On 24 September, after a week of public infighting between the two co-founders of Your Party, during which both threatened court action against each other, Jeremy Corbyn sent an upbeat message to the 800,000 supporters, confirming details of the founding conference and opening yet another online portal whereby supporters can join.
For many this bizarre attempt to re-inflate the initiative fell as flat as a pancake. Zarah Sultana was nowhere to be seen in the accompanying video, her name not mentioned. She retweeted the message eight hours later, but described herself simply as a ‘member’. Sky News reported she may be preparing a leadership bid. Few believe this is the end of hostilities.
With the Greens surging under the new leadership of Zack Polanski, the unions under no pressure to split from Labour, and Reform extending its lead in the polls, the danger is that the party could sink before it is launched. At meetings of the proto-branches that have sprung up around the country activists voiced their anger.
Conference plans
The conference is to take place on 29-30 November in Liverpool. Corbyn claims it will be ‘the most democratic this country has ever seen’ with 13,000 members attending on two successive days in two separate batches and many more taking part online. The amended documents will then be put to a vote of all party members: ‘one member, one vote. Open, inclusive, grassroots-led—this is what democracy really looks like.’
Only it doesn’t look like democracy. At least not as we know it.
For a start the 13,000 members are neither elected nor mandated how to vote by meetings of members in their locality, who know them and can judge their suitability to reflect their views. Local branches are bypassed completely in favour of selection by lottery.
This system of drawing lots, known as sortition, arose in Ancient Athens for the selection of juries to avoid the possibility that the rich could bribe or intimidate the jurors. It was in this sense a weapon of the ancient direct democracy of the Assembly (all free male citizens). In a modern state it does not and cannot perform this function.
When it comes to the lottery-selected ‘delegates’ voting—because they have not been chosen by the membership in meetings where they could hear opposing arguments, choose between them and then elect those best qualified to express their views—they will tend to support the arguments of those best known because they are MPs, influencers on social media platforms, or because they seem to reflect their prejudices. In fact it will be a lottery in the worst sense of the word—a popularity contest.
Also, by claiming the final selection will be weighted to include all genders, racial identities, incomes and regions, etc. Who will do this weighting? AI? In any case they will still not be delegates, i.e. members that their peers have delegated responsibility to.
To make matters worse, the attendees will only be at conference for one day each, allegedly so that more people can have the experience. If this is such a good idea, why not have 130,000 participants deliberating for one hour each? In fact the system denies conference goers the opportunity to hear opposing proposals, synthesise them, hammer out a plan of action. The danger is the illusion of mass participation masks the reality of passive consumerism by an atomised membership.
The conference documents have to be drafted by someone, or by a team, fair enough, but the whole process is shrouded in secrecy. Whereas in 2015 Corbyn electrified youthful rallies with calls for an end to austerity, nationalisation of privatised utilities, opposition to wars and rebuilding public services, ten years on these cries are muted.
It is believed that James Schneider is writing them—or was, as it is rumoured that he has resigned over the infighting—and we are told they will include the constitution, rules, a policy statement and strategy document. A secret leadership body will apparently sign them off, but at no point in the process have members or branches been invited to inject their ideas into the process.
Regional assemblies of tens of thousands will then discuss amendments submitted online or in person—if presumably the chair takes you to speak. In fact, it is likely that these assemblies will be run along the lines of Assemble, the organisation set up and run by Roger Hallam. The audience will be divided into groups of 8-10 people and given prepared questions to answer. Facilitators will gather the suggestions in and validate some, but not others.
In other words these will be ‘deliberative’ rather than decision-making gatherings. Another body, a conference arrangements committee of sorts, but again unelected, will collate and composite the amendments, selecting which ones should go to conference. The experience of this in the Labour Party is that it is a way for the organisers to bin proposals they do not like.
Populism
These methods of party building have a name: populism. The leader (usually singular, Corbyn was never keen on sharing the role with Sultana) is elevated as the saviour from on high. The members are atomised and their role reduced to reaffirming the leader and recruiting more people to the cause. Since the enemy is an elite ‘political class’ rather than a socio-economic system called capitalism, all that is needed is to rally behind the leader.
Two of the key political thinkers who have shaped Corbyn’s project for the new left party are James Schneider and Roger Hallam. They dismiss the idea of class-based politics, grounding the battle for socialism in the class struggle, in favour of left populism, where the 99% simply need to shatter the illusion of order created by the elite. (See box for our analysis of left populism.)
Corbyn’s message says that ‘you cannot be a member if you are also signed up to another political party’ (the word ‘national’ has been added to avoid banning local electoral parties). This should be seen in the light of his adoption of openly populist methods. It limits the rights of members to form, belong to or join, in particular, revolutionary propaganda societies—which is all so-called ‘parties’ like the SWP, the RCP, and the Socialist Party really are. It is political censorship.
If this leads to banning the far left from joining the new party or trawling through members’ social media posts in search of grounds to expel individual members, this would amount to an imitation of Starmerism, not grassroots democracy. It bars a democratic debate about what the programme, the fundamental strategy of the new party should be, and privileges the unexplained policies of the undeclared factions who have been warring over the past months.
Sultana as alternative?
Since Corbyn’s announcement Sultana has begun to distance herself from the ‘roadmap’ to the Liverpool conference. At a 400-strong meeting in Sheffield in the evening of the same day, she set out in more detail than ever before her vision for the party.
Her political ‘red lines’ are mostly confined to standing up for the rights of the socially oppressed, against Zionism, for trans rights, against Nato, etc. Yes, she says the party must be ‘class-based’ and ‘socialist’ but without being more specific, these remain platitudes that most right wing Labour MPs could agree on. In short Sultana’s positions haven’t developed far beyond the identity politics of her student organising days.
She has said the party must stand against austerity, but does this mean voting against cuts budgets, or, where in a majority, should the new party pass no cuts budgets? The latter is potentially illegal, and any court action would have to be met by escalation. This is the type of question that needs to be debated and voted on at branches and regional conferences.
Answering questions from the floor Sultana said, ‘democracy is not something we can compromise on’ and that this had been the basis of the internal rows. She claimed to be ‘critical of sortition’ and ‘in favour of members and branches putting forward motions and amendments and that regional meetings should be autonomous and able to vote’.
OK, but why go on with the atomised mass rallies and online ‘meetings’, where nobody meets? Why not start with real grassroots democracy, i.e. branches, which debate resolutions, pass them to regional gatherings and then a delegate conference?
Sultana has a unique national standing within the new formation and therefore a duty to listen to the members, i.e. the motions for a delegate conference passed by Sheffield and many other branches, and speak out on their behalf.
Not surprisingly, given her reliance on the Socialist Workers Party for organising her national tour, she explicitly disagreed with the proposed rule to exclude members of other political parties from joining, saying, ‘We have to show that we are fighting for democracy, we are fighting to unify the left’.
The rule is widely interpreted as laying down a marker to challenge SWP members’ rights within the party and could be used in a Kinnock-style witch-hunt from the 1980s. Indeed toward the end of his tenure as Labour leader Corbyn also oversaw expulsions and exclusions on the basis of anti-Zionism and membership of far left groups. But since these comrades are often crucial to branch leaderships and their silencing has a chilling effect on others. We must stand against any witch-hunting clause.
Andrew Feinstein voiced similar misgivings about the process to found the party when he spoke at Brixton, South London the following day, and there may be other national figures prepared to nominally put their services to some degree to the fight for grassroots democracy. They should speak up.
What we can do
Of course local activists should not place all their trust in these late converts to democracy. Their politics remain vague and insufficiently distinguishable from Corbyn and the team around him, like Schneider, Karie Murphy and Len McCluskey. However, branches should place demands on them, while relying on their own efforts to break the logjam and build strong branches and regional connections.
If Sultana is serious about democracy, she should offer to use or hand over the contact details of signed-up supporters in their area to the branches or those who wish to form branches. She—and Corbyn and his advisers too—should open up a space on the party website for branches to post notices and reports of their activities, and to send in motions to the party’s interim leadership, whoever that is. Sultana should do all in her power to facilitate branches organising real delegate-based regional meetings, where joint activity and conference amendments can be discussed and voted on.
But we should not depend on favours from Sultana, Feinstein, Salma Yacoob or any other national figure just because they have been shoved aside by Corbyn’s minders.
We should continue to set up branches—merge them wherever there are more than one in a locality—and organise outward-facing activities. Above all they should hold political discussions on what needs to be done locally, nationally and internationally. They should start by passing motions demanding the leadership opens up the founding process to real workers’ democracy.
Workers Power members in Stockport have done just this. The new branch has already held a series of regular meetings, intervened into the Manchester bus strike, held a successful gathering with the Withington and Chorlton branches with a view to holding a Greater Manchester assembly, and passed a resolution calling for greater transparency, data to be shared with the branches, and a delegate based conference to elect an instantly recallable leadership.
Your Party could soon become unsalvageable. Or it may be heading for a split. The plaintive appeals to Jeremy and Zarah to make it up will have no effect. But the enthusiasm for a party that can take up the struggle against Starmer’s Labour government, Reform UK and the far right still exists.
If it is lost it will be a tremendous boost for the far right. Only a revolt from below, organised and led by democratic, unified branches, co-ordinated at regional and national levels on the best plan of action they can find, can stop this.
Of course the vast majority of those who support Your Party today have reformist illusions in a parliamentary road to socialism. But if we can engage them in struggle—not least against the bureaucratic obstacles thrown up by their self-appointed leaders—the prize could be not just a break from the Labour Party but a break from reformism.
