Your Party must learn the lessons of the left in Europe and break from Labourism
An insurgent vision that breaks with the status quo can be popular. That’s the lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York. And it’s a lesson that Your Party could learn here in Britain.
MP Zarah Sultana’s speech at its conference in Liverpool electrified the conference hall. “We are not here for tweaks of a broken system but a fundamental transformation of society,” she said.
The leadership’s stifling of democracy and witch-hunt of the left hung over the debates.
The rows flow from rival visions—is Your Party radical, insurgent and democratic or a Labour mark 2.
But the mood from many people there was marked by a determination to move beyond bitter divisions—and build Your Party as a socialist alternative.
Rachael was selected to attend the conference. She told Socialist Worker, “The left has been disenfranchised and we’ve been abandoned by Labour. It’s become the austerity and genocide party. We need a change.”
Your Party needs to get organised to back candidates in local elections and for the Welsh Senedd and the Scottish parliament next year.
They should be credible candidates with local support, implanted in social movements and campaigns.
If it doesn’t, the Green Party will sweep up votes from among the millions who feel politically homeless and are looking to the left.
Many of those at the conference were former Labour Party members. They didn’t leave Labour to join a Labour Party mark 2.
Your Party needs to break with Labour’s traditions and methods.
Some of those within the leadership want to pose as the “grown up radicals”. It’s a politics that comes from a Labour tradition that sees elections as more important than what happens outside parliament.
It would mean bowing to pressure to tone down left wing messages in a search for votes.
The party should relate to trade unionists. It should be a home for workers taking action—and it should build and champion their struggles on the picket line.
But it shouldn’t focus its efforts on the trade union bureaucracy, the people at the top of the unions. This can be a conservative force that holds back struggle and is prone to compromise.
The new party should learn the lessons of left wing electoral projects across Europe.
Spyridon, originally from Greece and based in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, told Socialist Worker, “I want to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes we did in Greece”.
“Alexis Tsipras destroyed branches when he got into government. What we need is a mass movement to fight Keir Starmer’s Labour.”
The left wing coalition Syriza was elected in Greece in 2015 with Tsipras as prime minister. It demobilised the grassroots organisations that helped it get into office.
And eventually it would capitulate to the European Union’s demands for austerity.
Some 55,000 have joined Your Party and about 9,000 took part in the key votes. It’s a far cry from the 800,000 people who said they were interested in joining.
Many will have been turned off by the spats, public rows and internal divisions of an organisation that wasn’t even fully founded.
The task is to turn outwards and build a fighting organisation that champions socialist policies and builds workers’ struggles.
Amu Gib is running in the local council election from their prison cell
Socialists stand in north London
Where next for the left?
