Inside Your Party Conference: Is This Farewell to Corbynism?

With the two-day founding conference for Your Party (and that is now the official name) concluded in Liverpool, Zarah Sultana has triumphed in a drawn out battle with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. To rapturous applause from members, she’s staked out a new approach to leftwing politics in this country: socialist, democratic, decentralised and absolutely furious. But will it work?

One of the more enjoyable features of attending Your Party’s founding conference in Liverpool was watching representatives of the mainstream press struggle to grasp the idea of a party under democratic control. One of the least enjoyable was watching them roll their eyes and sneer at the views of the 2,500 Your Party members sortitioned (selected by lottery) to attend. 

For many in the media and probably across the country too, democracy is framed by big figureheads whose pronouncements either do or do not attract voters. The relevance of the electorate lies not in voters’ opinions, but rather how they namelessly distribute across pie charts when the figureheads seek their endorsement once every few years. 

“What do you mean, what do you mean?” asked a broadsheet journalist repeatedly when told on the second day of the Your Party conference that members, not MPs, will lead the party. That’s just not how it’s done. Until now.

Given that at Your Party, it’s been those big figureheads who’ve appeared to both stymie progress and create the most angst, perhaps it’s no wonder members have voted to de-centre them. 

From the party’s beginning, Corbyn’s camp has acted in ways unfathomable to many members – briefing to the Murdoch press, being seen to ice co-founder Zarah Sultana out of the decision-making of the party’s founding committee, and restricting what some understand as the democratic promise that drew them to the party in the first place. How? By closing membership to those who belong to smaller, more radical left-wing groups.

For her part, Sultana has engaged in divisive social media messaging, gone rogue at least once (twice, depending on who you ask) with party announcements and a membership portal, all while playing a high-risk media game. 

Endless public spats and rifts have seen external enthusiasm for the party dim. When Sultana abruptly announced that she and Corbyn would co-lead a new party back in July, 800,000 people expressed their interest. When she launched a now-defunct portal in early September, 20,000 signed up – and paid up – in just a day. Following an intense battle involving Corbyn’s team reporting Sultana to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and Sultana threatening to sue Corbyn in return, a second, official party portal was launched later that month. Uptake was vastly slower, with 55,000 members finally signed up by the time the founding conference kicked off on Saturday.

The members have been remarkably patient, perhaps not least of all because they’ve nowhere else to go. Talking to attendees this weekend, I met people simultaneously energised by political hope and traumatised by political practice. Public sector workers, immigrants or their children, people with disabilities, the broke and sometimes therefore also the broken: people of all ages, races and political experience. 

Many have been weaponised again and again by parties that took their votes then betrayed them and – in the case of Labour – purged them. The Greens, meanwhile, are not trusted and seen as unsocialist. Tirelessly, they toiled through Your Party debates inside the hall, enduring disruptions and discussing constitutional amendments over hours. Aside from two speeches, Corbyn was rarely to be seen. Meanwhile, Sultana created a media scrum outside the venue over her decision to boycott the first day, finally entering the conference hall only halfway through day two.

“It will take time,” one man told me at the end of Saturday, referring to the question of whether the left could ever be united, “But we have to do it. We have to believe it’ll be worth it.” When I asked him if he was for or against dual membership (the idea that members of radical leftwing parties could also be in Your Party), he was for. “We need the broadest, biggest left,” he said, before repeating, “It’ll take time to find agreement.”

That issue of dual membership dominated the first day of conference, due primarily to a self-harming political misstep by the Corbyn camp. Expulsions were made – first from the party membership, then physically from Corbyn’s pre-conference rally and the venue itself – all involving either members of the Socialist Workers Party or the tiny Revolutionary Communist Group. Implicated in two of those events was Corbyn’s closest aide, Karie Murphy, seen by some at this conference as an unelected official wielding too much party power.

For those at Sultana’s rally on Friday night and many attending conference on Saturday, the expulsions were deeply triggering. “No to Labour 2.0,” was a frequent refrain, along with reference to “unelected bureaucrats” and, on one occasion, “faceless enforcers” from members. To some, that expulsions were being made despite the question of dual membership not yet having been voted on by members reeked of centralised overstep. It was, undoubtedly, a stupid move, getting the backs of attendees up and draining the Corbyn camp of political legitimacy. 

But members were not especially impressed by Sultana’s decision to boycott the first day of conference in response. Though the move attracted national headlines, it didn’t sway many delegates. At the end of Saturday, attendee Clint said he was struggling to pick a horse. “They’re both flawed,” he told me. “And it’s up to party members to move them in the right direction.” 

By Sunday morning, the party had made its move. With online voting on the two key issues complete, Zarah Sultana, under the slogan “the witch hunt must end”, won on dual membership with a massive margin of 69% to 31%, which Corbyn had argued against.

On collective member leadership, she won too, though on a narrow margin of 52% to 48%, with her call for “maximum member democracy”. Co-leadership, which Sultana had earlier campaigned for, was not an option on the ballot, a decision taken by the Corbyn camp-led party organisers. Corbyn himself had come down in favour of a single leader. 

At lunchtime, Sultana arrived at the conference for her scheduled speech, surrounded by a press pack as she visited a pro-Palestinian display outside. Inside the venue, she toured the stalls before taking a seat, not on the stage, but amongst the members. But it was when her turn came to speak that she most clearly conveyed the turning of a page. 

You might say that Corbynism has two parts. The first is characterised by socialist principles carried by a single figure and promulgated through a centralised structure such as that of the Labour party. The members of Your Party voted against that bit. 

The second involves an inclusive, warm and optimistic message of sometimes vague underpinning combined with a tendency to placate rather than confront. Sultana’s conference speech – clear, sharp and gleaming: a cauterising beam of social and political anger – was anything but that. 

Referring to one of the expulsions, she decried “a Muslim woman being manhandled and dragged out of conference” as something to shame a party “standing for equality or justice”. The country, she said, “was rigged to serve the rich” who must be beaten “before they lead us into fascism”. The rentiers who own Britain, she continued, “are the real parasites and they must be taken on and taken down”.

“The system which “humiliates our disabled friends and neighbours” must be broken; those who “sleep in silk sheets in their blood-stained mansions” do so on the back of human suffering. “If you come for any of us,” she said, referencing pensioners, immigrants, queer and trans people along with the disabled, “you will have to fight us all.” 

“In the sixth richest country in the world,” she said, “life can be better”, promising clean air, good food, warm food and time with your loved ones. “We choose socialism,” she cried. Of her victory on collective leadership – and therefore also over Corbyn – she said: “It’s you, the members, who have won.”

Received with rapturous applause, some in the crowd chanted “Oh Zarah Sultana” to the familiar tune, as Corbyn sat downstage. Outside afterwards, members were both relieved that the wrangles appeared to be over, and possessed by ecstasy at Sultana’s electric rage. And it isn’t hard to see why. 

The urgency of her speech, as well as of Sultana’s increasingly high-stake actions in the battle for the party’s direction, reflect the urgency those members feel about the rise of the right in Britain. Although many would like to see electoral wins against Reform soon, there was also realism about how far Your Party still has to go before fielding candidates in England (it could be different in Wales and Scotland). In the absence of Your Party candidates at next year’s local elections, plenty will support local independents and more will vote Green. 

But what mattered to many, it seemed to me at the end of Sunday, was the sudden existence of a directed and united political movement, a collective manifestation of socialism to take on the dangerous, often local forces unleashed by Reform’s ascent. One woman, who asked not to be named, told Novara Media how she’d received a threat to bomb her house after organising a campaign to remove flags from her hometown’s lampposts.

Sultana can now claim to be the only individual in Your Party to have won the approval of its members at a vote – two in fact. The temporary organising committee comprising Corbyn and the two other remaining Independent Alliance MPs, Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan, will soon start making preparations for an election of the leadership committee next year. Backed by a completely singular democratic mandate, Sultana will now be able to regain her seat – at the very least – among a group and its advisors that she says excluded her (they say she left). 

Your Party members will no doubt be hoping that she puts her ascendant power to productive use, building unity rather than exercising revenge. She’ll need advisors (her current team seems to be largely her husband, Craig Lloyd) to help her carry out a difficult balancing act in the months ahead. On one side, the Party’s members, who’ve largely adopted her new vision for what’s being called the first explicitly socialist party in Britain since the 1940s, will want to see fast progress. On the other, there’s a larger left to be won over. Many within it will now be completely disoriented.

After all, Sultana appears to have ended, suddenly and perhaps even conclusively, the only left-wing political movement to have galvanised mass political action and almost win electoral power in decades: Corbynism.