Your Party: The People’s Money Ivory Towers and Empty Coffers

When Revolutionary Rhetoric Meets Reality, Money Gets in The way…

There’s a particular species of British political failure that repeats itself with depressing regularity. It begins with grand proclamations about standing for the many against the few, about smashing the establishment and building something new from the rubble. It ends, inevitably, with the same dreary spectacle: politicians bickering over money while their supporters watch on, betrayed once again by people who claimed to be different.

Your Party, the would-be vehicle for Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s latest attempt at radical politics, has managed to achieve this trajectory in record time. Somewhere between £800,000 and £1 million in donations (accounts differ, which tells you everything) sits locked in the accounts of MOU Operations Ltd, a company now controlled solely by Sultana after its original directors resigned en masse. The party’s founding conference looms at the end of November. Volunteers are working on a shoestring budget. And the people who put their faith and their money into this project are left staring at an empty bank account while the politicians argue about liabilities and due diligence.

*Statement from the Independent Alliance of MPs*

"Your Party’s founding purpose is to stand for the many against the few who hold the wealth and power in our country. Thousands of ordinary people have given their time and money to build a real alternative to endless cuts and…

— Your Party (@thisisyourparty) November 13, 2025

Let’s be clear about what this represents. When Your Party launched in July, 800,000 people registered their interest. These weren’t the comfortable middle classes hedging their bets. These were workers, pensioners, young people struggling with rent, families choosing between heating and eating. They looked at Starmer’s Labour, saw a party that had abandoned any pretence of representing their interests, and thought perhaps this time it would be different. They were promised an end to endless cuts and endless wars. They got endless infighting instead.

The timeline matters, in just a few sort months it puts it into perspective. Sultana announced the party’s formation on 3 July, ten minutes after a meeting where Corbyn had written in the chat that he didn’t think co-leadership was a good idea and wanted to delay. By September, she’d launched an unauthorised membership portal, collecting fees from over 20,000 people and raising another £500,000 (now lost in a data protection nightmare). Corbyn’s team denounced it as fraudulent. Sultana accused them of running a “sexist boys’ club”. Both sides threatened legal action before backing down. All of this played out publicly, comprehensively, spectacularly.

The mechanics of the dispute matter less than its meaning. Sultana became sole director of MOU Operations after the original board (Jamie Driscoll, Andrew Feinstein, Beth Winter, three figures with genuine progressive credentials) resigned in frustration at being caught between warring factions. She’s offered to transfer £600,000 immediately but wants to retain £200,000 for potential liabilities. Corbyn and the Independent Alliance MPs want the lot transferred now. Both sides claim legal and fiduciary responsibilities. Both sides accuse the other of playing political games.

But here’s where it gets interesting. While Your Party has been busy tearing itself apart in public, Sultana has been having rather cordial conversations with someone who represents everything Your Party was supposedly created to challenge: Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party. You know, the party that Sultana claimed in her July announcement was insufficiently radical, too compromised with the establishment, part of the problem rather than the solution.

The New Statesman reports they’re “WhatsApping again” after earlier tensions. They were spotted in heated discussion at Portcullis House in October. They appeared together on panels at The World Transformed festival. And Polanski has been remarkably open about his intentions, telling The News Agents in October: “I like Zarah, come join the Green Party.” He added, with telling casualness, that he wouldn’t “beg anyone” to defect.

At Forwards Festival with @zarahsultana.

Free Palestine. 🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/dTvnpdc06j

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) August 23, 2025

He doesn’t need to beg. The numbers tell the story. The Greens have surged from 68,500 members when Polanski was elected in September to over 150,000 now. They’re polling at 15 per cent, level with Labour in some surveys. Three Glasgow councillors have defected from the Greens to Your Party, but the overall traffic has been in the opposite direction. Labour councillors are crossing to the Greens. Former Corbyn advisers like James Meadway have joined. Even Owen Jones threw his weight behind Polanski’s eco-populist project.

Your Party, meanwhile, limps toward its conference with 50,000 members (soon to be 70,000 when the portal members are finally transferred, assuming the data protection nightmare can be resolved). They’d expected 100,000 to 200,000. The gap between expectation and reality tells you everything about how comprehensively this project has failed.

Now consider Sultana’s position. She unilaterally announced the party in July, ten minutes after a meeting where Corbyn had written in the chat that he didn’t think co-leadership was a good idea and wanted to delay. She launched an unauthorised membership portal in September, raising £500,000 and collecting data on 22,000 people without approval from her supposed co-founder. When challenged, she accused Corbyn and the Independent Alliance MPs of running a “sexist boys’ club.” Both sides threatened legal action before backing down.

This isn’t the behaviour of someone committed to building a long-term political project with her allies. This is the behaviour of someone systematically burning bridges while testing the structural integrity of her next landing spot.

The Liverpool conference will be, to put it mildly, a test. Delegates chosen by lottery will vote on founding documents while the party’s actual founders can’t agree on who controls the donated money. The constitution, published in October, is a bureaucratic stitch-up designed to give Corbyn’s faction control. Sultana has been building “Team Zarah” with its own separate fundraising operation. She’s been emphasising her anti-Zionist credentials in a transparent attempt to differentiate Your Party from the Greens and position herself to Corbyn’s left.

But what happens if conference doesn’t give her the backing she wants? What if delegates, selected randomly rather than as branch representatives, prove less sympathetic to her leadership ambitions than she’d hoped? What if the whole thing descends into the kind of factional warfare that’s already driven away hundreds of thousands of potential supporters?

She controls £800,000 of the party’s money. She has established direct communication with the only genuinely successful left-wing party in British politics. She has demonstrated repeatedly that she’s willing to take unilateral action when she judges it necessary. And she has a ready-made justification: if the conference proves that Your Party is indeed a “sexist boys’ club” unwilling to give a young Muslim woman the leadership role she deserves, why wouldn’t she take her supporters and her energy to a party that’s actually winning?

Polanski would welcome her. He’s said so publicly. The Greens are positioning themselves as the anti-establishment left-wing alternative to Starmer’s Labour. They need MPs. They need name recognition. They need someone who can speak to younger voters and Muslim communities in a way that Polanski, for all his charm, cannot. Sultana would be a prize catch, and she knows it.

The timing would be perfect, too. Conference happens 29-30 November. If it goes badly, she spends December “reluctantly” concluding that Your Party cannot be reformed. New Year, new beginning: Sultana joins the Greens in January, bringing whatever portion of Your Party’s membership she can peel away. By the time the May local elections roll around, she’s the Greens’ star candidate, proof that the party welcomes serious socialists committed to genuine change.

The ivory towers cast long shadows over London.

It’s all speculation, of course. Perhaps Sultana genuinely believes in Your Party and is fighting tooth and nail to build something new. Perhaps her control of £800,000 in donated funds is purely about legal liability and fiduciary responsibility, not political leverage. Perhaps her warm relations with Polanski are merely collegial professionalism between two politicians who respect each other’s commitment to progressive causes.

But here’s what’s not speculation: every worker who donated to Your Party, every pensioner who scraped together a membership fee, every young person who thought this time might be different has been betrayed. Not by Sultana alone. Not by Corbyn alone. But by a political class that treats mass movements as vehicles for personal ambition and treats other people’s money as leverage in factional disputes.

The ivory towers cast long shadows. In one, five Independent MPs demand immediate transfer of all donated funds. In the other, their former co-founder controls the money, maintains friendly communications with the leader of a rival party, and positions herself for whatever outcome proves most advantageous to her political career.

Down below, in the streets where working-class people actually live, fifty thousand Your Party members wait to see if the conference will produce something worth supporting. Another hundred and fifty thousand have already made their choice and joined the Greens, deciding that Polanski’s functional competence beats Corbyn and Sultana’s revolutionary rhetoric every time.

The Liverpool conference will tell us whether Your Party can function at all. But it might also tell us something more interesting: whether Sultana’s entire performance over the past four months has been an extended exit interview, establishing her credentials as the principled socialist who tried to make it work before joining the party that’s actually succeeding.

Political pragmatists would call it smart positioning. Students of working-class politics would call it something rather different. The workers who donated their money in good faith, believing this time would be different, already know what to call it. They’ve seen this show before. The ending never changes.

The money should be transferred. The conference should proceed. The party should function. But none of that will happen until the people at the top remember a simple truth: when you’re spending other people’s money to fight for other people’s interests, the first requirement isn’t revolutionary rhetoric. It’s basic competence and mutual trust. Without those, you’re just another set of politicians playing power games in an ivory tower, no different from the establishment you claim to oppose.

The revolution will not be funded. Not when the revolutionaries can’t agree on who holds the chequebook.