Your Party, FiLiA, Zionism, the trans issue…

People are asking now, is Your Party over? We never did figure out who ‘you’ is but, after New Year, local groups across the country who reckon we are us will be mustering to do what Your Party founding documents require, which is to organise, to further engage with our communities, to hold public assemblies — to do all the things we need to do to start re-creating democracy in this country.

It is a shame that those groups currently represent only around a tenth of the people who came together under the Corbyn movement banner a few years ago, but if they do their work well in the first quarter of 2026, they could bring back more than a few of those who lost heart and have not joined in.

It’s hard to see the light just now because in recent months the most noticeable product of Your Party has been anger and rows, as opportunists of many kinds piled in yelling, and organisers barricaded themselves in against the onslaught.

It’s so easy to get the habit of being furious, especially when life is hard, and our political world is being run by liars and criminals and, as so much of our life is online now, we are all susceptible to the rage-enhancing algorithms of Silicon Valley.

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Like many women, I near melted my keyboard after FiLiA this year. You could be forgiven for thinking that a whole raft of women saw the conference and its organisers as our mortal enemies. It’s easy to see when your blog’s being used as rage-bait — you get a massive up-tick in shares but precious few ‘likes’ or donations, and that’s precisely what my stats were doing in October and November of this year.

FiLiA is always conflicted — let’s face it, society has always loved throwing fish-heads at feminists; and women, most of whom are trauma survivors of one sort or another, rarely hesitate to throw them right back, and/or throw a good few of them at each other. Add to that the fact that the conference was in Brighton this year — the ‘trans capital of the UK’, and that the trans rights movement is very much on the back foot now, and therefore very angry.

Now add in FiLiA’s mission statement — it is ‘for all women’, and it ‘amplifies the voices of women’ which by necessity must include those women who are currently vociferous members of passionately opposed groups — #FreePalestine women and Zionist women, for example — and what do you get?

This year’s conference was designed to be a climax, a culmination of the gatherings and the learnings of ten years ‘on the road’ — but what is going to happen if you do that just when politics and social movements in the country are approaching a phenomenal meltdown? In many ways, the FiLiA team set themselves up to be a focal point of that clash.

Which side are you on?

Wrong question, probably. When do people get angry? Not when they’re winning. Outside of the perpetual snit algorithm-generated rage prompts us into, we are more likely to get angry when we’re challenged and we have no reasonable argument — or when we’re threatened and our arguments disregarded.

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The huge tide of anger that flowed across the country in spring this year, when a Judicial Review confirmed and re-iterated the sex-based rights that women’s spaces and services depended upon was a supreme example of that. The aggression from set ups like the Trans Liberation Group and in Brighton, ‘Trans Bashback’, who were presumably the people who harangued the FiLiA venue and organisers for months in the run up to conference, and then wrecked the frontage of the venue on the opening morning, was not a sign of victory or strength.

I wonder though, how many people can actually tell, through all the noise, what has been lost and won. Society as a whole is still in a no-win mess over things like who ‘is allowed to’ use what toilets, and it won’t get out of the mess until some people who aren’t blind with rage manage to address the issue in peace.

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I don’t really know how to end this blog. I’m as angry as anyone these days. In the last couple of years, our government has literally been stolen by fraudsters, we have been forced to watch an entire people shredded by a racist, apartheid state that’s run and funded by our own countries, we have been treated as criminals when we protest, we have all, unless we’re billionaires, seen our money and our energy increasingly drained away by government-funded profiteers and we’re approaching a level of climate-crisis where everyone finally begins to see what we collectively have done to our children and grandchildren.

Is it as simple (and as difficult) as agreeing to spend less time online and more time sitting round tables next year? I don’t know — you tell me — there’s a comments section below this article…

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