Why I left Your Party
When a new left party was first floated as an idea, and it might be co-led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, I was very excited. The Greens had not yet elected Zack Polanski as leader and were a much smaller electoral force. I left the Labour Party when Rebecca Long-Bailey was removed from the shadow cabinet, and I saw where Starmer was beginning to take the party. The subsequent purge of the left, the removal of the whip from Corbyn, support of Israeli genocide, and the crushing of freedom of speech and protest that has taken place since has proved my prediction to be correct. Your Party seemed like a promising new party to absorb the left that had been kicked out of or chose to abandon Labour. Not only this, but it was seen by many as a vehicle for uniting the numerous small radical socialist groups across the UK that cannot offer any influence on mainstream politics in their fractured state. YP could have been a popular front of sorts, bringing together all the different tendencies and traditions of socialism under one big tent, to better shape political conversation, shift the Overton window and influence policy.
Unfortunately, the public fighting between Corbyn and Sultana, the briefings to the press, the issues with members' finances, and other serious mistakes squandered the initial interest shown by 800,000 sign-ups. Most of the left-liberals and social democrats went to the Greens once it was clear Polanski had shifted the party to the left and had adopted lots of Corbyn's 2017 platform, but a core of serious Marxists and organised activists stayed in YP despite all the public embarrassment in a bid to forge a new, truly democratic party for members that was constitutionally socialist. I was one of them, voting in conference for maximum member democracy, dual party membership, strategic alliances and most importantly: collective leadership.
The first signs of an unelected, faceless group of bureaucrats making decisions on behalf of the party that were against the interests of the membership came in the form of a series of pre-emptive expulsions on the eve of conference, banning members of other socialist parties from attending. Next came the election for the CEC, in which the personality cult battle between Corbyn and Sultana raised its head again, with the decision to run slates. The formation of slates changed the election from what was meant to be a multipolar distribution of power to regular members, into a two-horse race, between one group that held all the bureaucratic machinery, funding and the most publicly well-known leader (the Many) and a much smaller group of activists, with no access to member data, funding or public reach (Grassroots Left). This was not a fair or democratic competition, and as expected, the Many slate achieved a complete victory, securing enough seats on the CEC as a single bloc that the few Grassroots Left candidates who were elected had no voting power in their numeric disadvantage.
This was not what collective leadership is meant to look like; it is meant to be a collection of independently elected representatives who decide their stances individually, not a united bloc who follow a whipped line that overpowers any other members of the council. Anonymous sources close to the Many slate briefed the press that if they didn’t win, the whole group, including Corbyn, would abandon YP and trash any remaining goodwill the public had for the project. There has also been evidence of administrative staff working for the Many slate that are on the payroll but have their identities kept anonymous. This is not the transparency and immediate recallability of elected leaders we voted for in conference. This is a continuation of practices that began in the Labour Party, born out of paranoia. Paranoia developed in Corbyn and his team from experiencing a Labour-right coup, and paranoia soaked into the foundations of the Labour Party about Trotskyist entryists grabbing power in local elections (see Militant in the 80s).
The Labour baggage was not meant to be carried over into this new party, but unfortunately, it has, and the resulting public knife fight has put off the public at large. To make matters worse, the newly elected CEC ignored the YP Scotland organising committee’s communications for so long that it was unable to act on amendments voted for at the Scottish conference, and then actually had the nerve to rerun certain votes, overwriting democratically agreed decisions, causing the whole provisional SEC to resign. Proto-branches across England were also ignored, with no funding or access to membership data being shared with them, meaning the creation and organising of all the local YP branches was done by hardworking local activists with zero budget or assistance. This caused many of them to disassociate with YP and become independent socialist groups. The complete failure of the CEC to organise the branches across the UK has shown it cannot be trusted to run a national party, on top of ignoring democratic processes and constitutional agreements chosen by the membership.
The final nail in the coffin was the recent decision by the CEC to circumnavigate the constitutional decision to allow dual-party membership, having tactically included the line “Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the party’s values,” at the time of the initial vote, not giving voters an option to vote for allowing dual membership without the need for approval. Had the CEC been a properly functioning collective leadership, as it was meant to be, CEC approval of other parties might not have been a problem, as the different interests represented on the council could have compromised on which parties were deemed appropriate. But the CEC being dominated by a majority faction that votes as a bloc means, effectively, that any motion presented by said bloc will inevitably pass without proper pushback.
When I voted on the dual membership amendment at conference, I was assuming that “aligning with the party’s values” meant not allowing members of centrist or right-wing parties to join YP, as many others also assumed. It is disingenuous for the CEC to claim that other socialist parties do not align with YP on the basis that they have their own leadership and hierarchy structures; that definition rules out ALL political parties! So many joined YP and helped to build it on the premise that it would be a big tent that could include social democrats, environmentalists, and revolutionary socialists without prejudice. A true socialist mass party that could unite the fragmented British left and take on the rising threat of fascism.
The decision to purge all the revolutionary socialist groups from YP is a drastic mistake, and leaves YP as yet another toothless reformist party, not presenting itself as sufficiently different to the Green Party under Polanski. Why would anyone join YP when all it has to offer is a less successful version of the Greens project? YP therefore exists as a bourgeois democratic party with a small membership that is constantly shrinking, no councillors and only one MP officially under the YP banner. The fact that it is run by a very mild, left-liberal faction means it won’t be expressing any unique perspectives capable of winning people over from the Greens or other parties on the left any time soon, either.
The Members Charter group put together an open letter demanding that many of these failures be addressed by a certain date for there to be any hope in saving YP from itself, but it was ignored. The Members Charter group responded with a decision to start organising all of those who had been frustrated, ignored, and abandoned by the YP leadership and posed the question: What’s next for the left after YP? A two-part video conference was arranged, and I attended. Unlike my entire experience of the YP mess, the conferences were hopeful, promising, and disciplined. The attendees were a mixture of YP members, ex-members, proto-branch organisers, YP-linked community independents and YP caucuses. The conference voted to create a federation that will bring all these disparate groups together and begin a process of building an alternative party. A motion was put forward to rename the Members Charter the Socialist Federation, which passed, among other suggested organisational structures and official positions. The Socialist Federation welcomes all the already existing socialist parties to join, and when it manages to create a formal party, hopefully, it will continue to welcome open tendencies and factions, and avoid the mistakes of YP. For this reason, I have chosen to end my membership of Your Party and have chosen to instead join the Socialist Federation, seeing them as the vehicle for creating the party I wanted YP to be. I encourage everyone in YP who believes in pluralism and radical left-wing politics to do the same, and I pray that together, we can build a popular front that can unite all the serious leftists across the country into one formidable force.
Solidarity,
Louis Loveless