Question: is it possible to join Your Party and ‘take a different direction’?

Answer:…?

For the last couple of years, I’ve been learning about real democracy. I first came across the concept in a film about Venezuela in the Chavez era. The way  Venezuelans at that time formed into local assemblies that discussed issues at a manageable, local level and passed policy up through the system to make national policy; the way Chavez used modern technology, so that anyone could start a TV channel and every channel had an equal chance of being taken seriously – not by means of investment or algorithms, but by means of whether other people found them useful.

I started learning about how you make assemblies happen, and how they work, in the run up to the 2024 general election, when some local activists set up Hastings Assembles. In those early meetings, our facilitators came from XR, from JSO and from Roger Hallam’s assembly movement. They are people who are used to the techniques that help to find and listen to those who aren’t big soap-box speakers.

It was very, very exciting. I loved the big speeches of the Corbyn movement – for a while – but my goodness, the novelty wears off. In the assemblies, I was learning how you really communicate with your community, and it’s totally different to what ‘the left’ generally does. Assemblies lead people away from waiting for saviours and heroes, and gradually get us used to listening for the new, hesitantly expressed ideas that might actually save us all.

Above all, assemblies, by their very nature, are resistant to corporate take-over. A meeting that’s by and for everyone who turns up doesn’t have a head you can lop off or buy off, and that is the most important thing of all, if we want to reclaim politics for humanity.

Hastings Peoples Party

Back in May, there was a local call out from activists who were fed up with waiting for Someone to start a new party in UK politics, and so we decided to ‘just get on with it’. Quite a lot of us new assembly-loving people came along, and the nascent local party set up a series of events for discussion, for learning and for networking. For example, one of our activists introduced the concept of the ‘protestival’, where local campaigners are invited to take stalls at an event where we can all look around, get talking, and cross-fertilise and grow groups taking action on local problems.

It was, and is, productive, enjoyable and democratic.

Andrew Feinstein

Last night, we had a Your Party getting-started event, with Andrew Feinstein as the main speaker. There followed what was billed as a Q and A, but was mainly SWP and TU people — people those of us in Hastings have heard a million times before. We know exactly what they’re going to say, and here they are, grabbing a two-minute slot to grandstand their stuff.

Anti-fascism! Hooray, clapclapclap! Revolution! Hooray, clapclapclap! Bash transphobia! Whoooo! Destroy capitalism! Whoo hoo hooray!

It made such a stark contrast to the meetings I’ve got used to. One couldn’t stand up and argue, because they didn’t say anything one would want to disagree with but everything they said led us back into the follow-my-leader sloganism that can so, so easily bury truths – and when the normally perceptive Feinstein ‘answered’ the ‘questions’ from the floor, he answered the slogans, and in doing so, demonstrated how we progressively make heroic leaders stupid.

Obviously, the main event of the evening was Feinstein’s set-piece speech but, being a prepared speech for a large audience, it didn’t answer the questions I had. He did show his discontent that the organising of Your Party had passed from the original committee to the six MPs but clearly, a speech to a large audience wasn’t the place to discuss the details or consequences of that.

The assembly bit

Still, we did have time in breakout groups afterwards, and that was a totally different experience. My group spoke about personal experiences of local issues in housing, education and health. We spoke about how it feels to be poor in Hastings, and about why we need a properly funded, local council. We listened to a TU activist about why TUs currently aren’t really democratic, and why big-speaker delegates going to annual conferences don’t really solve that, and the two Black women in our group spoke about how it feels to be a racialised person in Hastings lately.

What do we do about Reform/fascism/racism?

The few actual questions that normal people managed to put into the Q and A bit were around concerns about the rise of the far right. I have a neighbour who’s ‘quite taken with’ Nigel Farage, and is likely to vote Reform next election. She wasn’t there last night, obviously and if she had been, she would not have been moved by any of the soapbox declarations about ‘fascism’ or ‘bigotry’ — they would only have confirmed her as ‘the enemy’ — but if she’d been in that little group I was in, discussing local issues and ideas, I think it’s just possible something might have moved.

It’s a pity we didn’t have enough evening left to really develop those conversations.

Sure, all we said was taken down in notes, and will be sent up to the Big People at the top of the Party — but how many hundreds of pages of notes from the hundreds of groups across the country will they manage to read? As with the old Labour policy forums, there’s no system in place to use those conversations.

Then the evening was rounded off by another, quite long, TU speech in which there was nothing anyone would really disagree with, but what we mainly wanted was the loo and time to think. I went home wondering whether the notes from the bit where everyone really got to speak would carry as much weight with the Big, Important people in Your Party as the things the Big Speakers declared and people automatically went whooo clapclapclap to.

On our way home, my companion said to me, ‘we didn’t say anything about the media. We still don’t know how we’re going to sort out the corporate media.’ and we thought about how there might be someone somewhere in Hastings who’s thinking their way to the solution to that. That person might be one of the many, many people who shrink away from microphones, someone who doesn’t want to spend hours at meetings being soapboxed at by the SWP, someone who would love to sit in a little circle of neighbours, and tease out their idea…

… and I recognised that draining feeling that’s been growing in me – that I really don’t want to involve myself in that long-shouty road to delegatehood, or in that very tedious, tiring task of turning up every week to shout whoo! so we get the right delegate for an annual conference that’ll decide everything in three-minute shouty sound-bites…

… and I thought about all the people I know who didn’t come to that meeting last night because they’re already sick to the back teeth of listening to soapbox speeches from TUs, the SWP and grandstanding councillors. And about how all those people who didn’t come wouldn’t get their feelings and ideas recorded in notes and sent up the line to the Big People in Your Party.

The way forward

And I thought okay, don’t give up. The important Mr Feinstein said members of other parties can join Your Party, so let’s keep working on Hastings People’s Party — I really don’t mind whether it becomes a formalised political party or not, so long as it keeps doing what it’s doing which, to my mind, is real politics. Let’s keep working on a local scale, where we can apply the lessons we learned from the assemblies, and keep pushing the idea that local conversations need nurturing, they need space, facilitation and a bit of quiet for thinking and talking in. Let’s show the world that those local conversations in all their wonderful variety can be the force that makes policy. They need to be prioritised, not the same old microphone-loving soapbox speakers who ignore the nuance and variety of local feelings, but will dedicate hours and hours of soapboxing to getting delegate positions to plug the policies they want at big, annual conferences that decide everything.

Question: is it possible to join Your Party and ‘take a different direction’?

Answer: yes, if enough of us keep putting our energies into developing real, local democracy as well.

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