Tragedy is an often-misused word, especially in politics. But when, only a matter of months ago, more than three-quarters of a million people signed up to be part of a new organisation on the left that promised to change the face of politics, hope and a great deal of enthusiasm was most definitely in the air.
Since then, however, Your Party has been mired in disagreements, arguments, accusations of betrayal, electoral stitch-ups, rancour and factionalism that looks to have destroyed one of the best chances for a generation for the left to get its act together and take on the forces of the far right and also the centrist supporters of status quo neoliberalism. And that is a political tragedy. What looks to be the final straw is the decision of the Your Party CEC on 12 April 2026 that members of raft of left-wing organisations and groups will not be allowed to join the party as their organisations are incompatible with membership.
How did we get to this position? For seasoned Your Party watchers (and many members) it has seemed sadly inevitable from the moment the results of the factional CEC elections were declared and the victorious The Many grouping, clustered around Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, decided to take all the positions on the new governing body, freezing out all opposing views and voices.
Hard-wiring factionalism into the new party
Full disclosure. I was a candidate in those CEC elections, standing as an independent in the north east of England, and although I wasn’t elected, I received a creditable number of votes and my key message of an end to factionalism was very well received. During my campaign I said that it was vital that the CEC was not composed entirely of two blocs of members making decisions for purely factional reasons. The very soul of the party was at stake, I said at the hustings events I took part in. Alas, the result of the CEC elections saw YP members voting for ongoing division and factionalism at the top and as a result this approach ended up being hard-wired into the very fabric of the party’s governing body with the subsequently disastrous results we have seen.
I was proud to stand as one of a number of independent candidates whose sole aim and focus was to bring all sides together so that factional interests could be set aside and the membership could zero in on the urgent task of building Your Party and fighting Reform and the dark forces of the far right. Your Party’s founding conference voting in favour of a collective leadership for Your Party showed that its members really wanted to see a member-led party not a faction-led party. And let’s not forget either that more members endorsed independent candidates than either of the two factional slates in those CEC elections. There was a real appetite and opportunity for an alternative to factionalism, but this wasn’t taken and the winning factional group have doubled down and made things even worse.
What we have now is a position where, without consultation with the groups they have effectively proscribed from membership, the Your Party leadership is saying that a whole swathe of left-wing activists are no longer welcome as members of the party. While there will be many views about how realistic or desirable it us to allow members of other parties to be part of Your Party as members while still maintaining their party loyalty and discipline, this whole situation has been appalling handled by the dominant faction in the leadership. Surely a better approach would have been to open up a dialogue with those organisations that it has now proscribed as being incompatible with Your Party membership to discuss a way forward.
Instead, we have a top-down diktat that these organisations are out, beyond the pale and should not be allowed to darken the party’s door. If the party’s leaders had confidence in their political and organisational position, would it not have been better to open up discussions with the leaders of those left organisations and groups that they had concerns over and seek to persuade them to fold their organisations into the new Your Party? At the very least – and in a comradely spirit – there should have been a conversation and negotiations with those organisations before they decided to just throw them all out. Again though, the factional approach of The Many grouping in the leadership has led us to this point and they need to own this debacle.
The leadership’s moribund vision
The idea of dual membership is a sound one – and was voted for by Your Party members at its founding conference. Appealing to the tens of thousands of people on the left in Labour, the Greens and in other left groupings and none, was a laudable attempt to build a mass membership while allowing the various independent groups to ‘ride more than one horse’. Unfortunately, the moribund vision that presently controls Your Party sees any group or individuals that call out its bureaucratic control as a mortal threat to be marginalised and silenced. Hence the diktat of proscriptions, bans and ultimately expulsions.
So, is Your Party finished? My short answer is yes. The current leadership has destroyed any hope that there was of building something meaningful and thousands of members have already voted with their feet and quit in disgust with a heavy heart. And that is a tragedy. Many have joined the resurgent Greens and many more will follow. Lessons will need to be drawn and learned from this debacle, but that’s for other articles and commentary in The Left Lane. For now though, I’m reflecting with sadness and quite a bit of anger about the political opportunity that has been allowed to slip through our fingers. This all could – and should – have been avoided.
