She didn’t pull any punches
Anyone who hoped Zarah Sultana might strike a conciliatory tone in her speech to Your Party’s founding conference will be bitterly disappointed. After a weekend of intense divisions and disagreements among the leading figures of the fledgling party, Sultana used her speech to hit out against those she described as ‘nameless, faceless bureaucrats’ in the organisation.
She told attendees at the conference that the events over the weekend which saw some members of the Socialist Workers Party expelled from Your Party were “undemocratic”, and an “attack on members and this movement”.
She went on to describe one of those members being removed from the conference centre following their expulsion as “the shocking sight of a Muslim woman being manhandled and dragged out”.
Elsewhere in the speech, she said that “this party must never be captured from above – this party must never become a Labour 2.0”.
On what she has described as a witch-hunt of certain Your Party members over the weekend, Sultana said: “the members will not stand for this, the movement will not stand for this and I will not stand for this”.
However, she celebrated the decisions that had been taken over the weekend on the party’s new democratic structures – decisions which will see Your Party have a collective leadership rather than a single leader, will allow members of Your Party be permitted to also be members of other political parties with ‘shared aims’, and for local branches of the party to have autonomy over their spending.
She told attendees that this set the foundation for Your Party being “a mass, democratic working class movement – the largest socialist party in the UK since the 1940s”, and argued that the party would be “democratic, principled and rooted in the power of the working class”.
Much of the rest of her speech covered almost the exact same territory of the one she made at her pre-conference rally on Friday night.
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
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