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High-profile splits, leftist idealism — and finally, a name. Welcome to Britain’s newest political outfit.
LIVERPOOL, England — Midway through the first day of Your Party’s conference, its co-founder Zarah Sultana arrives at the cavernous ACC conference centre in Liverpool.
The independent member of parliament takes a photo with her supporters and chats to members of the press.
She declares that the new leftist party, shakily co-led so far by her and ex-Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, is being corrupted by “nameless and faceless bureaucrats” who are “working in the shadows.” Then she turns and walks away.
A few minutes later, the press are informed that Sultana is “boycotting” day one of the gathering.
Welcome to the chaotic world of Your Party — Britain’s newest political outfit. The party, meant to provide a full-blooded left-wing challenge to the incumbent Labour Party Corbyn once led, is already mixing deep idealism with the kind of factional splits that would make Monty Python blush.
The first day of its founding conference was consumed by fierce debate after Your Party officials banned members from the activist group the Socialist Workers’ Party from attending. Your Party officials said this was because internal rules had initially made clear that members could only be a part of one political party.
There were also reports left-wing groups, including the SWP, were planning to storm the stage.
But Sultana said the expulsion was evidence of a “witch hunt” coming from people close to Corbyn, who led the center-left Labour Party from 2015, defying the odds to rob the Conservatives of a majority in 2017 before going down to a calamitous election defeat to Boris Johnson in 2019.
This wasn’t the plan
This weekend was meant to be a turning point.
Chaos that has dominated Your Party’s early days — public spats over funding, direction, and even its launch timeline — would be cast aside in search of unity.
But while plenty of conference attendees expressed genuine enthusiasm for the cause — and stressed that the splits did not detract from real debates on the party’s formation and structure — a sense of quiet mayhem hung over the weekend.
In Sultana’s speech on Sunday afternoon (she did attend the second day of the gathering), the former Labour MP warned that the expulsion of ultra-left-wing groups was a decision “made at the top of the party” that came from the “Labour right playbook.”
Corbyn sat behind her as she made her speech. He clapped politely when she finished — and then swiftly exited the stage.
Increasing signs of hostility between the two politicians have been evident since the launch of the outfit.
Sultana unilaterally announced the party’s existence in July. Afterwards, she launched a membership portal that was later scrapped — but not before members had given over their money and data.
Sultana was then accused of withholding over £800,000 in membership donations. A spokesperson for Sultana said she had returned £600,000, and planned to settle the rest.
“We got very close to having to borrow a lot of money” to ensure the conference went ahead, Corbyn told PoliticsJoe. “We should never have had this problem. We should never have had this stress,” he said. Your Party launched without a legal structure and before registering with the Electoral Commission watchdog.
Former MP Claudia Webbe, who chaired debates at the conference and is working with Your Party, said that there were “lots of things” that could have been done at the conference if not for money troubles. “We could have had more people, we could have had a creche,” she said.
But Sultana’s team is, in turn, incensed at some in Your Party’s top ranks.
One of the party’s statements on the funds situation was sent out just minutes before Sultana was due to go on BBC Question Time, one of the most high-profile political slots on British television. Her camp briefed Sky News that the timing of the statement was “hard to interpret as anything other than deliberate sabotage.”
Why did they come?
In time, the focus on divisions may fall away — and members at least sent a signal this weekend that they want the party’s top brass to get on the same page. The membership voted Sunday to install a “collective leadership,” a model where members run the organization through a central executive committee.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create something from scratch,” said Independent MP Shockat Adam. He warned, however, that there would be “serious problems” if the splits continue. When asked why members don’t just join the left-wing Greens — who are rising in the polls under populist new leader Zack Polanski — Adam stressed that Your Party offers “choice.”
“There’s always room for more than one party,” he said, adding: “We have no choice but to make this vehicle work, and we need to continue talking to each other, overcome our differences and work together.”
Standing in the ACC hall during lunch break, attendee Amanda said she campaigned for the Greens in the 2024 elections, but is now firmly with Your Party. “I don’t trust [the Greens] enough to join them,” she said.
She fears Polanski’s party could become too much like Labour by trying to be “too broad a church.”
“We’re clearly a socialist party,” argued Webbe. “We are proudly saying that we stand with the working class, with the grassroots of our communities. I think that’s the difference. The Green Party will be seen in many communities as a middle-class party.”
Eye of the storm
Attendees told POLITICO there were signs of genuine positivity in the debate hall. People seemed enlivened by the opportunity for a new, national platform where they could discuss their very specific politics.
Webbe said “the mainstream media may want to dismiss [Your Party] and describe it as a shambles, or as a laughing stock, but they weren’t in the room” — indeed, press were not allowed in the debate hall— “they didn’t see the enthusiasm, the passion, the energy that was in this room.”
“That is the same enthusiasm, passion and energy that will go back out to 650 constituencies right across the country,” she argued.
But the problems — which Sultana called “hiccups” in her own speech Sunday while apologizing for those that were her fault — are hard to overlook.
Julian, an attendee who had come to the conference from the Outer Hebrides, was part of the group that paid into Sultana’s membership portal. “I was absolutely furious, because these opportunities come once in a generation,” he said.
While broadly positive about the party, he was concerned it is “addressing yesterday’s questions with yesterday’s forms of organization.” As members sat in the auditorium debating how the party should be structured, its purpose, and its constitution, he turned with a takeaway cup in his hand and said: “Please. Not another fucking amendment.”
The Corbyn factor
For some, Corbyn himself remains a huge draw.
On Friday, the eve of the conference, the former Labour leader — suspended from the party by current Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his response to a damning report on antisemitism — sat in a group meeting at Paul’s Place, a not-for-profit set up to support people bereaved by suicide.
Corbyn, now 76, has long prized grassroots and community action over the glare of national politics. After the meeting, with attendees encouraged to pick from plates of cheese and crackers, three people, all Your Party members, described Corbyn as the best prime minister we “never had.”
In the ACC, others seemed more skeptical. Leaflets were thrust into the hands of conference attendees describing Corbyn’s politics as an “old, cowardly, rotten left-social democratic alliance.”
“I’m not interested in Jeremy Corbyn or Zarah Sultana,” said attendee Julian. “I’m interested in how policy is made, how legislation is developed to deal with everything from Grenfell tower murders to climate change, whatever it is. And people have to get together and organize.”
As debates in the main hall continued and energy levels sapped, chairs at times struggled to keep the peace. Debate chair Aghileh Djafari-Marbini was booed when she tried to instill order. “I’m not scared of you,” she said to those trying to shout her down. “As a child, I used to visit my father in the notorious Evin Prison. I am not scared of you. You do not scare me.”
What’s in a name?
One thing that at least was settled at Your Party’s conference was a proper name for the outfit — although it’s got a distinctly familiar ring.
After asking members to vote on alternatives including Our Party, Popular Alliance and For The Many, Corbyn announced Sunday night that they’d opted to stick with the original pitch: Your Party.
“Our permanent name reflects what our party and our conference is all about: a radically democratic movement seeking a radical transfer of wealth and power from the few to the many,” a Your Party spokesperson said. “This weekend was a festival of democracy, breaking with the Westminster mould of top-down politics. That’s what we’ll be offering to voters across the country: a genuinely new kind of politics.”
It will also have no single leader. Three independent alliance MPs, Corbyn, Adam, and Ayoub Khan — who revealed at conference that he once killed a dog to save a baby’s life — will run the party on a caretaker committee, along with five sortitioned lay members, until an executive committee is elected in February.
Sultana is not a part of the caretaker committee. She says she was “excluded,” while the group of MPs say she left voluntarily.
As the sun set over a bitingly cold Liverpool Sunday evening, big questions over the future of this nascent outfit remained. “Nobody votes for divided parties,” Webbe reflected. “Nobody votes for parties where there is tension, where there are differences.”
For now, the chaotic launch seems unlikely to hold back the true believers. “Are we the alternative?” Corbyn shouted in his closing speech Sunday night.
Loud cries of “yes” fired back.