Your Party rally in Manchester last weekend (Photo: X/Manchester SWP)
The battle lines are being drawn over the future of Your Party ahead of the founding conference at the end of the month.
Will it be an insurgent force—one that fights for more than “bread and butter” issues and builds movements? Or will it be a Labour Party mark 2 where unaccountable MPs rule the roost and hold back socialist policies in the grubby search for votes?
These rival visions were on show as “sortition” opened this week for the founding conference in Liverpool on 29 and 30 November. Such a lottery means there is much less accountability than if local branches had been set up to elect delegates.
Zarah Sultana launched a campaign for democracy last weekend, saying, “I’ve always fought—and always will—for maximum member democracy.
“If you believe Your Party should be explicitly socialist, radically democratic, rooted in mass movement and led by our members, not MPs—join me and back these democratic demands.”
Sultana argued that “decisions should be binding on elected representatives at all levels” and calls for “open selections, mandatory reselection and the right to recall”.
“We cannot have a Labour Party 2.0—no backroom deals, no fiefdoms, no coronations,” she said. The proposed Central Executive Committee (CEC) “must all be ordinary positions that everyone can contest”.
Another demand is that all “future conferences should have delegates elected by all member meetings”.
Sultana opposes a proposed ban on dual membership designed to carve out Socialist Worker supporters and other left activists, declaring “Let all socialists unite.” Socialist Worker supports Sultana’s campaign for democracy and will be fighting for it at the regional assemblies and conference.
Sultana’s announcement came after a key figure in Your Party revealed an undemocratic and sluggish vision for the founding of the organisation.
Karie Murphy spoke at a special meeting of Your Party insiders last week on the organisation’s founding documents. They are being discussed at regional assemblies in the run up to the conference.
Murphy previously worked in Corbyn’s office when he was Labour leader and remains a key ally.
Several people got in touch with Socialist Worker about the meeting. We published extracts from the AI minutes of the meeting because we believe this information should be available to the whole movement.
A deeper political argument underlies the rows over democratic structures. Why does the Labour Party privilege MPs? It’s no accident that the party has such undemocratic structures.
These structures flow from the nature of the party. The problem is “Labourism”, the idea that parliament is more important than working class struggles outside of it to winning change.
This ideology is linked to the roots of Labour and its orientation towards the state. It was set up as the political expression of the trade union bureaucracy, a social layer that negotiates between workers and bosses.
While the party has articulated working class hopes of a better world, it has always aimed to take the reins of the British state and rule in the “national interest”.
The trouble is that there is no such thing as a national interest. There is no common ground between bankers, bosses, landlords and working class people.
Any attempt to rule in a “national interest” means working within the parameters of what big business will allow. The British state is a capitalist state designed to protect their system, not a neutral bureaucracy that can be used to implement socialism from above.
This political orientation is why Labour privileges MPs over members—and why it fails to deliver for working class people. Historically, the Labour left has fought battles over internal structures but ultimately remained wedded to “Labourism”.
The fight for a democratic, member-led Your Party should be linked to a broader vision of what sort of organisation it is.
Does it only focus on electoralism? That’s the vision of most of the Independent Alliance MPs who want to drag it the party to the right. Does it talk about building movements but see them largely as a means to elect more MPs? That’s been the vision of the Labour left.
Or does it see the job of MPs and elections to champion working class struggle and movements that are the key to winning change from below? This is the radical, insurgent vision that Socialist Worker supporters are fighting for while building Your Party on the ground.
Your Party can fulfil that potential—but not without a break from the methods, habits of mind and politics of Labourism.
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