By KD Tait
The world and Britain are falling deeper into crisis. Living costs keep rising while wages stagnate, rents soar and public services collapse. The Labour government has abandoned working people. Reform UK is riding high in the polls and Tommy Robinson can get over 100,000 on the streets of London.
The emergence of Your Party reflects real desire for change. The question is: will it become a genuine force of working class struggle and socialism, or simply another electoral project disconnected from the real battles and deflecting from them?
Your Party must not become a ‘broad left’ electoral brand or ‘movement’ that relies on one or two charismatic leaders and vague ‘values’—a rickety coalition of interest groups. What’s needed instead is a fighting, democratic organisation with rooted in the workplaces and communities, schools and colleges, where people can organise resistance.
Your Party should stand with those organising strikes, and support tenants’ unions. Its branches should conduct antiracist campaigns in the workplaces, communities and schools, as well as promoting democratic defence groups against police and far right attacks. Likewise whenever women, LGBT+ people , migrants, and youth, under attack it must be at their side.
It should demand a workers’ emergency programme: pay rises linked to inflation, rent controls, public ownership of energy, transport and housing, and properly funded public services. These will only be won through struggle, not by petitions or parliaments.
When workers take serious action, they unmask the real source of power in society—those who produce the wealth. A socialist party must link these fights together and direct them, by a series of demands, which linked together point to the need to challenge capitalist control of the entire economy and society.
Your Party must be truly internationalist and reject Britain’s imperialist agenda. No support for Zionism – cut all arms sales, trade and political ties with Israel. Break from NATO. Solidarity must be central to building an international socialist movement that attacks capitalism as it marauds across the globe. Existential struggles against imperialist war and climate change demand such an alliance.
Founding conference
As we head towards the founding conference on 29-30 November in Liverpool, legal wrangles, organisational chaos and political discontent have circled the nascent party. New lawsuits have been threatened against Andrew Feinstein and others, despite a promise to stop running to the lawyers: a sure sign of a burgeoning bureaucracy.
Assemblies, the first official meetings of Your Party, are taking place across the country. In metropolitan areas, like Leeds, Manchester and South London, members demanded the right to vote on amendments but were brushed aside by organisers.
Even so political opposition, both to bureaucratic elements in the structure and constitution and to the vagueness of the Political Statement, predominated.
However, we are reliant on a hidden mechanism to see if any of these proposals or online amendments will alter the conference documents. Thereafter it is quite literally a lottery, as sortition can, and probably will, be used to manipulate the outcome.
Next steps
At this stage of the new party’s formation, the political statement we need to make is primarily a series of action we will carry out – like standing candidate on no cuts manifestos, supporting direct action to block arms to Israel, confronting the racists and mobilising against the far right. This how we can hold the leadership which emerges in Liverpool to account.
For Your Party to succeed, it must be democratic, grounded in genuine branches in the workplaces and communities where members debate, decide and act together. Leaders at every level must be accountable and recallable. The party’s direction must come from struggle, not a handful of Independent Alliance MPs and their appointed advisers.
Every fight—over pay, housing, health or climate—should build working class power. The goal is to connect these struggles into a unified movement for socialism: workers’ control of production; nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ and community control; and a planned economy organised for need, not profit.
Capitalism gives us nothing but crisis—economic breakdown, environmental ruin, imperial war and widening injustice. The methods of struggle we use for immediate change—higher wages, rent controls, better services—are shaped by our wider vision of a different society.
Socialism means taking the wealth and resources controlled by a tiny elite and placing them under collective, democratic control. With them we can stop living on the scraps and start living on what we produce. We can combat the looming danger of global climate catastrophe. We need a party that embraces struggle, organises it and directs it toward this goal. A party that underlines class solidarity, exposes exploitation and affirms the need for workers to take power in their own hands. That is the kind of party worth fighting for.
