Yves here. Given that the mainstream media seems to have deep-sixed reports of any action, much the less progress, by Your Party, this account may seem like hopium. UK reader sanity checks very much encouraged.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. Originally published at openDemocracy
UK politics is in a remarkable state of flux, with Keir Starmer’s Labour government facing multiple problems.
Reform UK is surging ahead in the polls and, although the next general election is not until 2029, many pundits are already convinced we are headed for a far-right government led by Nigel Farage, possibly propped up by the Conservatives in coalition.
Given the current state of the Labour Party and the extent of its corporate capture, any opposition to this will have to come from the likes of the Green Party and the newly fledged Your Party, the latter of which had its inaugural conference in Liverpool last weekend.
It felt very much as though there were two completely different conferences taking place; the one being reported on in the mainstream/legacy media and the one being experienced by people in attendance.
The first conference was a source of contempt and ridicule in the UK’s mostly right-wing legacy media. Reporters struggled even to try fathom that a political party would indulge in the apparently quaint idea of grassroots democracy on a substantial scale. Their consensus was that Your Party was going nowhere fast.
The other conference, the one experienced by participants, was full of renewed enthusiasm for the seriously progressive policies that had lain behind Corbynism since 1995 and were now hopefully being exemplified.
Over two days, the 2,500 members in attendance (and the many thousands more who joined in online) debated and held direct and binding votes on 28 key issues, ranging from the name (they chose to stick with Your Party) to its constitution and organising strategy, through to finer details such as the fiscal behaviour of its MPs.
Their passion was clear, although somewhat tempered by dismay at the deep divisions that clearly persisted, with the party having been substantially knocked back by several internal disagreements in the run-up to the event and its co-founders and main figureheads, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana often appearing at loggerheads.
This dismay was made worse by the nastiness typical of modern social media and the thoughtful yet often dispiriting in-depth analyses, including by Steven Methven in Novara Media and Paul Knaggs in Labour Heartlands.
Whatever you think of Your Party and the various analyses it’s prompted, one thing should not be forgotten: this is a near-unprecedented experiment in grassroots democracy in the UK.
In recent months, hundreds of people across the country have worked together to organise Your Party meetings, often at a couple of days’ notice, with the gatherings attended by many thousands more.
The whole process may have been far from perfect and was certainly done in a rush, not least with the local and Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections looming in May, but Your Party now has the potential to embed this kind of grassroots accountability in its culture, even if the challenges it faces are huge.
After all, the current national economic culture is rooted in the neoliberalist model that is diametrically opposite to the outlook of Your Party. That model is essential to the ensuring the UK’s super-wealthy elite continue to thrive and is supported by the national print media and its singularly wealthy owners, making it even harder to take on.
In the United States, Donald Trump’s second term is seeing the results of Project 2025, the detailed preparation for office generated by the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank. Here in the UK, a similar process is underway. This is loosely termed Project 2029 and, according to Byline Times, involves a political lobbyist linked to the Heritage Foundation working with Reform UK in the run-up to the 2029 General Election.
From that perspective, the best development would be for Reform to merge with and dominate the Tory Party, and win the election with the help of advice and funding from Trump-land.
A year ago that would have seemed a tall order but politics in the UK really is in a state of flux. Labour won a landslide last year with less than 34% of the vote and is now in the doldrums, while the Green Party now has a larger membership than the Conservatives, largely thanks to its surging popularity under new leader Zack Polanski.
As to Your Party, much will depend on its capacity to build on the commitment shown in Liverpool, rising above and healing internal divisions in the process.
We already know that things can change with astonishing rapidity and that new ideas and approaches can come seemingly from nowhere. The impact of the Polanski leadership on the Greens is a good example, but two others over the past decade should be remembered.
In 2015, Corbyn fought a leadership campaign within the Labour Party and won 60% of the vote, with the second-place candidate managing only 19%. Then, at the general election two years later, he managed to deprive Conservative leader Theresa May not only of the landslide victory she was expected to win, but of an overall parliamentary majority, forcing her to do a deal with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party to stay in office.
In both cases, Corbyn won votes with policies that sought to rebalance the UK’s huge wealth inequality, which resonated with millions of people beyond Labour’s traditional base.
Given there is still more than three years before the next election and the current widespread political apathy across the UK, do not be surprised if Corbyn and Your Party manage something like that again.
Despite the hopeful tone, it sounds like Your Party is stillborn.
Presumably it “sounds like” via other sources than this hopeful report. How so?
Not that we Americans seem to have our act together given the current White House occupant. I’d say the article’s point that political movements need solid philosophical grounding to succeed is insightful. And here’s suggesting that the 20th c battleground of socialism versus capitalism was the proper ground to be fighting on and that was the reason the capitalists via the Powell Memo or think tanks or Project 2025 had such zeal to kill socialism dead. It’s the idea they are afraid of and must discredit.
We are also seeing a return of that 20th c generational divide and so any movement toward change may need younger politicians than Corbyn or Sanders.
The left successes of the last century came out of the excesses of the powerful. It can happen again but not without a fight.
With Corbyn, it all depends on if he learned any lessons when he was turfed out of the Labour party along with all leftist supporters. If he hasn’t, then it could be that in a year or two’s time that he might be turfed out of Your Party as well by Zarah Sultana. But if he gets a bit of ruthlessness to him, then he might be able to push aside the Reform party in the next year or two and go for the win. Unfortunately I do not think that the UK elite will let him do what he wants in power. It’s like if Bernie Sanders had been elected US President back in 2016. Bernie too would have been sandbagged at every step of the way.
Corbyn has the added problem that in 2029 he will be 80 years old. If Your Party became a true mass movement that might not matter, but otherwise it risks being portrayed as a one-man band by the mass media.
The UK public have seen what being ruled by octogenarians is like by looking across the Atlantic. They are unlikely, I think, to want to repeat the experiment.
Jeremy is best considered a John the Baptist character. His reputation for honesty and decency has been confirmed over the course of the last five years. We know that the Labour Party apparatchiks worked plenty hard to destroy his leadership and to ensure that he would never become prime minister. We know that members of his shadow cabinet worked against him. And we know that he has been right on most of the political issues he talks about and that he is constantly renewing his knowledge of the world about him. And he doesn’t bitch and whine about the way the Labour Party has abused him. He carried on as a remarkably good constituency MP and and advocate or the poor, the weak and the suffering.
Jeremy can lead without the formality of being an official leader and he has former colleagues in the PLP two of whom (at least) have the experience and youthfulness to make effective prime ministers and they just need to walk across the floor of the House and whoever Jeremy backs will be trusted by those of us – and our children and grandchildren – who were pretty disturbed by some of the hijinks at the Your Party conference, and by the fact that one of the founders, a professed anti-factionalist, has been systematically acting as a highly functional catalytic agent for factionalism from the moment the establishment of Your Party was announced, if not before.
I’m too old to be politically active on any level other than providing funds and crafting articles and speeches but I am aware that many people who would otherwise be forced to vote Reform to bring any kind of change to the lives of so many people at or below the poverty level will follow the lead given by Jeremy if he supports specific candidacies at ward and constiuency level.
The interesting thing is that many of my old comrades, and some not so old, the vast majority of whom left the Labour Party when I did, after initially feeling insensed at the nonsense which took place at the conference have come to the view that it is time they became became active again to make Your Party a serious contender at the next general election, fielding serious candidates set on creating the next government.
Unlike so many people, I see Nigel Farage as a very serious politician who knows that, if he gains 10 Downing Street will, like any sensible politician of the populist Right (or Left, for that matter), invest in the lives of working people and their families by focussing on re-building the NHS and he rest of our diminished public sector (the radical Right will find it relatively easy to re-nationalise our utitlity sectors simply on the basis of how degraded and expensive they have become whilst building up massive debts in order to pay excessive salaries to people with few obvious executive skills and unearned dividends to their “investors”).
The economic logic of spending public money on real assets which will provide extensive employment opportunities for young people and the rising precariat falling out of the white collar managerial and supervisory class hasn’t escaped the no longer fully convinced as well as the firmly non-neoliberal Right who wish to establish a new, more permanent basis for future power and have a place in the positive history of a future United Kingdom.
And Farage would have the opportunity to bring about what he said Brexit would make possible – build up better and more useful and much more profitable trade relationships with countries outside a declining EU, corrupt, warmongering and spiralling into a terminal financial, moral and political bankruptcy dragging down all of those member countries who don’t have to wisdom to get out before it is too late.
I think the next general election will be fought between Your Party, Reform and the Greens. The Liberals will hang in there, most likely at local level and a few constituencies with a competent and popular MP, but what they need is another Charles Kennedy and they are few on the ground. Anyway, we know what the Liberals do when can sniff a cabinet seat or two so they’re essentially a busted flush, not least because the Liberal Party is still primed by Jo Swinson’s DNA (her swansong in the House of Commons declaring that she was about to be prime minister makes prime viewing, as does her morally retarded attacks on Jeremy).
Anyway, just a few early morning thoughts which might offer some NCers a slightly different perspective on the UK’s political universe.
Corbyn and his faction are the problem. They’ve run this project into the ground through control freakery.
Sarah has her issues but any project that involves corbyn is doomed to failure sadly.
Couple of things.
1. As is my way, when a candidate or a party are mentioned, I go to the website (yourparty.uk in this case).
The front page is all about summoning people to the inaugural conference, November 29-30. There are also adverts for events with Corbyn on October 9 and 18. The “Events” section starts on October 18 and goes to December 1. Clearly, no-one has touched much of the website in two months, which is an issue to put it mildly.
On the other hand, there is a “Results” tab at the top, which I can only assume – it is not stated explicitly – refers to that very same inaugural conference. Here are some interesting, to me, votes:
Your Party should explicitly signal it is a socialist party. 80.20% Accept
Your Party should be a mass party rooted in the broadest possible social alliance. 67.9% Accept
[“Broadest possible alliance” and “explicit socialism” seems hardly a workable combination. Also, too, not sure how “explicit socialism” plays to the majority of the British public, given decades of anti-socialist propaganda.]
Leadership Model (clause 3.c.)
51.6% Collective leadership
48.4% Single leader
[Can you tell there is an issue here?..]
Regions and branches: spending autonomy (clause 3.d.)
66.43% in favour of Autonomy
[Decentralized socialist “cells” – this should end well.]
Amendment 2 – Strategic priority for 2026 English local elections:
Target support for endorsed candidates – 57%
Maximise the number of candidates – 43%
[Decentralized socialist “cells” that are almost evenly split on electoral strategy – this should end really well.]
Amendment 4 – Committing to the fight for trans liberation
Yes 71.79%
No 28.21%
[Paging J.K. Rowling………]
I mean, it isn’t all bad. And I am not trying to be a downer. But some things just stick out at this point, and not in a good way.
2. Corbyn was born in 1949. That means that, assuming Your Party achieves any sort of critical mass in the 2026-2028 time frame, this is really the Zarah Sultana show – or, if you believe the mood of the party members, it’s Zarah Sultana trying to herd a multitude of cats, i.e. local party branches. I know little about Sultana, other than what’s on Wikipedia – but I did notice that she, as recently as August, declared herself “a loud and proud anti-Zionist”. I mean…Corbyn was not remotely as vocal about it, and he got taken down as an “anti-semite enabler”. This? In the UK’s current political climate? On top of the possibility that one of the local branches gets out of control and off message?
I don’t know.
3. The openly, overtly, unapologetically trotskist WSWS has done a (completely unbiased, unskewed and untained) review of the recent conference – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/02/zkea-d02.html – and it’s quite something. I typically take anything they write over there with a teaspoon of salt, because WSWS has had some of its own ideological blinkers on since at least 1999, when I’d first discovered it, but again, one wonders how Your Party will move forward after all this.
While Trotskyist analysis can be insightful at times, when it comes to any kind of Party or mass movement-building, I’d beware (based on history and extensive personal experience in a union environment):Trots have an almost one hundred year history of turning small organizations into smaller organizations and can reliably be expected to sacrifice the growth of any organization in service of their own ideological and Build the (Sectarian) Party reflexes. I know there are some quasi-recent counter-examples to this, but I’d say they’re exceptions that prove the rule.
The trans issue alone will kill this party, I was so disappointed to see them embrace that.
It’s like they haven’t learned a damn thing from the last 10 years, where are the masses of people pushing for this? They say they want mass appeal but embrace an issue that maybe 6% of the general public cares about and a larger percentage despises.
There’s a theory that trans issue was pushed by the deep state through NGOs to divide the left.
Works like a charm.
Wsws has its blinkers on for this article as well. The unskewed part is that they are equally contemptuous of all the factions they cover. (If they’d managed to stand up at least a token Socialist Equality Party in the UK they could have a dog of their own at the fight, though I suspect they’d boycott the whole thing on one principle or another).
The biggest problem, I suspect, is that Your Party keep kicking the decisive faction fights down the road, rather than having it out and letting the losers withdraw. Another problem is that the Corbyn folks are probably the most coherently organized while the Sultana supporters are a somewhat incoherent coalition of several factions and allies of convenience by no means all on the same sheet of music.
I was mildly depressed to see that the top space of the WSWS now tells us to await it’s unveiling of a “Socialist AI”. Must we?
If you look for problems you find them , mostly inconsequential , but then you can try and expand them , a ploy used by the english newspapers , do you work for an english newspaper by any chance mr safety first ?
OH , and why did your mum and dad call you safety first ?
A personal attack, particularly one invented out of whole cloth, in lieu of an argument, is not on. I trust you will find your happiness on the Internet elsewhere.
I think you are spot on with Your Party’s problems. As I see it, the peculiarities of FPTP, with the incumbent parties all being utterly hated, gives a party coming out of nowhere a great opportunity–going over the top would not necessarily take that much–just a little bit more than those losers at right places. The catch, though, is that it won’t be “your program” that gets you there so much as what you can credible say you can do for the people who lost faith in conventional politics. You don’t need to put together a complete agenda–just enough that you understand what the problems are and that you are willing and ready to do something about them. The trouble with many “fringe” activists is that they ignore the voters and make it all about themselves. (FWIW, this is something that Mamdani and, at least up to a point, even Trump understood while campaigning.)
If they stick with Corbyn they will go nowhere.
He like Bernie Sanders has learned nothing over the last decade.
It reminded me of this discussion on the Bad Faith Pod of a “leftist” attempting to run against
Ritchie Torres.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTdqS5J5LL0
When Dalourny Nemorin was pressed about Zohran Mamdani’s position to not have someone challenge Hakeem Jeffries.
She attempted to explain it with some BS (from my perspective) then I just tuned out.
I have zero emotional buy in if you are not going to get rid of this establishment wing of the Democratic party.
Amazing that Prof. Rogers can write such a precise piece yet find no room to mention the Workers Party, a socialist, anti-zionist, anti-war party supported by George Galloway, Craig Murray, Chris Williamson, and others.
Also noteworthy is that the Workers are currently leaderless, G Galloway having told Tucker Carlson that he and his wife have left Britain due to political persecution.
on the BBC news website today 6 December is an article that reports (among many other things) the averaged results of 4 polls, 2000 people each, between 10 October and 3 November 2025. The images reported are only for people under 30.
According to those polls, 33% of women and 20% of men intend to vote Green. 13% of women and 20% of men intend to vote Reform.
As a UK resident non-citizen (born in the Commonwealth, resident 30+years) my feel of the “current political climate” is deep mistrust of politicians of all types, and increasing “do it yourself” willingness. Hence the visible work associated with Your Party, as reported by Prof Rogers.
People over 65 are 24% of the adult (over 18) population in the UK, 30% of voters. People 18-34 are approximately 20% of the adult population, 22% of the voters.
The main task of any political movement that desires true change is to get the young vote mobilised. The most likely to do so IMO in the UK are the Greens, Your Party and maybe Reform.
Anti-genocide and Free Palestine views are cross-cutting in the UK IMO. So tactics used against Corbyn previously are no longer effective.
The post’s author is “Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent”. Those seem curious affiliations for anyone seeking the radical political restructuring of the UK.
That said, I am far more pessimistic about Your Party. It appears to be a circular firing squad.
I think a lot of people with socialist and humanist sympathy will nevertheless vote for Reform because it has a real chance of winning and thus represents a real opportunity to burn it all down. People can smell power….
One view is that Reform will be incompetent at governing and having cleared the traditional parties out, will then bring the temple down on itself, at which point we can dust off the Diggers’ manifesto.
Reform might prove harder to dislodge once in power, in my view. They may attract competent people.
The Department of Peace Studies at Bradford, where the post author is Emiretus, is one of the Masters courses set up by the Rotary Society. This is tied to the Rotary Society desire to create their own university to support Peace Studies. They realised this was over-ambitious, and created Masters courses at universities around the world instead. These are well-funded, and each university takes in a cohort of 10 or so each year. The graduates go on to senior positions in governments or NGOs worldwide.
The history of the Rotarians is wild. For example, they were involved with the original vision for the United Nations:
https://www.rotary.org/en/history-rotary-and-united-nations
I’ve been to the Peace Studies events at Bradford, and am familiar with the course content. They definitely know what they are talking about. A range of perspectives are covered, with the bias left of centre.
Many of the comments here reveal a degree of hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn after the persistent demonisation the mainstream media has inflicted upon him for such a long time. I think it is a bias that may never be removed, despite the facts and present day realities.
At the same time, I see little evidence of open-minded thinking, with most here rushing to make judgements and draw conclusions based on little knowledge of Your Party and its members, and pre-judgement of Corbyn.
Firstly, Corbyn doesn’t have to be its leader – he may not even want to be, and may decide it would handicap the party’s chances in elections [because of the above-mentioned biases].
Secondly, it’s still very new, and hasn’t had time yet to form a cohesive manifesto and plan. It hasn’t contested any elections [that I know of].
Thirdly, one shouldn’t discount or ignore that past success Corbyn had in the Labour Party, which shows clearly that his policies and approach then had a wide appeal, so wide that he nearly won office. If Your Party has some or all of those polices, then there is no reason to believe that they are no longer valid or relevant. I’d argue that they are even more relevant than they were then, given the sharp deterioration of the UK in the intervening years since.
Looking at the polls, Reform seems to have peeked at just above 30% and are now slowly losing ground to the Tories. Labour keeps going down, and the Greens seems to mainly be picking up that support. According to Yougov’s polling (so take with appropriate amount of salt) if two parties appear to have a chance of winning the constituency, all parties that don’t appear to be winning drops to less then 10%.
So hard support for any party is in single digits, overall support is in flux and a massive number of voters are persuadable to voting for a party they think can win. It is an excellent opportunity for a new party, and Corbyn’s new party can win, if they can convince the voters that they can win. But that is true for other parties as well.
If Starmer isn’t as mad as Macron and pulls the trigger on new elections early, there is plenty of time for local elections to change the perception of parties chances before the next general election has to be held in 2029.
Small things. At least the party was able to give itself a name, unlike the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. Would have become very tiring to keep referring to it as the Jeremy Corbyn/Zarah Sultana Party. On a more serious note, parties have given way to the political movements of dominant personalities, so this is sort of a test of what might become of an attempt to actually build a grassroots party.