Your Party: Born in Confusion, Baptised in Ego
Jeremy Corbyn has finally launched the membership scheme for the provisionally named “Your Party,” offering supporters the chance to participate in a founding conference on 29-30 November in Liverpool. At Β£5 per month, members can join a movement that promises grassroots democracy but immediately demonstrates the opposite.
The conference arrangements reveal the contradictions lurking beneath the democratic rhetoric. While claiming to embrace “one person, one vote,” only 13,000 members, selected by lottery, will actually attend the two-day event where founding documents will be “debated and amended in person.” The rest, presumably, will be relegated to digital participation in final votes, assuming such a system materialises.
This lottery approach hardly embodies the participatory democracy Your Party claims to champion. The promise of “ensuring a fair balance of gender, region and background” through random selection sounds more like technocratic management than authentic grassroots engagement. If democracy means anything, it means those who want to participate can do so, not that participation depends on winning a geographical and demographic raffle.
The optics of the launch prove equally telling. Corbyn’s video announcement opens with an apology, “Sorry for the confusion”, referencing the recent civil war with co-founder Zarah Sultana. Yet Sultana herself appears only in fleeting glimpses: a shot from behind as she speaks on a panel, another holding a banner with other MPs. For a movement supposedly built on partnership and democratic principles, the absence of joint leadership in this crucial moment speaks volumes.
Any competent PR operation would have arranged either a joint video launch or coordinated statements demonstrating unity after their very public spat. Instead, we get Corbyn apologising alone while his co-founder remains conspicuously sidelined, hardly the image of collaborative leadership Your Party claims to represent.
Sultana chimed in with her own rallying cry on X: βWe have a world to win.β
The timing compounds the damage. After weeks of damaging headlines about unauthorised membership portals, “sexist boys’ clubs,” and threats of legal action, this launch needed to project competence and unity. Instead, it reinforces perceptions of a movement that cannot manage its own internal relationships, let alone challenge the established political order.
Corbyn’s promise that founding MPs will step back once the party is established, “Our role is not to run the party, not to control it, not to direct it”, rings hollow when the current leadership cannot coordinate a simple video announcement. If they cannot handle basic political communications, what confidence should supporters have in their ability to steward a democratic transition?
The lottery system for conference attendance epitomises these contradictions. True grassroots democracy would find ways to include everyone who wants to participate, not create artificial scarcity managed through random selection. The proposed digital voting for final decisions feels like an afterthought designed to legitimise decisions made by the chosen few in Liverpool.
Your Party promised to be different, more democratic, more inclusive, more responsive to members than the Labour machine it seeks to replace. Yet its first major decision mirrors the exclusionary practices it claims to oppose: a small group making decisions while others watch from the sidelines, their participation mediated through technology rather than direct engagement.
The absence of Sultana from the launch video crystallises the broader failure. A movement that cannot present a united front during its own membership launch will struggle to present a credible alternative to voters increasingly drawn to Reform’s simple messages. The very public fractures between supposed allies offer little hope for the unity necessary to challenge either Labour’s centrism or Reform’s populism.
Your Party may yet find its footing, but this launch suggests a movement more concerned with internal positioning than external appeal. Democracy, it seems, is easier to promise than to practice, even for those who claim to have learned from Labour’s failures.
And beneath the soap opera lies the bigger question: what kind of party is this to be? A socialist movement rooted in class politics, or yet another liberal alliance chasing cultural battles at the expense of working-class reality? Already, the exclusion of socially conservative voices risks cutting off the very base needed to beat Farageβs Reform in the Red Wall.
The truth is, βYour Partyβ risks repeating Labourβs mistakes. Eight hundred thousand sign-ups show thereβs hunger for an alternative, but numbers arenβt enough. Without trade union backing, without class politics at its core, it will remain a hollow shell.
Meanwhile, Reform marches ahead in the old Labour heartlands. In the North East, once home to the Durham Minersβ Gala, Labour has already been swept aside by Farageβs party. Polls suggest Reform could win every single seat in the region in 2029. Thatβs not just a political defeat; itβs a catastrophe waiting to happen.
If βYour Partyβ wants to mean anything, it must start by facing outward, to workers, communities, and unions, not inward to activists and egos. Otherwise, it will be just another party for the Left itself, not for the class it claims to serve.
History will not forgive another failure dressed up as hope…
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