Remember me
The conference hall was buzzing. On the morning of Saturday 29 November delegates poured into Liverpool’s Arena and Convention Centre (ACC) for the first day of the Your Party conference, ready to decide the fate of a political organisation that five months ago didn’t exist, and on several occasions since then has looked like it never would. The crowd was joyous, excited and mostly over 60. Ahead of Jeremy Corbyn’s opening speech as the party’s co-founder, members danced to McFadden & Whitehead’s 1979 hit, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”. After an extremely difficult birth, this new left-party was alive – and wailing.
The jubilant atmosphere didn’t last long. The night before the conference began – as Corbyn and Your Party’s other co-founder, Zarah Sultana, were preparing to host rival eve-of-conference rallies – members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were informed that their membership of Your Party had been revoked. Claims of a “purge” or a “witch hunt” ensued. Both terms were repeated across the course of the weekend by Sultana herself, including at her rally on Friday evening.
Your Party officials made it clear that the policy had always been that members would not be able to hold dual membership with another political party – and said that the expulsions were not targeted against any particular groups. The SWP didn’t seem to accept this: to them, this was personal. Sharing the stage with Sultana at her rally – at the Holiday Inn in Albert Dock – Lewis Nielsen, the SWP’s national secretary said, “We don’t need a Labour mark two.”
There was disruption at Corbyn’s rally as a result. Much of the conference organising was done by Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former chief of staff when he was leader of the opposition. Murphy keeps a low public profile, and is a figure of real mystique on the left; some of the disruptors saw her as having been behind the removal of the SWP from the members list.
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The former Labour leader’s event was billed as “An Evening of Politics and Culture”, and held at a venue on Great George Street, next to Liverpool’s Chinatown. A more cultured affair, it included live music, poetry readings and a little bit of politics. As the event began, some SWP members were denied entry. “Why are we being evicted?” they shouted. Sharing the stage with Corbyn was Len McCluskey, the former general secretary of the Unite union and another old ally. “Saboteurs!” McCluskey jokingly shouted back at the hecklers: “M15!” The man once known as “Red Len” appeared to be enjoying his retirement. Later on, McCluskey looked misty eyed as he read Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” to his former Labour comrade.
By Saturday lunchtime, discontent among some Your Party factions over the exclusion of SWP members was reaching feverish levels. It tipped over into chaos when an ally of Sultana’s was denied entry to the conference venue. Sultana had asked for six conference passes for her support team. She was granted five. James Giles – an independent councillor in Kingston, who had formerly worked on George Galloway’s campaign for the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election – was told he had not been granted a pass owing to a “private matter involving an Information Commissioners Office investigation”.
Sultana had seen enough. Speaking to members and huddled press outside the conference hall, unmissably dressed in a deep red suit, the party’s young renegade co-founder refused to enter; Sultana boycotted the rest of the day’s proceedings. Her spokesperson told journalists: “This witch-hunt is indefensible. We must build a party that welcomes all socialists.” Your Party’s inaugural conference had been running for less than five hours. Already its two founding camps had split.
None of this will surprise anyone who has followed Your Party closely. Over the past five months, the party has spluttered through more than one unfortunate split. Though rumours of a new left-wing party – with Corbyn at its heart, and possibly Sultana too – had been rumbling since before the 2024 general election, its emergence was first announced by Sultana in a post on X at 8.11pm on 3 July.
Except, there was one problem. Corbyn – who was supposedly Sultana’s co-founder – had never actually agreed to it. In fact, he had declined to vote in the informal online meeting in which the dual leadership of the project to launch a new organisation was being decided. He also encouraged his colleagues in the Independent Alliance (IA) of MPs to do the same – though, against Corbyn’s advice, the Independent group actually voted for co-leadership at that meeting.
While Sultana was still a Labour MP, a group of figures now involved in Your Party had already been in discussions with her about leaving to join a new left party. According to a source familiar with the talks, one of their proposals was that she would be the new group’s deputy leader under Corbyn. Meanwhile, another source has suggested that Sultana left the Labour Party on the condition of assuming co-leadership with him – though, if this was the case, it’s clear that Corbyn did not give his assent at the time.
Corbyn was so far from giving his assent, in fact, that he didn’t seem to know that Sultana had planned to announce the new party’s launch on 3 July. Instead, the following afternoon, he posted a response that praised Sultana’s “principled decision” to leave the Labour Party. Sultana’s announcement was described by one insider as “jumping the gun”. Corbyn and his allies were not pleased.
But he eventually came around to the idea. On 24 July, he and Sultana finally went public with the founding of an entity with the provisional name “Your Party”. A statement on X, co-signed by both MPs, characterised it as the arrival of a “new kind of political party”. The project was greeted by a wave of enthusiasm on the British left: 800,000 people signed up to the party’s mailing list.
For a while, things seemed to be going smoothly. Sultana joined Corbyn’s Independent Alliance, alongside fellow Independent MPs Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed. This team of six MPs would become the steering group for Your Party. They were aided by Murphy and Pamela Fitzpatrick, the director of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project. The IA MPs – also known as the Gaza Independents – are key allies of Corbyn. During the conference he told the New Statesman that he speaks to the IA members every day.
But tensions soon rocked the fragile coalition of MPs. Sultana and Hussain had a series of run-ins online over the place of socially conservative views within Your Party. In early September, Hussain shared his views on trans rights in a post on X: “[Trans women] are not biologically women, hence trans women,” Hussain said. When asked about Hussain’s views by the New Statesman in September, Sultana shot back: “This is a progressive, socialist party… trans rights are human rights. Your Party will defend them – no ifs, no buts.”
This was the beginning of deepening splits between Sultana and the other Independent Alliance MPs. On 18 September Sultana unilaterally sent an email to 800,000 people on Your Party’s mailing list informing them of the official launch of the party’s membership portal. She had again made a key decision without informing her colleagues in the nascent party. Her fellow members of the IA grouping subsequently warned people away from the portal. Sultana hit back by accusing the IA MPs of being a “sexist boys club”.
She also raised concerns that Karie Murphy, alongside other Corbyn allies, had been handed “sole financial control of members’ money and sole constitutional control over our conference”. One source familiar with the situation observed that it was “peculiar that the ‘sexist boys club’ apparently consists of one woman, to be scapegoated for everything. Makes you think.”
“Terrible Thursday” as one insider called it – referring to that day in September when Sultana launched the party’s membership portal – was also the day Sultana officially left the IA group of MPs. It was also when James Schneider, a co-founder of Momentum and one of the brains behind the movement, left Your Party (though he maintains close links to the party, and both Corbyn and Sultana remain a council members of Schneider’s organisation, Progressive International).
Some within Your Party thought Sultana should be reported to the Parliamentary Standards Committee for the unauthorised membership launch. A source close to Corbyn and Murphy said that while they were deeply frustrated by the portal incident, they advised against hitting back at Sultana with concrete actions, and have never been in favour of legalistic measures. Still, trust between the two camps was severely damaged.
Insiders have also noted the influence of both Corbyn’s wife, Laura Alvarez, and Sultana’s husband, Craig Lloyd, in ongoing tensions; both are actively engaged in their spouses’ political careers. Lloyd, a former officer for the Fire Brigades Union, is rumoured to have said when he and Sultana began dating that he hoped to make her “Queen of the Left”. (Lloyd denies that he said this). He told the BBC last week that they met at a bus stop in Brighton at Labour’s 2021 party conference. Some in Your Party have alleged that Lloyd and Alvarez’s involvement has stoked tensions between their respective partners. A source familiar with both couples pointed to the Communist Party policy of forcing members to divorce their spouses owing to “poor political behaviour” and mused that Your Party might be wise to adopt it.
In the weeks preceding the conference, Sultana and Corbyn began texting again. Mohamed and Hussain quit Your Party, having decided Sultana’s blanket opposition to social conservatism wasn’t for them. Suspicion between the camps seemed to grow rather than recede as the conference drew closer. And with the chaos of the opening events, and Sultana’s boycott of her own party’s conference, the open factionalism began to look like it was turning into farce.
But Sultana made an imperious return on the second day of the conference. She had cancelled all interviews – but now journalists were informed she would only be doing a press huddle outside the main hall. They were sent her live location in a WhatsApp group of journalists set up by Giles. The press pack could be seen running towards the Your Party co-founder’s location and circling her as she glided serenely towards the ACC. She paused to greet a group of protesters congregating outside the main hall and led them in pro-Palestine chants, before making her way into the building, surrounded by a crowd of journalists and Your Party members, all hoping to catch a glimpse of her return.
Though she has spent the past few months campaigning for the party to be co-led by herself and Corbyn, when it became clear this would no longer be an option, Sultana switched to backing “collective leadership” the model under which Your Party would be led by a central executive committee, rather than the model backed by Corbyn – that of a traditional, single party leader. On the Sunday morning, it was announced that the collective leadership proposal had won, with 52 per cent of members’ votes against 48 for single leadership (turnout was around 16 per cent). Sultana said in her speech to conference that she did not view this as her victory – but it clearly was. The battle over the party’s leadership structure was as a proxy war between Sultana’s camp and Team Corbyn – and Sultana won.
But the price of this triumph may be the party’s future. Sultana has praised this as a victory for her long-held vision of “maximum member democracy” and she is right. Neither she nor Corbyn will be allowed to stand for the party’s leadership: only ordinary members will be able to put their names forward as chair or deputy chair when the election process begins in January.
Though collective leadership is innovative, it will still be subject to the whims and unwritten rules of British politics: someone will become the party’s de facto leader. As the conference highlighted, the power struggle between the Sultana and Corbyn camps is far from over. According to sources, Murphy plans to leave the project in the new year, once the party’s central executive committee is in place. Rather than an all-out war between the two MPs, insiders speculate that we will see another proxy battle as allies of Corbyn and Sultana step forward to take charge.
Meanwhile, Zack Polanski’s Green Party is surging ahead in the polls: with policies and promises taken straight from Corbyn’s old playbook. It is becoming a cliché to reflect on the power this former Lib Dem wields over the British left – but it is clear that left-wing voters are beginning to back him. Your Party has dropped from 18 to 12 points in the polls since it was announced in July. How much longer will its supporters be willing to put up with this new socialist party’s internal squabbling before they decide to walk away?
[Further reading: Inside the Your Party crack-up]
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