It wasn’t a chilled affair…
It’s unlikely that many people were expecting the founding conference of Your Party to be a chilled affair. But if they were, they’d have been bitterly disappointed, as Left Foot Forward learnt reporting on the ground and from the conference hall. It was at times a somewhat chaotic with public spats, open divisions and controversies rife throughout.
It did end on a firmly uninteresting note though, as Jeremy Corbyn announced that members had voted for the party’s name to remain ‘Your Party’. But that was a rare moment of stability at a conference that appeared for much of its duration anything but stable.
Because it started very dramatically. Late on Friday – the day before the conference formally opened – it came to light that leading members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had been expelled from Your Party for being members of more than one party. This became a key backdrop for Zarah Sultana’s rally held on the same evening, where members gathered to call for more democracy in the party going forward.
At that rally, allegations were thrown around against ‘faceless, nameless bureaucrats’ within Your Party and claims that a ‘witch-hunt’ was being coordinated. One attendee even accused Jeremy Corbyn himself of carrying out that ‘witch-hunt’, something he was forced to deny as ‘absurd’ the following morning at a press huddle immediately before he delivered his opening speech to the conference.
In that speech, Corbyn made a strong plea for unity within the party at the conference, imploring members to “listen to each other, learn from each other, and be respectful to each other”.
That plea didn’t seem to be heeded by Sultana, who arrived at the conference venue to tell journalists that there was a ‘toxic culture’ within the party. After she’d spoken to a huddle of the media, she then promptly turned around and walked up the hill away from the venue.
It later became clear that she was boycotting the event and refusing to enter the venue as a result of the ‘witch-hunt’. She maintained that boycott for the remainder of the first day of the conference.
Meanwhile, while all this was playing out outside of the main conference hall, members were inside thrashing out the founding documents of the new political party. A series of votes were held over the weekend on key elements of the party’s structures, as well as its ‘political statement’ – a broad document which establishes the party’s ideological grounding.
In an extremely narrow vote, members backed a ‘collective leadership’ model, where there will be no single party leader and instead a central executive committee (CEC) will be elected and appoint people to be public facing spokespeople. Alongside this, members endorsed structures which will see local branches have autonomy over their spending and to allow Your Party members to hold ‘dual membership’ with other like minded political parties, a list of which will be determined by the CEC. For those still keeping up, these constitutional arrangements and democratic structures were all advocated for by Sultana.
Speaking of Sultana, once she had broken her boycott of the founding conference of the party she was founding, she delivered her keynote address to members on Sunday afternoon. Despite having won all the major votes at the conference, she didn’t strike a conciliatory tone. Instead, she used her address to once again hit out at those ‘nameless, faceless bureaucrats and argued that the expulsion of members was “undemocratic” and an “attack on members and this movement”.
What do the other MPs involved in setting up Your Party make of all this? There are two of them left (Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed both quit in the run up to the conference), and Left Foot Forward interviewed both of them this weekend.
Shockat Adam – who unseated Jon Ashworth in the 2024 general election – said that he doesn’t ‘believe in expulsions’ in the aftermath of SWP members being given the boot. He also told Left Foot Forward that he thought that the disagreements they are having now internally within Your Party “will make us stronger”, adding “I think we can get out differences out the way now, and that will make us a lot stronger for the future.”
Meanwhile, Ayoub Khan – the fourth and final Your Party MP – told Left Foot Forward that Your Party ‘is the vehicle that can deliver real change and hope’. He also said he wanted to see electoral collaboration between Your Party and the Greens.
What does this all mean for Your Party going forward? The left wing journalist Owen Jones was reporting from the conference, and Left Foot Forward asked him about just this. He wasn’t particularly optimistic, comparing Your Party’s founding to the infamous and disastrous Fyre Festival and branding it a ‘clusterf*ck’.
Well, in the coming months we’ll see whether labels like that stick, and whether the party can – as Corbyn asked it to – unite. Your Party has indicated that elections to the new Central Executive Committee, which will in the future act as its leadership, will conclude by the end of February. That will be another key moment that will determine the fledgling party’s future.
Watch this space I guess…
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
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