When Zarah Sultana announced that she would be leaving the Labour Party to co-found a new left party with Jeremy Corbyn, I was among the 800,000 people who signed up to what promised to be a new force in British politics. Despite what has followed, I have not left.
Since then, we have had a founding conference, the election of a CEC and in the upcoming local elections there will be Your Party (YP) candidates and YP-endorsed independents standing.
What we do not yet have is a functioning structure that allows comrades to communicate, form branches or organise in any meaningful way. Instead, there exists a disjointed network of proto-branches sustained largely by motivated comrades attempting to build something coherent from uncertain foundations.
Like many others, I have had a lot of misgivings about the direction of YP since conference. I observed conference as a steward. On the first day I was approached by an attendee brandishing a leaflet from the Revolutionary Communist Group that had been left on the seats in the auditorium. The attendee waved the leaflet in my face demanding to know if “this is OK?” I had expected that all flavours of the left would be welcomed under the umbrella of YP. That interaction suggested otherwise. It also set the tone for the remainder of conference.
As conference progressed, I witnessed comrades being removed and blocked from attending. Processes appeared to be increasingly opaque and it often felt as though a relatively small, organised group was able to dominate proceedings through procedural manoeuvring. The overall impression was of a party becoming more restrictive, particularly towards groups on the left deemed not to align closely with Your Party’s interests.
I left the Labour Party in the late 1980s after the witch hunt against Militant in which I saw friends and family expelled by the right (and soft left) of the Labour Party at that time. I did not rejoin in 2015, when Corbyn won the leadership of the party, because I knew how the Labour Party machinery operated and also because I saw a great many former witch hunters falling in behind Corbyn.
Almost 40 years later, I saw a working-class party which I truly believed would encompass the left in a meaningful way to finally push for transformative policies that would materially improve the day to day lives of working-class people in Britain and also stand as a force of opposition to the very real threat of the far right. In its place is a dysfunctional organisation that is scared and derisory of its own membership. It has failed to engage or organise within trade unions in any meaningful way – something that is vital if any progress is to be made in reversing decades of declining rights for workers.
And yet here I remain. The verve and commitment of young comrades who are trying to operate some semblance of proto-branches to maintain a degree of momentum in the movement is the only reason I remain in YP at this point.
I want a party that is willing to take up the banner of transformative economic and social policies that will improve the lives of workers in this country. I remain a member in the vain hope that with branch formation and networking of comrades then the party – and movement – we desperately need may become a reality. The promise that brought so many of us to this point will need to be realised in practice – and soon.
