Corbyn preemptively expelled some Socialist Workers’ Party members from the conference, Sultana called it an “undemocratic witch hunt” and boycotted the first day in protest, flouncing away from the venue for the gathered cameras. One old-timer Tankie confides that he was uncomfortable with the exclusions. “Even Stalin,” he tells me, “would wait for a rulebook to be formally adopted before he expelled people for breaking rules”. One prominent Corbynite in favour of the ban jokingly messages to say that the ejection of SWP members from the building is, only semi-ironically, “a delicious vision of what Grey Cuba could have been”.
As well as pushing for the inclusion of the sects in Your Party’s structures, and despite standing on an incredibly thin Labour manifesto last year, Sultana has spent her time on podiums advocating for nationalising “the entire economy”. Because if there’s one takeaway from this tumultuous foundation process, it’s that those presiding over the Your Party perma-crisis would be capable of abolishing the entire private sector, and managing the whole means of production, distribution and exchange themselves, Soviet-style. Sultana herself is still holding on to £600,000 scraped from the membership portal she preemptively launched, apparently in a bid to bounce Corbyn into action. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating potential breaches of the law, and, according to one source, Corbyn is the only person among the Independent and Your Party MPs resisting reporting her to the police and Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. These, then, are the bureaucratic geniuses who could formulate Five Year Plans for an advanced economy.
Yet it’s political differences that have become the core dividing lines between Zarah and Jeremy, with the latter, perhaps for the first time in his life, somehow representing the more Right-wing strand of his party’s thinking. The former Labour leader tells me that there is no Your Party witch hunt, and that, simply put, people “can’t be members of two parties at the same time”. He is also keen to emphasise his more limited desires for public ownership: of water, energy, the old, postwar state-delivered utilities. His is a brand of old-fashioned allotment Leftism, all tatty jumpers, homemade vegan flapjacks and CND marches. Sultana, on the other hand, has adopted the combative, sometimes crazed rhetoric of the convert. One pro-Jeremy wag describes the supportive network of Trotskyists around her as “Cultana”, with a worldview shaped by the extremities of early-2020s identity politics, online cancel culture, “calling out”, and neo-Maoist public purification rituals.
But in insisting on pursuing a “member-led” process, on “empowering the grassroots” and involving a panoply of bizarre interest groups in an exercise in “ultra-democracy”, Corbyn has opened a Pandora’s box, unwittingly handing power to cults that tend towards parasitic relationships with whatever body they attach themselves to. The favoured strategy of the “bottom-up social movement”, and the “prefigurative” and “democratic” structure so desired by the Left’s idealists, lends itself not to democracy, but to activist-ocracy, to domination by militant cliques of hardline oddballs who adore whiling their evenings and weekends away in damp halls full of political eccentrics, and who love nothing and nobody but the sounds of their own voices.
And yet this is the future that Your Party’s foundational delegates have chosen: yesterday, on the final day of the conference, it was announced that members had decided to reject the “single-leader model” in favour of a “collective leadership” made up of a body of 20 non-MPs. Neither Jeremy nor Zarah will lead Your Party. In exposing the public to their spats and civil warfare, the two have lost control of the vehicle they set out to build. What’s more, Your Party members will, after all, be able to have their “dual memberships”, ensuring that it becomes, in effect, an umbrella group of the warring Trotskyist parties camped outside. The foundational conference has voted itself into permanent, certain obscurity.
There’s a genuine political space for a party that represents the socialist — not the ecological — tradition, especially in the country that birthed the labour movement centuries ago. Vast spaces have opened up on Labour’s Left flank, with broad elements of Corbyn’s 2017 and 2019 programmes still attracting widespread popular support in polling. Dominic Cummings wrote of a “crude heuristic” that the median voter is, roughly, “national socialist”, meaning that they “are both more left than Blairites (e.g. tax the rich) and more right than Tories (e.g. on violent crime)”. But the hard Left are congenitally predisposed to fail to take advantage. They are stuck in the quagmire of their own dogmas, and they lack ability to compromise with electoral realities. The strong intellectual tradition associated with the last century’s Communist and Labour Party, the work of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Anthony Crosland and many others besides, has disappeared. In its place is a void, with a political culture dedicated to self-destructive language-policing over alliance-building, determined to make enemies, burn bridges, and turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.
Slightly further to the Right, the Your Party tragicomedy solidifies the Greens’ hegemonic pull over any voter more progressive than Starmer. Zack Polanski is the principal beneficiary of this weekend’s debacles, alongside a Labour Party that no longer needs to worry about a competent, coherent force that further bifurcates its Left flank and costs them marginals (if not winning many seats themselves). The chances of that happening, of Labour being troubled by this new upstart, are almost nil. Instead, the Left have fiddled while Rome burns, with Reform on the march, and swathes of working-class Britain rushing to Farage. Your Party will not threaten this seemingly inexorable trajectory, and will be barely noticed by the average voter. Nor will it threaten a floundering Labour, nor the Greens, nor concern anyone beyond its own alphabet soup of acronyms. It is unlikely to survive the next election. Once again, the revolution has been postponed, this time indefinitely.
