By Jeremy Dewar
On Saturday 22 November, around 40 delegates from Your Party proto-branches across the capital (30 in person, 10 on Zoom) met to discuss the possibility of holding an all-London branch delegate assembly in the new year. The atmosphere was comradely but defiant in the face of the self-appointed leadership’s attempts to stamp out the branches that have sprung up nationally.
Although called quite late in the day, the meeting attracted delegates (yes, we were by and large elected by local groups and mandated) from 17 local YP branches, with two further comrades representing student organisations.
The first half of the meeting heard reports from the delegates on the work done so far. There was a wide spread of achievements, from those who have just held their first one or two meetings to others who have been in existence for two and a half months – or longer in the cases of the Camden People’s Alliance, which grew out of Andrew Feinstein’s election campaign, and Socialists Against Streeting (SAS – Ilford North).
A pattern soon emerged of launch meetings attracting 100–300 people, followed by organising meetings attended by more committed activists, ranging from 30 to 60 comrades. WhatsApp groups tended to be larger, with an average of 150 members. Unification of disparate, spontaneous, or left group-initiated ‘branches’ has largely been achieved.
Campaigning work has already begun, again with a range of activities: anti-racist/antifa work, including migrant rights; free or subsidised travel initiatives; housing; food insecurity; and anti-poverty campaigning. Links with local campaigns, e.g. London Renters Union, and community groups, e.g. the Kurdish centres in Haringey, are being established.
There was also some discussion about standing in the May elections. In some areas, approaches have been made towards the Greens to secure a division of seats. Others were sceptical of standing at all.
The Socialist Party pushed their idea of a ‘No Cuts’ pledge before any agreement with the Greens is made, and for People’s Budgets. These are good ideas, but the ‘what happens next?’ after councillors pass No Cuts budgets – i.e. the point at which the Liverpool council rebellion cracked in the 1980s – is missing from their analysis and agitation.
‘We Will Not Be Dictated To’
But the one issue that united all was opposition to the proposal that the leadership will decide the boundaries of the branches – in particular, that all branches should map onto the arbitrary and, in fact, Tory-drawn constituencies.
In some cases, e.g. Southwark and Haringey, this would mean breaking up borough-wide branches into four or five separate entities. Branches with 50 activists would be split, leaving some with only a handful to try and launch and sustain campaigns. As Alex Green of Ilford North said, this is a deliberate attempt to silence the party’s grassroots activists.
Another fear was that this was expected to be a long, drawn-out process. Karie Murphy, part of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle, told a Zoom call recently that there would be no branches at all until sometime in April. This means that Newham Independent councillors, for example – who have voted in favour of cuts – will run the election campaign in their borough.
Instead, it was decided unanimously to press ahead with some urgency to hold a democratic London Assembly of Your Party, made up of voting delegates but with room for observers as well. We want to hold the assembly before the start of Ramadan but later than January – ideally on 7–8 or 14–15 February. A further all-London meeting, to be convened on 13 December, will decide on the details.
Southwark Prepares Next Steps
The following day, Southwark Your Party met to discuss motions, branch structure, and conference. It also heard a report from the previous day’s events (see above).
We discovered that there were nine sortitioned conference attendees in the room, which meant that either we were ‘lucky’ or, more likely, that the number of members who had applied for sortition was indeed shockingly small. The Socialist Unity platform’s amendments were circulated and thought to be a generally solid basis to guide the members on the conference floor.
We narrowly voted to defer a motion to set up a ‘Free Red Buses’ campaign, inspired by the Democratic Party’s Zohran Mamdani, who pledged free transport in the New York election. Deferral was designed to allow other potential campaigns to emerge.
The main ideas are to demand free bus transport for all (essential in south London, especially for ethnic minorities, low-paid and shift workers), join unions in calling for better pay and conditions for drivers, and to expropriate the bus operators’ fleets, garages, and computer systems.
Another motion – to support the Filton 24 and other pro-Palestinian prisoners, especially those on hunger strike – was passed unanimously. The plight of the hunger strikers has been almost totally ignored by the pro-Zionist media, but symbolises their continuity with other political prisoners – the suffragettes, the IRA, etc. – who have taken this desperate measure. We called for their release and amnesty, as well as the unbanning of Palestine Action.
The final two motions came from comrades in rs21. The first was a rather standard and bland description of how we might organise and establish roots in the community.
There was a preamble which made some questionable assumptions: that the party leadership would be made up of ‘Westminster politicians’ (no! this is Corbyn’s assumption, not ours); and the building of ‘class power’ without defining what that means or who we will have to fight (e.g. the trade union bureaucracy) in order to achieve this.
But since these were not mentioned in the motion, we passed it with one vote against. Another rs21 motion on the May elections was deferred for the same reason as the bus campaign idea – to allow more time. The motion would also have to be amended to be fit for purpose as a socialist election campaign. For instance, it failed to outline clearly the need for a No Cuts budget and how this might be fought for.
All in all, these two meetings represented small steps forward for the work of YP activists in London and Southwark. More work will have to be done after the conference and in the new year. But a spirit of comradely cooperation exists and needs to be strengthened further, given the bureaucratic pressure to conform to an unworkable model.
