KD Tait
The launch of Your Party generated real enthusiasm. After years of defeats, betrayals and demoralisation, it raised hopes of a genuine alternative. The anger on the streets, in workplaces and among young people shows that the demand for a mass working-class party is urgent and real. Against austerity, imperialist war and the growing menace of the far right, such a party could become the weapon our class needs.
Split at the top
That’s why the split between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana has sparked real confusion and anger among Your Party supporters. Local branches that have been mushrooming across the country now face a choice: paralysis or a serious debate on the way forward. The urgent task is to meet, discuss, and coordinate—not wait for warring ‘leaders’ to settle their feud.
The differences between the two camps are opaque. But what is clear is that Sultana, in declaring the Labour Party ‘dead’ and taking the initiative to launch the party is opposed by Corbyn, who, at best, favours an electoral coalition of MPs and councillors which acts as pressure on Labour without crystallising a split in the wider movement.
Many Your Party supporters will be naturally sympathetic to Sultana’s combative defence of key principles. But the deeper truth is that neither side has given any clear explanation of how they see a new party’s programme and strategy making a clear break from Labourism or Polanski’s so-called ‘eco-populism’.
Instead, their methods from the outset were to bureaucratically outmanoeuvre each other and then resort to lawyers. Their split is the predictable outcome of a top-down project, conceived in the corridors of Westminster and stitched together by cliques of advisers.
With the Greens surging under a new leftwing leadership, and the trade union leaders under no pressure to break from Labour, a new left party has the responsibility of giving a clear answer to why neither social-democratic reformism, nor Green middle-class environmentalism can provide fundamental solutions for the working class.
Populism without democracy
But what is on the table is James Schneider’s populist electoral project, which lacks real democracy, structure or accountability, and deliberately liquidates working class organisation into an atomised mass of individuals. Neither Corbyn nor Sultana have opposed the thoroughly undemocratic proposals for organising the conference.
Certainly Corbyn is no supporter of accountability to the membership. As Labour leader he oppsed mandatory re-selection of MPs, no-cuts budgets, ignored conference votes he didn’t like, and threw principled anti-Zionists to the wolves of the antisemitism witch-hunt. When Momentum threatened to become a democratic vehicle for grassroots organisation, he and his allies shut it down. They centralised power, sidelined branches, and killed debate in the name of ‘unity’. The result was demobilisation and the destruction of the very movement that had swept him to leadership. That same hostility to grassroots democracy is being repeated in Your Party, dressed up now as one-member-one-vote.
OMOV is not empowerment but a cover for celebrity rule. Leaders decide which questions the membership gets to vote on. It atomises activists into passive individuals, while those with parliamentary platforms or media reach dominate. Real democracy means branches, delegates, and the right to debate and recall – not online ballots dictated from above.
A question of power
This is not a technical issue but a matter of class strategy. Taking power away from the billionaire class cannot be done by parliamentary manoeuvres alone. Even if a left party were to win a majority in Parliament, the ruling class would resist through the media, the courts, the army and the police. The struggle demands not passive electoral support but an organised, militant working class.
That is why populist shortcuts are so dangerous. The danger is not that Your Party is ‘too radical’ but that it liquidates class politics into hollow populism – substituting celebrity spokespeople for real working-class organisation.
And yet the raw material for a real party exists: solidarity with Palestine, the strike wave, communities defending asylum seekers, youth radicalised through culture and protest. The potential is immense. A few thousand organised militants rooted in these struggles are worth far more than 800,000 online signatures.
‘Our Party’ plays musical chairs
The online initiative Our Party now presents itself as grassroots renewal. In reality looks more like an undeclared faction, recycling the same failed model with a democratic gloss.
A handpicked ‘handover team’ of union officials, lawyers and ‘trusted’ activists—accountable to nobody—will oversee elections by OMOV to a Founding Stewards Committee. Branches are bypassed altogether. Conference documents will be drafted by unknown individuals, amendments sifted online, and a random lottery will decide delegates. This is not grassroots democracy. It is smoke and mirrors. It is less democratic than the Labour Party conference!
The truth is simple: neither Corbyn’s camp nor Sultana’s faction, nor Our Party, represents a way forward. Both cling to the same failed formula: top-down populism, plebiscites without debate, and electoralism without struggle.
The way forward
What we need is not another shell party or clique warfare, but a real workers’ party rooted in workplaces, communities and streets—a party built from the living struggles of our class. That means turning outward to build a party though the fight against fascism, imperialism and austerity.
Branches of Your Party should seize the initiative to organise the fightback now. We propose the following starting points:
- A Workers’ united front against fascism and in defence of migrants. Organise in our communities, schools and workplaces. No reliance on police or courts – self-defence by workers and youth.
- Mass direct action to break ties with Zionist genocide. Occupations, blockades, boycotts and workers’ action against Israel and the arms trade.
- A national mobilisation before the austerity budget. Fight for an emergency workers’ programme: rent freezes, price controls, public ownership of energy and housing, taxing the rich to fund jobs and services.
Whether or not the feuding leaders and their hangers-on can agree some redivision of power and influence doesn’t depend on begging letters from the grassroots. On the principle that the working class needs ‘no saviours from on high’ we think branches should demand access to resources and membership data to contact activists in their areas, and, without waiting for permission:
- Elect two delegates each to regional conferences who can elect delegates to a democratic conference arrangements committee.
- Demand a sovereign national conference of branch delegates to decide policy and elect leadership.
This is the democracy we need: one that empowers militants in the struggle and holds leaders accountable in practice.
The split between Corbyn and Sultana is proof enough that top-down populist projects end in paralysis and betrayal. But if even a fraction of the 800,000 sign-ups and the dozens of branches take the path of class struggle and grassroots democracy, that would be a real step forward – and one worth fighting for.