Politicians Should Step Aside and Let Members Run the New Left Party

Our communities have been abandoned, and our people are suffering. The cost-of-living crisis is being felt in our pockets. The far right is ascending dangerously close to the corridors of power. Wildfires, droughts and the extremities of climate breakdown pose an existential threat to our planet. The people of Palestine continue to face the ceaseless daily violence of the genocidal Israeli state. And state authoritarianism is clenching its fist around our necks. These are the stakes of our current moment. There is no time to waste, and yet our leaders are wasting it.

The formation of a new, mass leftwing political party, provisionally entitled Your Party, is a desperately welcome development. Over 800,000 people signed up to hear more about the project: one in five were projected to be considering voting for Your Party, and hundreds of meetings have been organised up and down the country to bring the vision to life on the ground. The opportunity of a lifetime is staring us in the face, but now it is in jeopardy thanks to the warring factions of two leftwing politicians. Power needs to be taken out of their hands and put back into the hands of working people – which is why we’re part of a campaign to do just that.

Yesterday morning, supporters of the new left party received an email inviting them to become paying members. Over 20,000 people joined, according to Sultana. But within an hour, WhatsApp chats across the country were blowing up, saying that Your Party’s mailing list had been hacked, causing panic in what should have been a moment for celebration. But it had not been hacked: Zarah Sultana and her supporters had initiated this membership launch unilaterally.

Jeremy Corbyn, Adnan Hussain and the other male members of the Independent Alliance (IA) responded with a statement declaring Sultana’s email as “unauthorised” and claiming “legal advice” had been taken. Sultana quickly replied with a statement arguing that her intentions were to “safeguard the grassroots involvement that is essential to building this party”, against what she described as the “sexist boys’ club” of the IA and former executive director of the leader of the opposition’s office under Corbyn’s Labour leadership, Karie Murphy.

In the past 24 hours, a deep-seated feeling of confusion, embarrassment and demoralisation has cast a dark cloud over the base of this movement. We hoped that Corbyn, Sultana, the IA and its supporters could be trusted to undertake this precious chance of founding a new political party. We had hoped that they would lead with the best politics of our tradition at the forefront: solidarity and unity in action. But our admiration for both Corbyn and Sultana notwithstanding, we were wrong. There is a crisis of leadership gripping our movement: power now needs to be put in the hands of the grassroots. A new campaign, entitled Our Party, seeks to do exactly that.

Made up of around two dozen organisers drawn from the trade union movement, tenants’ unions and the Palestine movement, Our Party demands that the MPs involved in Your Party step aside from leading the founding of the party, and allow members to take over. Control over the process of founding the party, along with all money, data, digital systems and companies should be given to a handover committee with a clear and focused brief. This committee would facilitate the election of a founding stewards’ committee that can – with complete transparency – facilitate a member-led, democratic pathway to conference, the conclusions of which will be driven, shaped and decided entirely by the membership.

The founding stewards’ committee would have a “clear, focused mandate” from the membership to execute the existing plan for regional assemblies and a national conference, taking control of the party’s collective resources in the process. This committee would be transparent, accountable and obliged to publish all minutes, decisions, voting and processes.

“The MPs got us this far, but now it’s time to hand over the reins,” they write. “The people should take things forward from here.” We have been involved in discussions about Our Party, and entirely endorse the group’s demands. The only route out of this awful situation is complete openness and transparency about decisions being made, who is making them, and how they are being made. And crucially – fresh, non-aligned leadership.

On the pilot episode of our new podcast about Your Party, Life of the Party, we talked about the radical principle of democratic participation, one captured by a famous quote from Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, “Every cook can govern.” It’s an ethos that ordinary people can and should determine their futures, control their own lives and decide how the institutions they belong to operate.

It is time for the socialist movement to stop anointing kings and shying away from grassroots power. If we are going to build a mass movement that is capable of defeating Faragism, building class power on a mass scale, and transforming the lives of millions, it will need to be shaped, felt, and lived by its supporters. It will demand a democratic culture which equips our class with the tools necessary for liberation. It must be an instrument for mass action, but it must also prefigure the kind of mass democratic culture our society so clearly and desperately needs.

To all those at the top of the party: your power struggles are jeopardising this historic opportunity. We demand you take a step back, observe the bigger picture, get serious, and hand the reins over to the grassroots membership. Put your money where your mouth is, and give us our party.