Time and again we have said that Your Party would be a dead end, ‘the embodiment of reactionary Labour left politics of the past’. Now the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Since its conference at the end of last November, it has become invisible. It may boast 60,000 members – but where are they? Certainly not out on the streets. It organises nothing. Occasionally a handful of members will appear on this or that protest, join this or that trade union picket. But as a political force it has shown itself as utterly irrelevant, unable to project any identity. Despite its frequent claims, it represents nothing new. It has got so bad that when Jeremy Corbyn spoke at a recent pro-Venezuela demonstration it was for his Peace and Justice Project, not Your Party.
While the overwhelming majority of its members are content with inactivity, a minority are spending vast amounts of energy on social media canvassing for various candidates for election to the Central Executive Committee (CEC) collective leadership model agreed at its founding conference. This has enabled the political feuding between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana to continue. Each has put forward their own slate of candidates: Sultana’s supporters have set up Grassroots Left, Corbyn has responded with The Many. Corbyn’s supporters continuously brief against Sultana, most recently to insinuate that there were possible grounds for a criminal investigation into the membership portal that she set up briefly in September. The Many slate includes MPs Ayoub Khan and Shockat Adam, both private landlords, and Louise Regan, president of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Just the sort of leaders to prove that Your Party has nothing to do with socialism or anti-imperialism.
The online squabbling is about who controls the CEC, not the substance of Your Party politics. Corbyn wants an end to collective leadership so that he can run the show. His primary constituency is the rump of the rancid Labour left which has spent decades destroying any potentially progressive movement. Sultana has meanwhile reaped the consequence of her refusal to openly challenge Corbyn’s reactionary politics: she has lost the chance of appealing to an independent constituency. Instead, she is reliant on the support of the reactionary organisations of the petit bourgeois left who want a faintly radical Your Party but who realise that any determined opposition to Corbyn would make him walk and bring about Your Party’s collapse. Sultana is caught in an impasse of her own making.
