Labour Heartlands: ‘Your Party’ Conference Message

A Message to Those Still Fighting for a Working-Class Alternative

Let’s be honest: we’ve been watching the unfolding drama inside Your Party (the rows, the withdrawals, the donations vanishing into administrative purgatory, the liberal identity-politics tug-of-war, the expulsions) and we can all see the same thing.

There is potential for a new working-class party in Britain. But only if someone finally gets a grip on party discipline and cuts loose the liberal anchor that’s dragging the whole project to the seabed.

For all our disagreements with Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and the assorted leadership clique around them, the simple truth is this: their rupture with Labour remains one of the few genuine cracks in Britain’s political concrete. Within that fracture lies real opportunity, the chance for thousands of workers to finally break from the stranglehold of Labour’s decaying social democracy.

Because let’s be clear. Labourism, that comfortable compromise with finance capitalism, is now the chief barrier to building a genuine working-class politics in this country. Not the Tories. Not Reform. Not the Greens. Labour itself.

Labour’s role for decades has been to manage the decline politely while offering the working class nothing but scraps from corporate tables it no longer even pretends to serve.

So if a new force is to emerge, it cannot rely on personalities, celebrity MPs or liberal influencers masquerading as radicals. A movement built around individual saviours is a movement waiting to collapse. Workers don’t need leaders to “gift” them organisation. Workers create leaders, and can unmake them just as easily.

Real power starts from below: branches, communities, workplace groups, people who actually know what it means to graft for a living. If members have already started organising locally, they shouldn’t stop now just because their leadership is wobbling. In fact, the wobble is all the more reason to push harder.

Use today’s conference to do what Labour long ago abandoned: link branches nationally, build solidarity, and unite around principles that serve the many (not the managerial class, not NGOs, not lobbyists, not the latest identitarian trend).

At Labour Heartlands, we have always grounded ourselves in a few basic, immovable truths. Not academic abstractions, not the latest Twitter catechism, but principles rooted in the lived experience of working people:

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One. Class is the primary dividing line in British society. Not identity, not culture war distractions, but who owns the wealth and who creates it. Any genuine working-class party must stand unapologetically with those who graft, not those who speculate or manage.

Two. Material conditions shape political outcomes. Abstract theories and academic jargon serve the middle-class left, not working people. Socialism means concrete gains: jobs, housing, services, dignity. If it doesn’t improve lives, it isn’t socialism.

Three. Democracy in Britain is not a finished project. The fight for free speech, assembly, civil liberties, and yes, an honest reckoning with our archaic constitutional set-up, is essential. Without democratic power, economic power is a fantasy.

Four. Socialism is not a slogan; it’s a material programme. Public ownership of energy, rail, water and the commanding heights of the economy. If the resources of this country aren’t in the hands of the people, then the people will always remain tenants in their own land.

Five. Unity matters, but unity built on truth, not on liberal guilt-tripping. A working-class party must be a party for everyone. That means workers first (not NGO gatekeepers, not identity priests, not professional activists who think the pit villages are a political museum).

Six. Women’s sex-based rights are not negotiable. A party that cannot say “woman means adult human female” cannot hope to speak to the working class. A party that bends to every passing cultural fad cannot take on capital. A party captured by the liberal middle-class cannot claim to represent the common people.

Seven. Democracy and sovereignty belong to the people, not to elites. Whether it’s the EU, NATO, the IMF, corporate lobbyists or the unelected quango state, power must be returned to democratic control. Internationalism doesn’t mean surrendering working-class interests to supranational bureaucracies.

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If Your Party wants to step into the historic role Labour abandoned, then it must root itself in working-class life, working-class interests and working-class language. Discipline, clarity and courage: without them, leaders are merely captains without ships.

Your Party must understand British socialism has its own traditions. From the Levellers and Diggers to the Chartists, from Tony Benn to George Orwell, this country has produced a radical democratic tradition that owes nothing to Davos, nothing to NGOs, and nothing to the American culture war. We defend that inheritance.

We at Labour Heartlands want to see a real alternative emerge, one capable of breaking the political cartel and giving voice to millions who have been ignored for too long. But it must be built on bedrock, not on slogans.

To build a new Britain, you must build a new movement. And that starts with principles, not personalities.

If Your Party is willing to do that, then perhaps, just perhaps, the political realignment this country desperately needs can finally begin…

In solidarity,
Labour Heartlands