After a week of public disagreement between the two left MPs – Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana – who launched the call for ‘Your Party’, the show is back on the road. It is now possible to join ‘Your Party’, and the email inviting supporters to join also announced that a “founding conference will be held at Liverpool ACC on Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 November”.
The fact that steps are being taken to develop ‘Your Party’ will be very welcome news to the 800,000 who have already said they want to join. Against the background of brutal austerity from Starmer’s New Labour Mark II and electoral gains for Reform the need for a workers’ party with socialist policies could not be clearer. Socialist Party members will be joining ‘Your Party’ and arguing for how it can meet its potential and become the kind of party the working class so urgently needs.
Plans have been announced for discussion around draft documents on political principles, the constitution, rules and organisational strategy. However, the current outlined plan for the discussion is unfortunately not a route to serious debate and decision making. Regional ‘deliberative’ meetings are to be followed up by the founding conference which the organisers expect will be attended by 13,000 members, with 6,500 attending each day. Those attending are to be selected by lottery. Following this, final votes will be taken online with all members voting on a one-member-one-vote basis.
In our view these proposals are not an effective means to build a democratic workers’ party. Practically, how could 13,000 people actually debate a party programme? Who will the conference ‘delegates’ be accountable to? Who will they report back to? No trade unionist would want their shop steward or workplace representatives to be chosen by random lottery, rather than electing the person who would best fight for their interests. A democratic conference should be based on representative and accountable delegates, including from affiliated organisations.
Nonetheless, despite these problems, the foundation of ‘Your Party’ will be an important beginning, and we will take full part in the discussions within it, as well as continuing to argue in the trade union movement that a new party is needed and trade unions need to be central to it.
The application to join ‘Your Party’ initially stated that a member could not be a member of another ‘political party’. Now it says another ‘national political party’. Presumably, the change has been made to take account of the myriad of local left parties that have sprung up over the recent period. Debarring current members of establishment political parties – the Tories, Reform or Labour, for example – is an entirely legitimate precaution against attempts at sabotage, which of course doesn’t preclude individuals who have previously been part of establishment parties being allowed to join if they have changed their views.
However, a recent article in The Observer (25.09.25), was a first hint of the inevitable campaign by the capitalist elite to try and ensure it is socialist organisations that are excluded. The author, Donald Macintyre, concluded that tight control of the membership was “understandable when a whole hotchpotch of Trotskyite and revolutionary organisations vie for a place in a party meant to appeal to ‘ordinary’ and working-class members.” It says everything about Macintyre’s prejudices that he discounts the possibility of Trotskyist organisations being made up of working-class people, and including many workers’ leaders, like the eleven elected members of trade union National Executive Committees that are members of the Socialist Party.
No to exclusions!
No doubt some of the left organisations within the new party will prove irritating to others, but it would be a very serious mistake to submit to the demands of the capitalist press and conclude that the solution is exclusions. Attempts to impose unity from above never work, as the events of the last week have indicated. Instead it is necessary to allow free and democratic discussion on the many crucial issues this party will face, within which there are bound to be organised trends.
It is vital that includes the right of Marxists to organise within the party, including the Socialist Party. We were previously called the Militant Tendency. In the 1980s and early 1990s we led two massive battles that defeated the Thatcher government, first in Liverpool City Council and then the battle against the poll tax. Throughout those years we were witch-hunted from the Labour Party, starting with the expulsion of the Militant Editorial Board in 1983.
Jeremy Corbyn was among those in the Labour Party who always took a principled position in opposing our expulsion. He understood that, while our alleged ‘crime’ was ‘being an organisation within an organisation’ that was nonsense. The right-wing of the party were also organised, just as they were in Labour Together during their struggle to defeat Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Our real crime was our ability to win widespread support for our clear Marxist programme and, as we warned at the time, our expulsion was the start of a process that ended in the Labour Party we have today: a willing tool of the capitalist class.
That experience has important lessons for ‘Your Party’ which rightly aims to be a party which really is ‘for the many not the few’. It will not achieve that if it takes the Labour Party road of excluding organised socialists and Marxists. It is absolutely clear that, especially as the party takes off, the capitalist elite will try to make sure that ‘Your Party’ becomes one more establishment party, putting pressure on from the outside – including to expel so-called ‘extremists’ – but also organising to argue for ‘moderation’ inside the party. That can only be countered by a democratic structure, based on the working class, in which Marxists, along with other trends in the workers’ movement, can debate out the way forward in the struggle for socialism at each stage.
See also Editorial: The case for a workers-led new party gets even stronger