People came to Your Party because Labour shut the door on the left and millions wanted a class voice of their own. That need hasn’t gone away. The project has collapsed, but the people who joined it, built local groups and campaigned for a fighting alternative have not.
Your Party’s collapse proves celebrity leaders, bureaucratic control and purges of socialists can’t conjure a new party into existence. A real workers’ party has to be built in workplaces, unions and estates. Its members must be able to argue openly, organise tendencies and act together. Without that, the membership becomes an audience and the party becomes a shell, then a machine run by the bureaucracy. Your Party became both.
What matters now is whether its activists are pulled into local struggles or left to drift through another round of conferences, platforms and electoral manoeuvres. We need a fighting, democratic organisation rooted in the working class.
Into the lifeboats?
Everything that made a new party necessary is still here. Labour has moved sharply right. Union leaders look to a new Labour figurehead like Andy Burnham to limit the damage. Reform and the far right are gaining because living standards are falling and nobody with real influence offers a class answer. The Greens and liberal independents can pick up protest votes but they can never substitute for workers organising for themselves.
Any effort to keep good activists in contact and pointed towards the class struggle is welcome. But preserving a network is not enough. More conferences and shoestring local election campaigns will repeat the same mistake.
A workers’ party will not be built by electoral pacts, regrouping ‘the Marxists’ or deals between left groups. It has to grow out of real struggle: strikes and rank-and-file organising, tenants’ campaigns, migrant defence, anti-fascist mobilisation, Palestine solidarity, climate protests and student action. Elections can play a role when they come from that movement and strengthen it. Detached from struggle, they become another shortcut to nowhere.
Connections and the newly launched Socialist Federation could help for now. They can keep activists and branches in touch. But they face a clear test: do they turn outwards into struggle, or do they reproduce the old weakness in a new form?
Turn to the class
The first job is to turn the surviving networks towards the fights bearing down on people.
The cost-of-living crisis is returning with force. Rents and bills are unaffordable. Wages lag behind prices. Councils are preparing more cuts to libraries, youth services, SEND provision and social care. Yet the money is always found for war, profits and subsidies to business.
This convention should launch a campaign for local committees of action against cuts and the cost of living. These should be open united-front bodies, not mini-parties or propaganda fronts. They should bring in union branches, trades councils, tenants’ groups, anti-racist campaigns, migrant defence groups, disability and trans rights campaigns, Palestine activists, student groups, socialist organisations and people in no organisation at all.
The work is practical. Map the attacks in your area. Call open meetings. Back every group of workers in struggle. Stop evictions and immigration raids. Fight council cuts. Demand rent controls, insulation and properly funded services. Confront Reform and the far right when they try to turn falling living standards into race hatred.
These committees don’t require agreement on every political question. Socialists, trade unionists, campaigners and independents will disagree about elections, Labour, the Greens, the police and the road to socialism. A united front is not a shared programme. It is an agreement to act together against a shared attack.
It also tests who is serious. Call on union leaders, councillors, MPs and national campaigns to back real action: refuse the cuts, open the council books, support the strikes, fund the resistance and get their members out. Work with those who act, push those who waver and expose those who block the fight.
Local committees of action can build towards regional and national anti-crisis assemblies. These should be made up of delegates sent by unions, campaigns and local groups, not platforms of celebrity speakers. Their job would be to draw up an emergency plan that makes bosses, landlords and profiteers pay—and to organise the force needed to impose it. Building these organs of working-class resistance from the ground up is how the fight for a new workers’ party becomes real.
If Connections and the Socialist Federation help make that turn, they will have done something useful. If they do not, they will become one more waiting room for activists who deserve better.
