The Stillborn Revolution: How Your Party Died Before It Was Even Named

The Graveyard of Socialist Hopes: On The Menu Infanticide and Fratricide, Your Party’s Liverpool Debacle.

Can a political movement survive when its founders cannot occupy the same room without accusations of witch hunts, sexist boys’ clubs, and smears? The answer arrived in Liverpool this weekend, where the wreckage of what might have been Britain’s socialist future lay scattered across the conference floor of a party that hasn’t even settled on a permanent name.

By a margin so razor-thin it might as well have been a coin toss (51.6 to 48.4 per cent), members of Your Party voted to embrace a “collective lay-member” leadership model, effectively barring both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana from leading the organisation they ostensibly founded. This wasn’t member democracy in action. This was a mercy killing dressed up as participatory politics.

The irony would be exquisite if it weren’t so tragic. Here was Corbyn, who had previously stated he backed the “sole leader” model and would stand for the position, outmanoeuvred by his supposed co-leader Sultana, who had supported the collective model after her preferred “co-leadership” plan had been blocked. Neither got what they wanted. Both lost. The British left, ever faithful to its hundred-year tradition of eating its young, had done it again.

Let us be clear about what transpired here. This was not some noble experiment in radical democracy. The party’s foundation has been overshadowed by internal conflict, with a dispute between former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana earlier this year, resulting in a botched membership launch and threats of legal action. Before the conference even properly began, the parliamentary caucus had already haemorrhaged two MPs in as many weeks. Iqbal Mohamed, the MP for Dewsbury and Batley, resigned, citing “false allegations and smears” after clashing with Sultana over gender-critical views. A week earlier, Adnan Hussain had withdrawn, citing concerns about factionalism and “veiled prejudice” against Muslims.

The pattern here is grimly familiar to anyone who has studied the British left’s morbid history of self-immolation. In the wake of the 2024 election, two distinct teams began discussing a new mass political organisation, one called Collective (set up by former Corbyn officials including his former chief of staff Karie Murphy) and another known as the Memorandum of Understanding group. Corbyn was closer to the former and Sultana to the latter. From the very beginning, the project was overtly divided, pulled between competing visions of what a post-Corbyn left should look like.

The substantive disagreements were real enough. There were genuine tensions between representing the protest vote of 2024 (powered largely by Muslim communities galvanised by Gaza) and embodying uncompromising socialism on every cultural question. The hope was that co-leadership would allow Your Party to display both these strengths, looking outward to the country at large while also activating its core cadre. But hope is not a strategy, and good intentions cannot substitute for the hard institutional work of building a genuine mass movement. Particularly when that vacuum is being quietly filled by those whose expertise lies not in winning elections but in capturing party machinery.

Instead, what emerged was factional warfare masquerading as principle. On Saturday, Sultana boycotted the first day of the conference, accusing people within the organisation of creating a “toxic culture” and citing a “witch hunt”. She said she would not enter the main conference centre in Liverpool after one of her supporters, Kingston councillor James Giles, claimed to have been denied entry. Other members were expelled on Friday over membership of the Socialist Workers Party.

The tragedy deepens when you consider the polling. A Find Out Now poll over the summer suggested that Your Party would be equal third to Labour in support, on 15 per cent each, with Reform on 34 per cent and the Tories on 17 per cent. Luke Tryl from More in Common told The Independent in August that the prospect of a new Corbyn-led party polled very well and “took 10 per cent of the vote, taking votes from Labour and the Greens”. There was genuine hunger for what this party might offer. Working-class communities, alienated by Starmer’s rightward lurch, were searching for political representation. The Muslim communities who had delivered shock victories in 2024 wanted a political home. Young socialists, betrayed by New Labour Mark II, were looking for somewhere to invest their energy.

And what did they get? Public disagreements between co-leaders Sultana and Corbyn, a major conflict when Sultana launched a website inviting people to join the party (raising at least £500,000 within a few hours) which Corbyn and the other independents announced they had nothing to do with, declaring that any direct debits should be “immediately cancelled”. From polling at double digits to watching two middle-aged politicians squabble over membership databases and trans rights while their parliamentary group disintegrates. Recent polls reportedly place support at around 4 per cent, a catastrophic collapse that speaks to how thoroughly the infighting has repelled potential supporters.

The British left has form here. We have seen this film before, many times. The Independent Labour Party’s break with Labour in the 1930s. The Communist Party’s sectarian “class against class” strategy that isolated it from the labour movement. The Social Democratic Party split of 1981. Respect. The Socialist Workers Party’s various front organisations. TUSC. Each new iteration promises to learn from past mistakes. Each new iteration makes precisely the same ones.

Corbyn himself issued a call for unity, acknowledging there had been “mistakes” in the party’s foundation. You have to admire the understatement. But mistakes can be corrected. What we witnessed in Liverpool was not a series of mistakes but a structural failure, the predictable consequence of attempting to build a mass party without first establishing the trust, the processes, and the political culture necessary for collective action.

The truth is even in unity, socialists in Britain do not have many robust political institutions, nor even a coherent political culture, they have struggled properly to balance competing priorities, and a polarisation has instead asserted itself. This is the nub of it. The British left excels at critique, at identifying what is wrong with capitalism, imperialism, and the existing Labour Party. It looks inwardly while forgetting to create a real vison of what could be. But what it cannot do, apparently, is build institutions capable of exercising power or even maintaining internal cohesion long enough to fight an election.

Some will argue that the collective leadership model represents genuine member empowerment, a rejection of the cult of personality that has plagued left politics. Welcoming the vote, Sultana said she had “fought for maximum member democracy since day one” and described the decision as “exciting”. Fair enough. But member democracy requires members who trust one another enough to engage in democratic debate rather than mutual denunciation. And it requires knowing precisely who those members are and what their actual allegiances might be.

The members who voted for collective leadership probably believed they were choosing radicalism over traditional hierarchies. What they have actually chosen is paralysis. A “collective” of lay members with no parliamentary experience will attempt to steer a party that exists to contest elections, while the MPs who might actually win seats are relegated to supporting roles. This is not bottom-up democracy. This is a recipe for permanent impotence, dressed up in the language of participation. And this institutional weakness makes it perpetually vulnerable to those who understand that organisational vacuum invites occupation.

The SWP’s Quiet Takeover of the Corbyn-Sultana Project

And into that failure walked the inevitable vultures. It is no surprise, then, that the conference ended up voting in favour of dual membership, including dual membership with organisations whose entire modus operandi is to infiltrate and redirect new movements. That vote didn’t fall from the sky; it reflected the organisational reality already being lived in many local groups. By the time delegates reached Liverpool, the ground had shifted. The SWP weren’t petitioning for influence. They were already sat in the chairs.

The brutal irony is this: many Your Party members still haven’t realised that the internal battle they believe they’re fighting (between Corbyn’s camp and Sultana’s camp) may no longer be the main event. A quiet, effective faction has already run the opening moves. The party’s founders were still arguing over titles while a different political tradition was calmly assembling the scaffolding.

Here is the inconvenient truth that almost no one inside Your Party wants to say aloud: the Socialist Workers Party saw the opening before anyone else did.

In the days immediately after the party’s launch, when structures were loose, membership systems unclear, and no central leadership had been agreed, SWP activists moved faster than the founders themselves. They clocked the organisational vacuum and did what the SWP has done for decades: they filled it. With no coherent chain of command in place, they booked meeting rooms, chaired local gatherings, and positioned themselves as the visible organisers in numerous branches. To many early recruits, the first people they met wearing Your Party badges were, in fact, SWP cadres. This wasn’t accidental. It was classic, textbook entryism executed with impressive discipline.

The outcome is becoming painfully clear: it is no longer “Your Party” at all. The movement that was launched in the language of empowerment, democracy, and grassroots renewal is rapidly shifting into something else, something shaped by those quick enough to occupy the vacuum before anyone else understood what was happening.

Call it a coup. Call it a fait accompli. But one way or another, the project as originally conceived is slipping from the hands of its founders and its members alike.

The tragedy is that it didn’t require malice, only disorganisation, naivety, and an open door. The SWP walked through it. Others will too. And unless Your Party confronts this reality, the chaos now visible on the conference floor will be only the opening act of a much larger collapse.

In fairness, one can hardly blame the SWP for seizing the opportunity. They needed a new front after their toxic past, particularly the Comrade Delta scandal of 2010-2013, when the party leadership attempted to cover up rape allegations against former National Secretary Martin Smith, subjected the complainant to victim-blaming questioning about her sex life and drinking habits, and expelled members who questioned the exoneration. Of the ten people who were elected to the Central Committee in 2013 at the height of the scandal, eight remain in 2024, meaning the party is still led by most of the same people who were responsible for the total mishandling of the case. Your Party, disorganised and leaderless, represented precisely the kind of ‘new front’ and opportunity the SWP desperately needed. They have spent over a decade attempting to rebuild credibility through front organisations like Stand Up To Racism. Why not add one more to the collection? The tragedy is not that they tried. The tragedy is that Corbyn and Sultana created the conditions that allowed them to succeed.

And so another ingredient was thrown into the bubbling pot of chaos.

The shame is the working class does not need another socialist talking shop. It does not need another venue for middle-class radicals to perform their ideological purity while Trotskyist factions manoeuvre for structural control. It needs a political organisation capable of defending jobs, wages, public services, and communities against the twin assaults of Tory austerity and Labour neoliberalism. Your Party, in its current state, cannot provide this. It can barely survive a weekend conference without losing MPs and conducting internal purges.

Perhaps the collective leadership will surprise us all. Perhaps they will build something genuinely new from the ashes of this weekend’s debacle. But history suggests otherwise. The British left’s sectarian impulses run too deep, its capacity for self-destruction too well-honed, its preference for ideological correctness over practical solidarity too ingrained. These are not individual failings but collective pathologies, reinforced by decades of defeat and marginalisation. Collective leadership, in this context, will equal yet another power struggle with new personalities and old problems dressed in fresh rhetoric.

The name will be announced on Sunday afternoon. Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For The Many. It scarcely matters. You cannot rebrand a failure. You cannot vote your way out of fundamental political incoherence. The tragedy is not that Corbyn and Sultana will not lead this party. The tragedy is that the party they might have led, the party that working people needed them to build, was stillborn in conception, then strangled in its crib by the very forces claiming to midwife its birth. The left does not merely eat its young. It commits infanticide dressed as democracy, then stands over the corpse debating procedure. In the end, they built not a movement but a monument to the British left’s eternal capacity for fratricide. One more headstone in the graveyard of socialist hopes, erected with the very best of intentions and the very worst of political judgment, now occupied by the grave robbers who were circling before the body was even cold.

The coup is complete. Your Party has become Their Party. The only question remaining is which “they” will ultimately control the corpse, and whether anyone outside the left’s diminishing circles of the perpetually committed will even notice the difference.

As for what comes next? I still have the bet on that Sultana will cross the floor and join the Greens by spring. And after this debacle, it’s odds on that Jeremy Corbyn will retire with a despondent sigh to his allotment to write his memoirs of what could have been. Perhaps he’ll title it “Preparing the Ground”, a fitting epitaph for a man who spent fifty years cultivating the soil for a harvest that never came, only to watch others plant their own seeds in the furrows he had dug.