The Your Party conference in Liverpool
There is strong support within Your Party for it to be a radical, democratic, member-led party of the whole left.
The leadership has lost two key votes after the first day of voting at the founding conference in Liverpool this weekend.
Members voted by 69.2 percent to allow dual membership with other organisations that don’t stand candidates against it.
It will still be up to the Central Executive Committee (CEC), which will be elected in February, to decide which organisations are allowed or not.
The Your Party bureaucracy expelled members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) on the eve of conference on Friday.
Jeremy Corbyn falsely told the media on Saturday that the SWP is registered with the Electoral Commission. It is not.
The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Corbyn, advised its supporters to vote against this amendment.
There was a narrower vote, 51.6 percent, in favour of a model of collective leadership rather than a single leader. But this went against the leadership too.
Members of Your Party want more democracy and there appears to be wide support for it to be different from other electoral parties.
But the close vote may also reflect that wide layers of members were inspired to join Your Party by Corbyn and want him to lead it.
We support collective leadership, with both Corbyn and Zarah Sultana part of it.
Socialist Worker doesn’t fully agree with either the constitution or the political statement. But it would be highly damaging for Your Party to emerge from this weekend with neither of those.
Incredibly, some sections of Corbyn’s camp urged members to vote against the final constitution and political statement because they lost. But members overwhelmingly voted to accept them.
SWP members voted for the amended constitution and political statement because we are for unity on the basis of the democratic verdict.
Some 9,000 members of Your Party voted online, far beyond those who were chosen to attend the conference in Liverpool.
But that’s still a far cry from the 800,000 people who said they were interested in joining Your Party. They have understandably been turned off by the social media spats, public rows and internal divisions of an organisation that wasn’t even fully founded.
These divisions are political. At root, those who control Your Party want it to be a Labour Party mark 2 that can pose as the “grown up radicals”. This is the politics of Labour and the trade union bureaucracy that has held back the left for generations.
It’s no surprise that Len McCluskey, the former Unite union leader, spoke at Corbyn’s rally on Friday night. He was a key figure that pushed for compromise with the Labour right under Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
The task is to turn outwards with a different vision of Your Party that champions socialist policies and movements and workers’ struggles.
It has to become a fighting organisation—one focused on fighting the class enemy, not factional enemies and the left.
A radical vision—that breaks with the politics of Labourism—could turn it around.
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