Memories can sometimes be short in politics, but you don’t need to think too hard to remember back two or three months ago now when news of Your Party first emerged.There was a deafening clamour of almost universal support that was offered by commentators across the British Left. You had Owen Jones cheerfully discussing tactics with Jeremy Corbyn, while Novara Media was crowing about Your Party’s incredibly rapid growth.
And yet, the dynamic duo of Corbyn and Sultana couldn’t last two months without managing to entangle themselves in a wholly avoidable public falling out. On the 18th September, an email was sent to supporters of Your Party, which included a membership portal that people could sign up to join for £55. This membership portal was widely promoted on social media by Zarah Sultana, who later claimed that she had set up the site in order to allow supporters of the new party to “continue to engage and organise.” Sultana also claimed that her decision to set up the membership portal was “in line with the road map set out to members […] and is a safe, secure, legitimate portal for the party.”
Corbyn, however, released a conflicting statement, one that was co-signed by his fellow founders of the party, which stated that an “unauthorised message” had been shared, promoting a membership portal under an entirely new domain, before urging people to ignore the email and to cancel any direct debits. Sultana followed this up by branding the leadership of Your Party as little more than a “sexist boys club.”
Many people were shocked and disheartened by the hasty and undignified collapse of the Corbyn-Sultana alliance. With the benefit of hindsight however, should anybody really have been surprised? For all its promise and passion, Your Party’s progress has been hindered since its conception by several major factors.
Firstly, there is the question of how much political influence Your Party would actually be able to obtain. In the short term, it is possible that Your Party might have been able to function as a sort of Left-wing version of UKIP; pushing Labour towards the political Left by providing traditional supporters of the party with a viable protest vote. The problem with this strategy is that it relies on the intelligence and political awareness of Sir Keir Starmer, a man who appointed a cut-throat landlord to be the Under-Secretary of State for Building Safety and Homelessness.
Starmer has made his position clear. Under his leadership, even if Your Party was able to gobble up around ten percent of Labour’s traditional voters, it is extremely unlikely that he will succumb to a leftwards pinch from Corbyn and his allies. It is far more likely that, if faced with a genuine threat from an alternative Left-wing party, Starmer will simply feel emboldened to continue his pivot towards the Right. Starmer has already made numerous attempts to appeal to the contemporary Right, the most clumsy example of this being his (in)famous “island of strangers” speech. Compare Starmer’s firm and defiant public stance on immigration with his historic inability to state whether Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide, or his previous refusal to rule out the introduction of a wealth tax, and it becomes clear that Starmer is committed to scooping up as many of the Reform party’s voting base as possible. This is despite a growing dissatisfaction with Starmer’s Labour from the political Left, which was evident right from the beginning of his time as Prime Minister. Although Starmer managed to secure 411 seats for Labour in the 2024 General Election, the party itself received three million fewer votes than it did under Jeremy Corbyn.
A desperate and clumsy attempt to win over Nigel Farage’s supporters whilst shirking his responsibility to try and retain any voters from Labour’s progressive wing would be a typically Starmeresque move, and one that would be inevitably doomed to failure. Even if Your Party was able to establish itself as a legitimate rival to the Labour party, instead of forcing Labour to adopt what could be seen as a course correction, the outcome of their success would be far more likely to lead to a fragmented Left, and an empowered Reform UK.
Another major hurdle that Your Party must overcome is the question of why it even exists in the first place. In recent years, the contemporary populist Right have shown an increasing desire to unite into a singular, politically overwhelming force. If the Labour party is going to be supplanted at the next general election by anyone other than Reform, then it needs to be overtaken by a united, organised, and disciplined Left. This is something that must happen sooner rather than later, and it is imperative that actors on the political Left do everything they can to avoid putting any further barriers in their own way. With that in mind, why don’t Corbyn and his allies just join the Green party (assuming the Greens will welcome them in)? Currently, the Greens have four seats in the House of Commons, just one behind Reform UK and in terms of membership they are now reportedly the third biggest party in the country. Their rise in popularity is derived from the very same dissatisfaction with the Labour Party that Corbyn is obviously hoping to capitalise on. Recent polling has suggested that the Greens are “viewed more favourably than any other party in London” amongst voters aged 18-24. Couldn’t those 750,000 Your Party supporters be put to better use as canvassers, organisers and campaigners for the Greens, as opposed to being trapped in some sort of political limbo? After all, by attempting to create yet another leftist party, Corbyn risks creating a situation where he and the Greens will be forced into scrapping for votes whilst the turquoise shadow of Reform looms in the background.
Even if we put aside the question of how much political influence Your Party would even realistically be able to acquire whilst putting themselves in direct conflict with the Greens, the organisation itself is riddled with serious underlying political contradictions. How is anyone supposed to believe Your Party’s stated desires to implement a mass redistribution of wealth and power—taxing the rich, investing in a major council-house building programme, and so on—when one of the party’s founding members, Adnan Hussain, is a landlord and director of multiple private companies dealing in real estate? It is unlikely that voters who have grown dissatisfied with Labour’s increasing rightwards drift are going to be won over by a new progressive party when one of its founding members is a wealthy landlord. This particular source of income is probably going to remain an awkward elephant in the conference room.
These are just some of the underlying problems that Your Party will need to address. They need to put aside their differences, resolve anything that Labour, Reform and their adjacent supporters within the alternative and mainstream media could potentially use to discredit them, and devise a clear, long-term political strategy. One that will provide this country with some sort of united, determined and popular alternative to the two-party paradigm that also asserts why they should be the main Left wing voice in British politics.
Words by Rhys Clarke
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