A few weeks ago, I was watching a football match with friends. We were, as you do, discussing the founding conference of Your Party and whether we had been allocated a place. My friend and I had not been lucky enough to get a ticket. For me, I was relieved that I didn’t need to travel to Liverpool. They took the opposite view, stating they wished they could go, and might still, even if they were unable to get into the conference itself. I asked them why. They said something which stuck with me:
‘I just want to see it die. To know it is dead and that we can get on with other things.’
But what if death never comes?
At several points this year, we thought it’d be over – the botched launch, the turn to lawyers, Sultana’s boycott of day one of the conference, the attempt to push out members of the Socialist Workers Party the night before, and so on. And yet, the project, nominally at 55,000 people, identifying as socialist, has been born.
For those who refer to the founding process as a stitch-up, illegitimate, and so on, the picture which emerges is not so clear-cut. Such things are not binary. The foundation process certainly falls short of the sovereign working-class membership that we fight for. At the same time, the amendment options presented by the clique around Corbyn were the result of member organising, particularly around the Democratic Socialists – that is to say, they were a concession to organised member power. The winning of various amendments, such as collective leadership and more, did reflect some vitality.
The reality is that for a lot of people who’ve only experienced the tedium of Labour Party meetings, or their moribund union, or the smaller Marxist sects, this process was more democratic than anything they have ever experienced. That this experience is far below the level we realistically need for mass revolutionary organising is both an indictment of the process, of course, but also of the British left generally. Into this space, an atmosphere of general disorientation has emerged.
The gap between reality and appearance has grown. Amy Leather, notorious for her role in the cover-up of sexual violence in the SWP and drive to exclude members opposed to it, can stand at the front of the conference decrying an anti-democratic witch hunt. Corbyn and his allies represent the ‘right’ of the project, against a significant section of his own base. Reform, a party led by ex-bankers and their allies, presents itself as the insurgent force of popular change. A ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza is nothing of the sort. Every day we log in online and see yet more images and videos of the genocide, unsure if they are real or generated by AI.
How do we orient in such disorienting times? We must, as Amilcar Cabral says, ‘return to source’. We must remember and reinterrogate the fundamental touchstones of our politics, assess the state of struggle, the possible forces that could be mobilised, and the forces we are up against. As Brecht once wrote:
‘The great truth of our time is that our continent is giving way to barbarism because private ownership of the means of production is being maintained by violence. Merely to recognise this truth is not sufficient, but should it not be recognised, no other truth of importance can be discovered. Of what use is it to write something courageous which shows that the condition into which we are falling is barbarous (which is true) if it is not clear why we are falling into this condition?’
A brief balance sheet of the Your Party founding conference
What was won? Politically, the enshrining of the commitment to solidarity with trans people marked an important demarcation line. There were votes for the party to be explicitly socialist, to run on an anti-cuts agenda, and for various recall and term limit rights in the structures. In addition, the party committed to focusing its electoral efforts rather than standing as many candidates as possible. The most significant win was the commitment to a collective leadership body, the CEC, which will be vital for breaking the personalised and toxic MP-led dynamics of this political moment.
What was lost? The actual amendments process in practice was a farce, with a popular motion on limiting MPs to a worker’s wage blocked through various inconsistent means. In addition to the short submission window, many amendments were simply not heard due to time. Suspiciously, the votes from members were wiped at one point, the evening before. The existing leadership grouping around Corbyn prioritised their ‘roadmap amendments’, which allowed them to delineate the terms of key debates despite member opposition, most notably on dual membership. In this case, members were forced to choose between no dual membership and an approved list. Both solutions are inadequate, and no alternatives were considered. Party members were given four extremely inadequate options for voting on the name, despite there being a viable path to the ‘Left Party’. This meant the deeply unfortunate Your Party name was retained.
The expulsion of several leading SWP members the day before the conference, as well as the refusal of entry to James Giles as a member of Sultana’s entourage, were eventually reversed given widespread opposition. However, we are now in a transitional period, where the existing leadership grouping, who have remained opaque and poorly organised, are in charge of implementing the votes. There remains a chance that the grouping around Corbyn will seek recrimination or to further entrench their own position – or even storm out of the project entirely.
In all this time, the Greens have grown in membership and profile under Polanski, representing a real point of attraction for many on the left who have been frustrated by Your Party – little has been done to reverse this trend.
One of the major tasks of Your Party is to regain any sense that it is a competent and real political force – wins are needed. The extent to which branches, particularly in key areas like Birmingham, London, Preston, and more, could produce viable independent challenges is uncertain, and we’re certainly on the back foot for planning competent challenges for the local elections. What these 55,000 members do, where they do it, and to what end has been decidedly under-explored as the process has been dominated by the crisis at the top and the need to push for member democracy.
To return to foundations, our interest in whether militants engage with the Greens, or Your Party, or neither, is in the final instance a matter of its consequence for the mass activity of the exploited and oppressed in Britain and their struggle against the British state. In this regard, a few things at this moment provide hope. Your Party decided to smother the early enthusiasm. The Greens have grown but remain significantly focused on the logic of electoral work. The deeper sense of politics that we have as Marxists, which recognises the undercurrent of freedom observed every time you push back against your boss, your landlord, or the state, feels poorly served at this time.
Why are things this way?
Leon Trotsky founded his Fourth International with the claim that ‘the world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.’ For Trotskyist groups since 1938, this has been mobilised as a fundamental reason for why the working classes have not been able to push through a revolution – leadership being provided by social-democrats or Stalinist forces has prevented the revolutionary outbreak.
In many ways, the last few years in Britain have displayed the same trope of the crisis of leadership. Despite the accelerating breakdown of Labour’s historic support base amongst the working classes of Britain, the unprecedented scale of the movement for Palestinian liberation, and the breakthroughs in the 2024 election for forces to the left of Labour, ‘our side’ was slow to get its act together. Of the ‘figureheads’ of this moment, Corbyn and Sultana, it was the latter who far more extensively recognised the political stakes but has engaged in a potentially terminal brinkmanship to force something into being.
However, this moment doesn’t just reveal the historic crisis of leadership; it also reveals a deeper issue: the historical crisis of competence. At every stage of this process, if something could go wrong, it did.
This is not solely for Your Party either, irrespective of your particular political persuasion, whether a soft-left Labourism, one of Britain’s brands of Trotskyism or a more anarchistic flavour, all such traditions are in an organisationally weaker state than several decades ago. This is in terms of the quantity of membership, both of groups and of institutions of the workers’ movement – there is a failure to reproduce. It’s also in terms of quality, the depth of engagement with struggle, inquiry into our moment, and the challenges we face – an inability to cadreise and analyse.
The left ecosystem of groups and activists lacks significant social infrastructure, such as spaces for people to meet, shared resources, and more. We also have an ineffectual media apparatus, having broadly struggled with inroads into both televisual and online media, retaining an almost religious commitment to print. The list could go on.
This isn’t just about crying ‘roll your sleeves up’ and assuming everything is due to a lack of effort. Nor should we be tempted, as many are, to retreat into mechanistic accounts of downturns in struggle, wherein the defeats of the last five decades necessarily prevent our forces from coming together. A deeper political basis for this crisis of competence, particularly in the context of the deeply bizarre and personalised crises of Your Party, must be sought.
There are the consequences of the way the smaller groups to the left of Labour have attempted to organise since the 20th Century, the so-called ‘Parties of a New Type’, who seem permanently stuck with a ceiling of a few thousand. These groups, by virtue of their size, end up naturally focusing on a few different arenas of struggle, or risk spreading their forces too thin. This produces a sectionalism in activity. For example, socialist groups in Britain have historically preferred not to engage in electoral work consistently and deeply, preferring to engage in workplace organising and struggles for elected union positions. The result is a British far left that remains woefully underprepared to engage competently in electoral work, whilst competent at workplace organising. When a moment such as this one arises, where both electoral and workplace tactics are required, we see how this sectionalism has left us underprepared.
At the other end, the consequences of Labourism, as a set of relationships between the working classes, the institutions of the workers’ movement, and the Labour Party, have been extensive in reproducing certain practices. Both the left and right within Labour have historically relied upon an alliance with various union bureaucracies and back-room deals to secure political victory, rarely engaging the actual membership of the organisation, even when it was significantly working class. The result of this process is to produce politicians who act like Sultana and Corbyn, both ultimately dependent on a series of advisors, ‘tap on the shoulder’ conversations and trade union officials to push forward their project, at various times quite performatively calling towards their own membership to loyalty.
The defeats of the late 20th Century and the decline in the institutions of the workers’ movement, particularly the trade unions, have further intensified these practices. Sects which previously emerged during the last great wave of rank-and-file workplace activity in the 70s find themselves increasingly reliant on funding from union bureaucracies for their activities and are more willing to take positions within these institutions (often as a result of the choice between ‘you or the union right’ in elections). Politicians from the Labour Left increasingly became reliant on the bureaucracies of the agglomerated unions, particularly exemplified in Corbyn’s relationship with Len McCluskey and others in Unite. The result is less interest in expanding working-class mass membership organisations and forms of resistance, facilitating a death spiral court politics, where figures jockey to get access to what little resources still exist for their project.
There are many other political elements that we can observe from the recomposition of the working classes in Britain and the effect it has had on their institutions. Generally, there has been a decline in civic society membership organisations and a greater reliance on NGOs – as well as a greater turn by the left to foundation funding. There has been a preponderance of figures in the movement with ‘movement jobs’ – whether for unions or NGOs – rarely accountable to a membership. Social infrastructure has been lost to a wave of gentrification and the asset speculating economy of Britain. The growing exclusionary nature of further education, decline in employment prospects, and increased caring responsibilities all produce growing barriers to the production of organic intellectuals and militants.
Many of these elements have been outside our control; far more have not been. More could certainly be added and should – without developing an account of why we can do less, with less, we will not reverse the trend.
There is then a gap between the seriousness of our moment and the seriousness of our cadre. We must demand an alternative to the organisational inheritance of the sects and the traditions of Labourism – a third path must be sought. We are faced with the primary task of producing a new generation of communists who can overcome the limits of past forms. This is not hopeless, especially given how resistance at this moment could produce a far more serious militant – particularly in the face of greater immiseration and state repression. But it is one of the most pressing tasks.
The coming Reform government
The turn towards fighting within Your Party and the surging Green membership risks obscuring the political challenge of this moment – the dominance of Reform. Having monopolised, across various classes, the position of being the ‘anti-establishment’ party, it has begun a steady march towards a majority in Parliament. The left must be doing all it can to attempt to reverse this situation, but given the forces we have, we should take quite seriously the reality that it is Reform’s game to lose.
At the time of writing, assuming a July 2029 election, that gives us 1,300 days until a Reform government could be formed.
This is especially worrying because the British state, which Reform is seeking to wrest control of, is an increasingly violent and authoritarian one.
Starmer has continued to oversee and encourage the use of the anti-protest and anti-trade union legislation of the previous governments. Not only have these powers been used extensively, particularly against those opposing the genocide, but new interventions have been made against civil liberties. This is particularly through the proscription of Palestine Action and the new proposed police powers against repeat demonstrations. Most serious is the proposal to remove jury trials for the vast majority of cases.
Alongside this stripping back of rights, Labour is committed to growing repressive state capacity. Labour is expanding prisons by 14,000 places by 2031 through a £2.3 billion prison building programme. The government’s Plan for Change and Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee wants to put 13,000 more police on the streets at the same time. Now they are proposing a Digital ID scheme amid widespread opposition. The raft of xenophobic policies which Shabana Mahmood has announced since being appointed as Home Secretary has only shown a commitment to further strengthen the border regime and its division of the British working classes.
The response of the Starmer government to protests outside migrant detention hotels has been to promise to close them. Where will people be imprisoned instead? Starmer has turned to the British military and its land to push for the use of military barracks and the construction of makeshift camps on military land, building on the existing use of MDP Wethersfield and Napier Barracks.
This means that Reform is gaining power at a time when civil liberties have already been restricted to an unprecedented extent in modern history. They will inherit a significant policing and prison infrastructure, a supercharged border force and significant digital surveillance powers. They will likely also take control of a number of what are effectively prison camps on military bases. They will have a symbiotic relationship to a level of vigilante street violence, embodied in marches around Tommy Robinson and the figures engaged in ‘raising the flag’.
They will likely use this against internal opposition, particularly the organised left. They will also use this against forms of working-class resistance, particularly from those impacted by border policies and racialised sections of the working classes.
These are state powers which the British left both within and around the Labour Party, as well as in the form of smaller collectives and sects to their left, has not had to contend with for several decades. Our current organising infrastructure is used to a broader civic space, which saw state repression and harassment, but was not funded and empowered on such a scale. The terrain is shifting, which would present a challenge for a larger competent left, nevermind us.
What alternative can be constructed?
State repression can produce a hardening effect on social movements, in which those involved respond by battening down the hatches, operating with fewer activists, and sometimes being willing to engage in more escalatory action. Repression also produces widespread anxiety amongst activists, as well as focusing us on spending time and energy dealing with the effects of repression. It becomes easy to lose a sense of informed risk, anxiety grows, and an obsession with ‘security culture’ rapidly facilitates a retreat from outward-facing activity.
We must retain the basic insight that our strength depends on winning mass support amongst the exploited and oppressed. Our task by 2029 is to build a popular cradle which will provide the minimum operational viability for any left politics in the context of Reform repression.
This does not mean attempting to cajole, trick, or build a lowest common denominator basis to popular support. There is an edge to many calls to engage in community mutual aid, base-building and similar activities, which seems less about the infrastructure of class struggle, and more based on a misguided belief that we can trick people into socialist politics through engaging in ‘good activity’. Similarly, that is not to jettison basic commitments around freedom, whether against transphobia or xenophobia, to broaden the base through concession. It is to think through how we engage in the articulation of a new politics of freedom in an outward-facing manner.
We also face the dual difficulty of recomposing class resistance – in the sense of cohering different elements of the working classes in Britain into linked forms of struggle, whilst also constructing collective identification amongst those resisting.
It would be naive to assume we can win a majority of the entire British working class and build a collective identity within three years. Instead, we should recognise that the best case is recomposing a section of the British working classes who will form the basis for popular support in the face of Reform.
In this regard, I would argue a priority of any new left organisation, whether Your Party, the Greens, or others, is producing a popular anti-racist politics in the face of Reform. This is necessary to disrupt the current growing wave of racism, sanctioned by Labour, Reform and others. In this regard, a popular anti-racism will not necessarily defeat Reform. But if effective, it will also cohere a sufficiently large section of the population towards an alternative political project. This would require us to, as Virasami and Marvin argue, move ‘from anti racism as a watchword to a political practice of composing working-class coalitions wherever we are.’
The immediate vector to recomposing proletarian anti-racism, and the overarching political priority, is through continued resistance to the genocide in Palestine and the British state’s active participation in this. Across Britain there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions who actively oppose the genocide. In the continued backing of the genocide against this popular opposition, workers see reflected the racism endemic to British society. The seeds of building a sufficiently large working-class coalition lie in this endemic hostility to British imperialist action in Palestine.
Anti-militarism as a wedge
We can build further on this popular anti-racism constructed through opposition to the genocide by putting forward a deeper anti-militarist politics.
We are seeing several European states, along with many others, rearm. Reeves’ budgets, Lammy’s foreign policy, and Starmer’s nationalistic vision all depend on increased military spending, both on the armed forces and a growing arms economy. The proscription of Palestine Action came precisely because their actions at RAF Brize Norton undermined the presentation of military might and competence by the British state.
The British working classes are experiencing the continued breakdown of already broken public services – what Davies has termed the ‘broken promise of infrastructure’. They are seeing the rising cost of basics, higher rents from landlords, and the withdrawal of more and more public services. Continued expansion of military spending can be counterposed to this undermining of public services and general immiseration. It is a wedge to build an alliance between those sections of the working classes already politicised around the genocide with those furious at the breakdown of living conditions.
Crucially, it is also an area where Reform is incapable of making the same argument. They cannot put forward popular claims to reduce military spending and refocus it on basic public services and the cost-of-living crisis. Otherwise, they undermine their own nationalistic claims and fracture alliances among the global far-right committed to military expansion.
This is not a ‘bread and butter’ argument. How struggles around the cost of living and infrastructure are made can be presented as much as struggles for dignity, security, and freedom as they are about resource allocation.
‘Us or Reform’ – the problem posed.
Whether Starmer manages to continue as Labour leader or not, it is clear that the thrust of the Labour strategy currently is to demand loyalty in the face of the Reform threat. That this won’t work is clear – a historically unpopular government saying ‘us or Reform’ simply ends in people stating ‘ok, Reform’.
If following May 2026’s likely disastrous results for Labour, there is an attempt at a palace coup against Starmer, there may be attempts to force a candidate in who claims some break with ‘Starmerism’. The barriers to Andy Burnham attempting this are substantial, but who knows which other figures may emerge. However, there is a real chance that a Starmer replacement attempts to present themselves as some return to the ‘broad church’ of Labour politics. This will then be coupled with calls to prevent Reform coming in through popular alliances.
As 2029, or an earlier election gets closer, the rightward pressure such calls for popular alliances will have, whether on supporters of Your Party, the Greens or both, has not seriously been confronted.
There are many reasons why the calls for a popular alliance should be resisted. Firstly, given the disastrous position Labour find themselves in, it is unlikely such a strategy can work even with some change in leadership. Any attempts to pose a popular alliance against Reform in such a way would be tying oneself to a sinking ship. Secondly, Reform has succeeded in presenting itself as an alternative to the established political parties at a time of historic breakdowns in relationships between political parties and their social bases – Reform poses currently as the only significant alternative to the ‘parties of order’. The ability of any left attempt at this moment to produce a popular cradle also requires that it can present itself as an oppositional project, an alternative to established politics. Any formal political alliance would seriously undermine this claim.
We will not be able to recompose a popular class politics by linking any insurgent attempt to do so with the current governing party. This is always the lesson of seeking the political independence of the working classes. However, the threat of Reform and the crisis of competence on the left mean this will be used as a wedge to frustrate processes of securing political independence for all those resisting in Britain.
Looking ahead
To summarise, we leave the foundation conference of Your Party with some victories, but an overall mixed image, with our forces spread over several organisations with minimal alignment and infrastructure.
This is a result not just of a historical crisis of leadership, but also a historical crisis of competence – the full contours of which need interrogation. Our cadre is inadequate for the challenge we face, particularly the likelihood of a Reform government.
To rebuild mass resistance and popular support amongst the British working classes, I have suggested there are two areas of importance – a renewed anti-racist working-class politics, particularly constructed from those opposed to the Palestinian genocide – then attempting to produce a wider coalition around the cost of living and dignity of life, particularly linked through renewed anti-militarism at a time of growing militarisation.
By constituting such a coalition and rebuilding infrastructures to fight the crisis in competence, we are offered a chance to go forward. Constructing this and retaining political independence as calls for a popular alliance against Reform grow will then become the tasks of the day. This is important to look ahead to at a time when those in Your Party will begin obsessing over the CEC elections, and those in the Greens and other projects become focused on the May 2026 elections.
Whilst writing this piece, we learned of the death of Asad Haider. He wrote of the problem of widespread depoliticisation at the close of the 2010s. The sharpest of us all, his words have not aged:
‘The contemporary left is mired in circular and disempowering disputes whose material implications are ambiguous, which only seems to amplify the vitriol which accompanies them. What is obscured by the affective intensity of these disputes is that in the absence of a guiding political orientation, they represent little more than forms of adjustment within the existing world, and therefore an investment in what is. It is impossible to genuinely act within this condition of depoliticization. So let’s affirm the absolute necessity of reviving and transmitting the hypothesis that this world is not necessary. Under the guidance of this hypothesis we may begin to determine what new modes of politics are possible.’
