Your Party now represents the second failed attempt in a decade to unify the socialist left in Britain into a single party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. While Corbyn’s Labour Party was defeated at the polls in 2019, Your Party has faded into irrelevance before contesting an election. Having won the Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections in early 2026 and subsequently purging many internal opponents, Corbyn’s The Many faction now appears intent on managing Your Party’s decline. Corbyn has scarcely expressed any personal enthusiasm for the project. If his milieu has any vision for it at all, it is as nothing more than a loose network of independent local councillors and MPs of which Corbyn is the nominal figurehead.

This was not the only vision for Your Party, though. Many activists organising in proto-branches and running for the CEC elections saw it as an opportunity to build a mass party, building power by uniting the highly fragmented socialist left into a single organisation. This would, of course, always have been a fraught and contradictory process. But a single party appeared to be a necessary vehicle to work towards greater programmatic, strategic and organisational unity – and therefore greater social power – over the medium term. It is by this metric that we can now say with certainty that Your Party has failed. Far too many have been alienated from the project for it to remain viable as one of genuine unity. There are and will continue to be accounts of why Your Party failed, on these terms and others.

Many will emphasise failures of leadership, including Corbyn’s indecision and anti-democracy and Zarah Sultana’s strategic mistakes and public feuding. These incompetencies are an important part of the story, particularly for explaining why thousands of members and hundreds of thousands of potential supporters energised by the opportunity were so quickly demotivated by Your Party. There is an obvious contradiction at play that the same politicians whose participation created the opportunity of Your Party were among its biggest weaknesses, precipitating its rapid and embarrassing downfall. I feel as strong a sense of betrayal as others, but our explanations for the failure of Your Party should look beyond the personalistic politics of leadership. It is now necessary to identify the deeper contradictions within the socialist left that meant we were not able to overcome our leaders’ inadequacies to build the party in spite of them.

Your Party represented a doomed attempt to unite three distinct (and themselves internally fragmented) sections of the socialist left in Britain. Each has a major cultural flaw of which it has been seldom self-conscious, let alone proactive in seeking to redress, respectively limiting their ability to work together productively. These are a) the bureaucratic left, which tends towards anti-democracy, b) the doctrinal left, which tends towards sectarianism, and c) the movementist left, which tends towards disorganisation.

To be clear, I would locate myself within the movementist left, given my political experience in climate and other social movements; the less institutionalised section of the Labour left; and, most recently, the new Your Party factions. I also stood (unsuccessfully) on the Grassroots Left slate in the Your Party CEC elections in Yorkshire on an eco-socialist platform. This doesn’t mean I intend to spare my section of the left from criticism in argument. In fact, I hope to achieve the opposite by reorienting reflections on Your Party away from emphasising what factional opponents did wrong and towards a more holistic analysis, including critical reflection of the limitations of our own sides.

The point, therefore, is not to litigate Your Party feuding or the internal drama of the Grassroots Left slate, but to contribute to a greater self-understanding across the socialist left to inspire a commitment to transcending our respective limitations. I proceed by further defining the three sections of the socialist left, reflecting on their role in the Your Party founding process, and briefly outlining the beginnings of a route forward in pursuit of socialist unity.

I contend that there are three important characteristics that the socialist left needs to work effectively: democracy, conjunctural politics, and organisation. Democracy in this context means support for and participation in structures where members can substantively inform political programme and strategy. Conjunctural politics broadly means updating strategy and political programme on the basis of analysis of the current social conditions. Organisation is not just about whether activists belong to a formal organisation, but also that it contains internal political unity among a disciplined and committed membership. Each section of the socialist left in Britain broadly demonstrates two of these characteristics but tends to lack another.

The bureaucratic left

The bureaucratic left is composed of those who have predominantly been schooled in politics through the internal structures of the Labour Party and trade unions. This is not to say that everyone politicised through or active in Labour or the unions is of the bureaucratic left, as each has always contained activists from the Marxist and movementist lefts too. The people we are talking about are those who have organised mostly through regional and national committee structures and as councillors or paid staffers. This is a relational mode of politics where power rests in the density of personal networks and the skill of manoeuvring (i.e. cultivating loyalties and/or operating ruthlessly). In the context of Your Party, this is the milieu surrounding Corbyn and organising The Many slate in the CEC elections. 

Members of the bureaucratic left might think of themselves as the leadership of the socialist movement, performing a necessary function of leading the movement by providing a structure to mobilise their mass of supporters through. This mass is distrusted by the bureaucratic left, though. It does not want to afford the masses the democratic powers needed to determine political programme or strategy, as they are seen as lacking the requisite political understanding or strategic insight. The example of Corbyn supporters’ appetite for a second EU referendum (a “People’s Vote”) in the latter years of his Labour leadership is a strong and chastening example of this. Left-wing Labour members were sincerely motivated but ultimately contributed to the failure of the project as they were malignly influenced by reactionary forces.

The bureaucratic left expressed this anti-democratic tendency as it led the founding of Your Party. For example, it has not facilitated the formation of local branches until June 2026, despite considerable grassroots member energy to do so. When activists autonomously self-organised what came to be known as ‘proto-branches’ anyway, some among the bureaucratic left denied their existence. Such formations did exist, but they were not seen as legitimate, and with that justification denied any resources or access to members’ data. This reflects a hostility to (including fear of) bottom-up organisation that would lead to the masses developing their own power bases, on their own terms, independent of structures imposed from the centre. Furthermore, the bureaucratic left organised Your Party’s founding conference to limit democratic participation by using sortition to disempower organised factions, only allowing votes between pre-approved options, and subsequently amending conference decisions around the composition of the CEC with an online confirmatory ballot. The masses are not trusted to decide what party they want for themselves on their own terms. 

If the bureaucratic left’s great deficiency is its anti-democratic tendencies, then we can identify relative strengths in its organisation and capacity for conjunctural politics. Above all, The Many slate decisively won the CEC election because they were able to mobilise more supporters through the pre-existing organisational infrastructure of the Peace & Justice Project. This is an organisational vehicle with a large mailing list and resources (including staff) built following Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and effectively deployed to exercise considerable power in the founding of Your Party. Furthermore, the bureaucratic left did demonstrate some attentiveness to shifts in the balance of forces. It identified Corbyn’s expulsion from Labour by Keir Starmer and the rise of successful independent electoral campaigns as opportunities to cohere new political forces (including, and especially, those with a foundation in the insurgent Palestine solidarity movement). The caveats which underline the bureaucratic left’s political limitations are that the pivot to a new party was only instigated after pressure from Sultana; it did not represent a sharp break with Labourism, as they remained committed to forms of organising derived from trade unions and the Labour Party; and it was essentially an attempt to re-run Corbynism without analysis of why it failed previously.

The doctrinal left

The doctrinal left is composed of a multitude of Marxist organisations, most of them in the Trotskyist tradition. Those active in Your Party included the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Socialist Party (SP), Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) (CPGB-PCC), Workers Power Counterfire, Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL), Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Anti*Capitalist Resistance (A*CR), as well as a host of other smaller organisations. The SWP, SAlt, CPGB-PCC, Workers Power and Counterfire were involved in the Grassroots Left slate, while others organised in proto-branches, and the RCP withdrew before the founding conference despite initial involvement. Each of these organisations has its own internal organisation and culture, not to mention its own political preoccupations and doctrinal specificities. Nevertheless, we can also identify shared characteristics, particularly regarding their organisation, approach to democracy, and conjunctural politics.

The element of the doctrinal left that can make them so annoying for those who share meetings with them is precisely their strongest point: they are more organised than you. These organisations tend to have between a few hundred and a few thousand members and cultivate a strong culture of commitment and discipline. This translates to members reliably turning up to meetings and planning how to intervene (i.e. by spreading around a room and coordinating speeches to make the same or complementary points). This can often effectively set the tone of a meeting in which their members are a minority by organising to push their line in this way. These organisations were therefore able to effectively influence the politics of proto-branches and the Grassroots Left slate because (like the bureaucratic left, albeit in a different form) they came to Your Party with strong pre-existing organisation.

Unlike the bureaucratic left, the doctrinal left had a stronger record of commitments to democracy in Your Party. This requires setting aside the complex politics of these organisations’ internal democratic structures, which are variable in the balance between ‘democratic’ and ‘centralism’. There is also a need to set aside motivation. While some organisations appear to have a genuine doctrinal commitment to mass democracy (in their own organisation and others’ they participate in), other organisations supported formal democracy in Your Party because it was necessary for them to exert influence. Regardless of motivation, the virulence of the doctrinal left’s opposition to the bureaucratic left is substantively down to divergent approaches to democracy downstream of critiques of its politics of left-reformism. The doctrinal left consistently supported a democratic founding conference and transparent voting in the CEC election, as well as tending to lead the formation of proto-branches (themselves a democratic intervention aiming to give members power early on).

The doctrinal left’s primary weakness, though, is its aversion to conjunctural politics. This manifests in a dogmatic approach to politics where the doctrine is rarely adapted to evolving conditions. This breeds a sectarian culture which tends towards division, as organisational unity must be based on total agreement on certain doctrinal questions. Substantive disagreement on political questions is understood as the basis of organisational incompatibility (rather than issues to collectively work through). This doctrinaire approach to organisation within the doctrinal left also translates to its relationship with other sections of the left. Fragmentation is a recurrent part of its history as disagreements on doctrinal questions lead to splits or expulsions. A recent example is the SP’s expulsion of members, who went on to found SAlt, over issues including ‘identity politics’. The significance afforded to political questions means that the doctrinal left tends to demonstrate an intransigent inflexibility, particularly in debates about programme. We saw this as many within the Grassroots Left slate organising committee refused to consider proposals for a more expansive political programme, building out a strategy of base building and details of party democracy beyond what was eventually agreed. Their strength of principle meant that several comrades admitted to having not even read the proposed documents, as they refused to engage in the substance of ideas in more expansive proposals brought by the new factions.

The movementist left

The movementist left contains socialists who are more diffusely distributed across the social movements and are therefore less likely to have fixed organisational associations, whether party or trade union. Instead, they follow the issues and formations that appear to be most expedient in a given moment, leading to a politics that is at best dynamic in its evolution and at worst vague and imprecise.  The movementist left tends away from institutional politics and towards communities and/or direct action, but is not averse to left-electoral projects when they develop an insurgency. This was the case during Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party – as it organised through constituency parties (CLPs), grassroots campaigns and Momentum’s mass door-knocking – and more recently Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Before 2015, it gravitated towards environmentalism, anti-austerity and/or student politics. Afterwards, it organised mutual aid during the COVID-19 pandemic and organised through tenants’ unions and the Palestine solidarity movement. 

In Your Party, the movementist left was expressed primarily through a series of new factions. These were politically heterogeneous and arising from different movements, though several involved the influence of different rs21 members. Organising for Popular Power (O4PP) represented the networked London left and developed strategies of ‘base building’; The Democratic Bloc was composed of former Momentum activists and proposed a more mainstream conception of a democratic electoral party; Eco-Socialist Horizon (ESH) developed out of Labour for a Green New Deal and advocated the importance of climate politics in party building; Trans Liberation Group (TLG) contested a radical trans politics against anti-trans reaction; People’s Front (PF) emerged from the militant Palestine solidarity movement and advocated the practice of social investigation; and Greater Manchester Left Caucus (GMLC) sought to unify socialists in their region while arguing against Your Party administering capitalism. Democratic Socialists of Your Party (DYSP) perhaps sits least comfortably in this schema as it contained, was contested by and therefore reflected both movementist and doctrinal lefts (as well as those seeking to transcend those categories). It proposed a party of a new type, the vision for which was an evolving and sometimes uncomfortable synthesis of Max Shanly’s proposals, rs21 partyism and the CPGB-PCC’s priorities. Nevertheless, DSYP caucused with the new factions before and during the Grassroots Left slate, including as they came together at The World Transformed (TWT) in 2025 to express a shared vision for the party.

The movementist left, therefore, contrasts with both the bureaucratic and doctrinal lefts in that it could not intervene in Your Party through pre-existing organisations but had to (very quickly) create new ones. This is a feature of its disposition against long-term organisation building, which we might explain as arising from its basis in the anti-institutional new left politics of the post-68 era: a trend spread across the West and prominent in Britain. This is not to say that the movementist left does not have organisation – it is clearly prepared to intervene in organisations and create its own – but that it is not practised in building them to endure. This put the above factions at a considerable disadvantage during the founding of Your Party, as they had to build the proverbial plane while flying it. Furthermore, the movementist left’s disorganisation also reflects a general lack of political commitment and discipline. Energy flows into an initiative when it appears to be popular and exciting, and dissipates when (as with Your Party) meetings are boring, you have to work with annoying Trotskyists, and the leadership is embarrassing. Without an organisational basis for accountability between comrades, socialist politics becomes a fickle choice between what makes individuals feel good rather than collectively determining how to struggle most effectively.

The irony here is that while the movementist left rarely enacts this collective democracy, it is most committed to it on its own terms, both for its internal structures as well as any party it moves through. Democracy is not seen as an instrumentally useful means of entryism or an inconvenience through which to incorporate the masses, but the engine through which socialist politics is necessarily conducted. Their experience of Your Party was attempting to positively engage in factionalism, not as division but as the method of associating and organising openly based on shared political and strategic ideas. Indeed, two of the new factions (DSYP and Democratic Bloc) explicitly prioritised organising for genuine member democracy in the party (albeit with different visions for what this looks like in practice) while the others readily signed up to this commitment too.

Another of the movementist left’s strengths is its conjunctural approach to politics. This is evident in an increasingly common rehabilitation of the praxis of ‘conjunctural analysis’ where groups assess the changing balance of forces in relation to capitalism’s crises to develop strategic interventions. This is a disposition ingrained and reflected in activists’ preparedness to throw their weight behind issues as they arise. This does not look like organising opportunistic demos or selling papers at others’, but to innovate new forms of organisation and action and build new political coalitions as conditions change. For example, the rise of the Palestine solidarity movement has seen new campaigns of direct action, new organisations and a reassessment of the prominence and militancy of anti-imperialism across the milieu. Before then, the movementist pivot to the climate crisis in the late-2010s caused an introduction of a much stronger ecological politics, including relating the urgency of the crisis to strategy. Your Party, too, provoked serious intellectual work to develop new ideas of what kind of party was both necessary and possible to advance the socialist left in Britain.

Left misalignment

This is not the space to litigate a blow-by-blow account of the brief but intense story of Your Party factionalism. It is useful, though, to reconstruct a top-level account of what happened and why, to properly understand Your Party as a failure of unity. The core dynamic was that the Grassroots Left slate formed to contest the CEC elections as an alliance between the doctrinal left and the movementist left, against the bureaucratic left. The two former sections broadly shared an analysis that the latter was undermining Your Party’s potential as a mass socialist organisation because of its anti-democratic tendencies. This was quite evident in Your Party HQ’s preparedness to purge the sects (e.g. the SWP) or stop their members from standing in internal elections (e.g. the SP), organise a stage-managed founding conference, and re-run votes with confirmatory e-ballots. In this sense, one section of the socialist left entered the project with no intention of working towards unity and, in fact, was intent on undermining that ambition.

The question, then, was whether the Grassroots Left slate could effectively unite to develop an alternative vision for Your Party, and organise an effective counterweight to The Many. Neither transpired as the Grassroots Left turned out to be less than the sum of its parts, both because the doctrinal and movementist lefts were not ready in themselves to unify productively. Recurrent disagreements plagued the project, intransigence on key questions (like the scope of the political programme), and splits, which all undermined the possibility of effective organising. Some indicative examples should help illustrate the point, though this is a partial account.

The doctrinal left demonstrated its dogmatism as representatives from organisations like SAlt and Counterfire, which consistently frustrated attempts to agree on a shared programme for the slate. This was both regarding a) the type of party that the CEC would build once elected and b) the political programme Your Party should adopt in the period before a properly democratic members conference. These were obviously crucial questions that would have to be addressed at some point, but the can was always kicked down the road. Instead, the sects advocated an alliance around the most minimal points of unity. They agreed on the principle of ‘maximum democracy’ – but with no detail of what that should look like in practice – and tended to propose short lists of left social democratic policy (e.g. opposing austerity) which happened to accord with the organisation’s pre-existing platform. 

The sects insisted that the Grassroots Left slate could not resolve the longstanding debate among socialists between the minimum-maximum programme and transitional programme on the timeline we had. However, this argument obscures that the new factions of the movementist left were at least attempting to develop a conjuncturally appropriate programme, transcending doctrine to create something that works for this political context at this point in history. It is hard to see how political unity could have been achieved as long as the doctrinal left conducted debate as a winner-takes-all contest between pre-established positions rather than the co-production of new ideas arising from collective conjunctural analysis.

The movementist left demonstrated its disorganisation as it lacked both the capacity and the discipline to effectively import its political innovations and mobilising energies into the slate’s campaign. By the beginning of the CEC election, much of the movementist left’s base had already been alienated from Your Party due to the embarrassing fighting between the Corbyn and Sultana camps. The Grassroots Left slate was weaker for the failure of the movementist left to bring its base back into the coalition by investing them in the project of party building in this context. Frankly, the movementist left cadre could not overcome its own personal embarrassment at the situation to persuade friends and comrades of the correct course of political action. This is indicative of an individualism that arises when comrades are divorced from the commitment and discipline cultivated by a serious organisation.

This lack of discipline further manifested as Democratic Bloc left the group of new factions (which came out of the TWT unity talks) after losing a vote on whether to select candidates by open primary and O4PP left the Grassroots Left slate as no other organisation agreed to a position of neutrality towards Sultana (who was a member of the slate organising committee and became an official candidate) and Corbyn (who the slate endorsed for election). Had those new factions remained on the slate, they would have improved its internal culture immeasurably and likely contributed positively to political decision-making and campaigning. An important conclusion is that the abstention of much of the movementist left from the project is as responsible for Your Party’s failure as the more flagrant flaws of the bureaucratic and doctrinal lefts. It is, likewise, hard to see how organisational unity could have been achieved as long as the movementist left lacked the commitment and discipline to such a degree.

The result of both the doctrinal and movementist left’s respective inadequacies, then, was a campaign that did not cohere the collective organisational capacities of the groups that had come together to form the Grassroots Left slate. Most checked out after the slate was selected, if they hadn’t already, leaving the campaign too heavily reliant on individuals who were contingently available to invest their considerable personal capacities. In this context, the mistakes that were made (e.g. the botched launch and statement opposing the Greens in Gorton & Denton) appear much less surprising. An aggregation of available individuals is almost inevitably less capable than the unity of socialist organisations. Given this, The Many’s decisive victory in the Your Party CEC elections should not really have been too surprising.

Towards unity, again?

The socialist left would certainly be in a considerably stronger position to confront the coming crises if it were able to abolish the distinctions between these three sections. The experience of Your Party makes it clear that this cannot be achieved by simply launching a new party, everybody crowding in, and expecting that we can all productively work together immediately. While there is an entrenched distrust between all sides, which makes it hard to imagine a successful process in the short-term, we should not abandon the ambition. Instead, the pursuit of socialist unity must be a process conducted intentionally over time. I contend that each section must first get its own house in order before it is possible to achieve a ‘party of the whole left’. Each section must prioritise understanding its own deficiencies and working to overcome them.

The bureaucratic left must overcome its aversion to democracy and learn to support autonomous initiatives while navigating the contradictions that arise from this. The doctrinal left must overcome its doctrinaire approach to political questions and learn to practice conjunctural analysis, likely entailing the eventual regrouping of Marxist organisations. The movementist left must overcome its disorganisation and create enduring structures which cultivate political unity, commitment and discipline. As I am of neither the bureaucratic nor doctrinal left, it is not likely to be productive for me to prescribe how either of these sections should pursue this process, though I of course hope they take this provocation seriously. As someone more of the movementist left, I am perhaps unsurprisingly both more confident that it has the greatest potential to overcome its inadequacies and in prescribing what it should do to achieve this.

As well as a growing self-consciousness around the practice of conjunctural analysis, some within the movementist left have begun to reckon with the necessity of cadreisation as the basis of organisation building. TWT – perhaps the most enduring organisation of the movementist left – has introduced a leadership programme to take place in the summer of 2026, aiming to develop its volunteer base politically while cohering a layer of militant organisers across the wider left. Furthermore, some coming from the movementist left have sought to transcend its limitations by joining rs21 (itself a split from the SWP), including its explicitly partyist tendency (Marxist Unity Caucus), as part of a self-conscious commitment to organisation building. While TWT and rs21 emerge from different traditions and continue to operate very differently, they respectively represent the most promising incubators of a coherent socialist left which forges unity by combining democracy, conjunctural politics, and organisation-building. That said, one should not confuse the existence of these organisations with them being adequate, as their respective political unity, commitment and discipline remain underdeveloped along with the continued fragmentation of movementists across many other weaker groupings.

We need a wider debate about how exactly the movementist left reckons with its inadequacy and practically builds organisation over the coming years. My insistence is that this should be our explicitly understood orientation in the months and years to come. There should be no campaign designed or festival organised by rs21, TWT or otherwise that doesn’t concretely contribute to the project of organisation-building as an essential step towards the horizon of unity. This cannot be the predilection of a small number of strategic thinkers, but our commonly understood driving force as we navigate the crises.

Chris Saltmarsh was a Grassroots Left candidate in the Your Party CEC elections and is a member of Eco-Socialist Horizon.