Before talking about why I left Your Party, why did I join Your Party in the first place? While I certainly had criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn, I always felt like his heart was in the right place. I assumed that his promise of a “grassroots, member-led mass party” was genuine, informed by how the antidemocratic structures of Labour had come to bite him in the backside.
Unfortunately, it turned out that all Jeremy wanted was Labour 2.0, only this time with his faction in control. It really felt like Groundhog Day, with The Many now purging the left in the same way the Labour right had once purged the Corbyn wing for being to their left.
The demand for a new mass party of the working class is rooted in the recognition that Labour has ceased to be that. In the event, it has always been my conviction that that had happened before I was even born back in April 1995, when Clause 4 was vandalised by the Blairites. That is why I was never a member of the Labour Party.
The original Labour, a class-based party uniting all workers in anti-capitalist struggle regardless of their leanings (from Clause 4 social democrats to Leninists to anarchists and everything in between) is a fundamentally good idea. But they have warped into an irredeemably bourgeois neoliberal party. ‘Labour’ really falls afoul of advertising standards – they should rename themselves ‘Capital’, that being the interest they now represent.
The irony in Your Party’s decision to expel the ‘organised left’ is that they themselves are now guilty of the very criticism they levy, democratic centralism. Yes, uniting around a programme and a leadership is crucial. But that can only happen once a programme has been democratically arrived at and once the leadership has earned the trust of the class it claims to represent.
The problem of the ‘organised left’
The whole problem with the ‘organised left’ as it stands is that they claim to be a vanguard of a class that hasn’t organically accepted them as such. Your Party has made the same mistake and with that decision consigned itself to becoming yet another irrelevant sect. 800,000 people did not express interest in a Bonapartist pet project, or they would not have been deterred by all the shenanigans and whittled down to just 55,000 (and much fewer now).
It is no secret that I support an independent Scottish party. It hasn’t always been that way. In the beginning, I was advocating for party unity. But then came shambles upon shambles and the complete disregard shown by ‘HQ’ for Scottish voices and the democratic decisions of Scottish members and it became clear to me that no UK-wide superstructure, even of ostensible progressives, will ever be free of English paternalism.
From the Liverpool conference onwards, there has been a strong sense among Scottish activists that we can do a better job of organising ourselves, then (this was) vindicated by the success of Dundee conference compared to the shambolic stitch-up that was Liverpool. As part of the interim Scottish executive, I naively believed that ‘HQ’ would honour the Dundee conference and cooperate in an ‘amicable divorce’, granting the Scottish party access to member data and funds.
It quickly became clear that they had no such intention, that data and funds were a red herring, and that is why I and most Scottish activists called it quits. Staying any longer would have been political masochism. Together with those activists, we are now working on building the new, genuinely member-led mass party of the working class which Scotland so desperately needs and deserves.
