Your Party Scotland conference votes for radical vision

Your Party Scotland conference

Some 300 members of Your Party in Scotland gathered in Dundee this weekend for its conference.

Members voted to stand candidates in the May 2026 elections to the Scottish parliament at Holyrood and to back Scottish independence.

They voted that Your Party Scotland’s elected representatives should “never vote for cuts” and “will support the moving of legal no cuts budgets in council chambers and in Holyrood.”

They also voted by just over 59 percent to work towards becoming an organisationally independent sister party of Your Party in the rest of Britain.

Your Party MP Zarah Sultana told Socialist Worker that opposing cuts, pushing for Scottish independence and opposing genocide in Palestine are “policies that will be popular in Scotland.”

“We need to present a socialist alternative. There is so much talent in this room to select candidates and have a targeted approach. If you are not on the pitch you leave a vacuum”, she said.

After Your Party was announced in July last year, hundreds of thousands of people backed it. Many were driven by anger and disappointment with Labour’s austerity, its racism and its backing of Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Six months later, Keir Starmer’s Labour has sunk further into crisis and the prime minister’s days in number 10 look numbered.

At the conference, Harry told Socialist Worker he had joined Your Party due to being “basically fed up with the mainstream politicians that don’t care about people.”

He added, “There is more wealth on this earth than ever before. But everybody is having a hard time. The quality of life is deteriorating.”

Mayasah said, “Conservatives never spoke for me. Labour did. But it doesn’t represent my values any more.

“But I like what Jeremy Corbyn says. I’m intrigued to see what the policies are and what it will look like,” she told Socialist Worker. 

Yet Your Party has been caught up with infighting at the top. And its national leaders have been slow to turn the party into the kind of insurgent, radical and democratic organisation it could be.

Your Party Scotland is still a network of “proto-branches” that haven’t yet been formally established. Activists don’t have the contact details of other members in their area or access to funding from their subs payments.

The Green Party has become the major force on the left in England. In the upcoming by-election in Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester, it is the Greens and the racists of Reform UK who are making the running.

In Scotland there are some key differences. The Scottish Greens were tested in government when they allied with the Scottish National Party and inflicted punishing cuts on working class people.

Three Green Party councillors, Dan Hutchison, Seonad Hoy and Leodhas Massie, as well as former Scottish Green Westminster candidate Niall Christie, defected and joined Your Party.

The electoral system for the Scottish parliament employs a form of proportional representation when people vote for candidates in the regional list. This gives smaller parties a fighting chance that they don’t have in England.

Your Party Scotland members voted by 69.8 percent to stand candidates in the May 2026 elections to the Scottish parliament at Holyrood.

Angela McCormick from Glasgow argued, “We have a clear and present danger and an urgency. No more filibustering. We have to argue to start the organising from today and take on the toxic dead-end racists of Reform UK.

She added that Your Party could draw strength from the huge movement for Palestine, “The biggest anti-imperialist movement we have ever seen.”

But the fact that nearly a third of voters opposed this shows there are doubts about what the campaign would look like. Some argued that the party needs more time to discuss policy before standing in elections.

Ashley Pringle from Ayrshire said, “If we don’t have a credible economic strategy to put before the electorate we are going to be ridiculed.”

Your Party councillor Dan Hutchison told Socialist Worker, “There is certainly a risk we don’t have a platform that covers every debate.”

But he said it was possible to run candidates on broad principles that socialists can agree on. “Tax the rich and fund public services, I would be fine with it if we had a campaign based on that”, he said.

“We need to give people the option of voting for a socialist. There are people who want an alternative. And they can see through Reform UK’s bullshit. People want to vote for someone they can trust. If not us, who will they vote for?”

Members of Your Party Scotland voted by 63.23 percent to take a position in support of Scottish independence.

The independence referendum in 2014, that came close to winning, terrified the British establishment.

For some it was a nationalist cause. But others put forward a vision of an independent Scotland based on rejecting Tory austerity, welcoming refugees and weakening the power of the British state to wage imperialist wars. Your Party could build on that radical vision.

Owen Maitland from Glasgow said that hundreds of thousands of working class people “who hadn’t been near a polling booth in decades” came out for independence in 2014.

Members of Your Party Scotland voted by 82 percent to allow members of other organisations to be part of Your Party.

At Your Party’s national conference in Liverpool in November, Corbyn and his allies attempted to exclude members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from the organisation. Several SWP members were expelled by email while on route to Liverpool.

Members at that conference voted to allow “dual membership” rather than ban it outright. But the people who were expelled are still waiting to see whether the Central Executive Committee (CEC) will allow them back in once it is elected.

In Scotland, members voted for a different approach. They decided to presume that people in other parties are members, unless the Scottish Executive Committee says there is a specific reason they should not be.

Stephen Allcroft argued that revolutionary socialists should be excluded from Your Party because they believe in “a dictatorship of the proletariat”. But lots of people in the audience cheered for the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat—evidently the idea of working class people having some power is popular.

On the other side of the debate, Rebecca Long argued that Your Party “would benefit from socialists being part. It shouldn’t be the CEC deciding behind closed doors who should be allowed.

“That’s crucial if we are trying to build a working class, democratic party that can fight the right in parliament and on the streets as well,” she said.

Members of Your Party Scotland decided to adopt a collective leadership model rather than electing a single leader and for national officers directly elected by the membership.

Emma Jayne Park argued that Your Party members are attracted to “a different kind of politics”. She said the party should adopt collective leadership to let go of the illusion that a single charismatic leader can unite us all.

They also voted by 81.4 percent to develop a process for trade union affiliation. Some members were sceptical of this. The trade union bureaucracy, a conservative layer at the top of the unions, can be a rightwards pull on political parties.

But nevertheless, voters clearly overwhelmingly saw a need to represent and involve trade union members.

During the conference, there was also a hustings for the Scottish representative on Your Party’s CEC. Niall Christie, Jim Monaghan and Ian Drummond all put their case.

Several members of Your Party including the candidates expressed their frustration that there is only one Scottish seat and that this didn’t allow for gender balance as in other regions of Britain.

Now that the founding conference is over, the election campaign needs to start this week. It will be an uphill battle given the delays that have already stalled Your Party’s progress and the short timeframe.

Angela McCormick told Socialist Worker, “The party should build on the huge demand for change. It needs to recover from the infighting. But members have shown they are very resilient.

“The urgency is there. It would be criminal to waste it. We still have time.”

Your Party could still be turned around. And in Scotland there is a prospect of running a serious campaign in the upcoming elections. Now we need to get the show on the road.