Are you still ‘for the many’? Are you one of the 850,000 who signed up as soon as Jeremy Corbyn declared a new party? Are you one of the (now less than) 50,000 who are still hanging on? Or one of the 4,000 or so who are still engaged enough to join in the endorsements round in the national committee elections? Are you one of those in despair at the state of the project, or one who reckons the Greens will do if ‘Your Party’ fails?
Are you standing on the sidelines, laughing bitterly? Do you want it all to end in murder and ruin so you can say ‘I told you so’, or do you want to make it work? (Don’t sniff at me – we can all get tempted by the ‘I told you so’s when life is this frustrating). Do you think half the people in the party are your enemies?
What were you doing when Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party? Were you giving it all you’d got, addressing the doubts and doom-mongers, and battling against the enemies within the party?
Did you know how much it mattered? Did you know why, for all his faults, Corbyn was holding the door open on a unique chance for all of us?
If you took all that as seriously as I did then you, like me, would have died a little on that terrible night of the 2019 election count. We’d pulled in more votes than Blair did in 2005, more than Brown or Miliband ever did (hundreds of thousands more than Starmer would in his 2024 ‘it’s us or the Tories’ campaign), but we saw the Labour seats falling, one after another, all that long night.
Unlike Starmer would do in 2024, we’d tried to make Labour work ‘for the many’. By contrast, team Starmer ruthlessly focused time and money on key sectors and lied to everyone else (which is how you win elections in the ridiculous system we have in place). Playing to win, they call it. It guarantees that those who win elections are already cynical and ready to lie — but against all the odds, we nearly won in 2017, with Corbyn. We would have done, if we’d been wiser to the sabotage going on behind the scenes.
The morning after the 2019 election we sat, each in our own sorrow, wondering where and how hope could rise again. Now, after over 2 years of witnessing a genocide, whilst the climate crisis climbs to irreversible disaster, and the Starmer/Streeting axis finishes off our NHS, selling us all to Silicon Valley along the way, we look back on 2019 every time we see ‘Your Party’ slip another notch down into disaster and bitter dispute.
We know now that a non-establishment party that starts doing well will be attacked 24/7 by the system, sabotaged from within and without, and that any newborn attempt at a socialist movement will be ridiculed and/or ignored by the media. Please note, this is not happening to the Green Party. Polanski gets plenty of air time and the media largely ignore the lunacy of what goes on in the party he leads.
The Green Party does not scare the establishment. They are using it to help bury Your Party.
Those of us who were truly battle-hardened in the Labour Party know all too well why the remnant of team Corbyn juddered and delayed their way to announcing the new party. We know what they went through, trying to run the LOTO office in Westminster, and we know it’s why they’ve been secretive and defensive every step of the way with ‘Your Party’. Have you really thought about it? The day team Corbyn moved into that office, someone had stripped it and taken away all the computers. It went downhill from there. Remember when Rebecca Long-Bailey went sleepless to re-do a full night’s work on that finance bill, when plotters chose a crucial moment to ‘accidentally’ delete all the shadow cabinet files?
But Corbyn held on for as long as he could, and we built a movement that wasn’t going to die out. That’s why, when all the ‘Your Party’ rows behind the scenes spilled out, mostly through Sultana’s Twitter feed, we stayed put despite our screams of frustration, as our ground-base of six MPs became five, then four (‘boy’s club’, ‘socially conservative views’) and the big names supporting team Corbyn walked, or were pushed, away (battles over the management of funds and membership portals). And then my entire generation got told to piss off (‘okay, boomer’) and the pretence of co-operation disappeared when the endorsements race got going (‘keep endorsing the GL slate, we need to dominate the board’).
Those slates
I don’t know whether many people calling themselves ‘the grassroots left’ in Your Party even realise what an insult that slate is. This is not the Labour Party. We don’t have a tranche of corporate-funded enemies in the party, we don’t have an HQ dominated by right-wing careerists and Zionists. If they are ‘the grassroots left’ what the hell are they implying the rest of us are? We will always have disagreements amongst our members, that’s what politically minded people do, but to build a mass movement we need the party run by people who understand that not every disagreement needs to be a fight to the death. We do not want a ‘leader’ who competitively calls out for hundreds and hundreds of endorsements, purely to keep other candidates off the voting lists. We want a leader like this…
But team Sultana were determined to keep those endorsements for their own candidates coming, to ‘dominate’ the lists, and keep everyone else off. That’s why, despite the questionable wisdom of having slates in the first place, once it was done, we needed ‘The Many’ slate in defence. The Many slate are not faceless, back office bureaucrats. They are good, reliable activists we remember from the Labour Party years. They put together a team focused on calling out to the original 850 000 and getting Your Party back on track. Corbyn was invited to join them (as opposed being put on the slate against his will and having to demand his removal, as happened with ‘the Grassroots Left slate’).
Are you with me so far? I think we all need to vote in those CEC elections, and I hope voters will make sure the public office election and all the regions include members of ‘The Many’ slate? Do you see why I personally think that it’s not ‘sensible’ or ‘reasonable’ now to vote for both Corbyn and Sultana, and expect them to work together, as if none of this ever happened?
No kings, no gods
Corbyn alone can’t solve this. He needs some members of his team at his side — but quite frankly, he’s been through enough. He’s our figurehead, our best-known and best liked politician, but we can’t make everything depend on him. That’s why, as well as voting for Corbyn and The Many candidates, we need to bring in some of the independents – a task made harder by the very real need to counteract the ‘domination’ of the ‘Grassroots Slate’.
On the national list, we need The Many team – that’s Corbyn, Laura Smith, Ayoub Khan and Shockat Adam but we also need at least one experienced independent. I’d go for Michael Lavalette. He’s one of the Preston Independent councillors, and has an excellent track record as a socialist activist.
In the regions, you’d need to check who in your area is for ‘The Many’, but also look into who amongst the independents is a proven mass-movement socialist. I’m in the south east and our ‘The Many’ candidates are Michelle Ryan and Cassandra Bellingham.
The non-slate SE candidates who look promising to me are Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (who’s led the list on endorsements) and Crispin Flintoff. Both have proven their worth – Wimborne-Idrissi as one of the JVL team who pulled out all the stops to try and rescue team Corbyn from the outrageous ‘antisemitism’ attacks on his Labour leadership and Flintoff with all the campaigning he’s done through ‘The Crispin Flintoff Show’.
If you’re in the North West, you might look at Sam Gorst, a popular activist in Corbyn’s Labour, now a successful independent socialist councillor. If you’re in London, you might consider Valerie Coultas, a feminist socialist who will ensure our politicians of the left don’t forget about what matters to women and girls.
Those are my picks but don’t take it from me, please take a look around The Many website, and find out who’s standing in your region. Most importantly, make sure you know something about your local independent candidates (I mean what they’ve been doing in recent years, not just what they’re saying on the campaign). After endorsements, it’s going to an STV vote, starting on the 9th Feb so we’ve got some options. I’m hoping that all those who want the movement to grow and thrive will choose The Many candidates and independents as their top three options.
Click here to visit The Many website
No cults, no purity spirals
So, it’s almost time to vote. What we’ve learned from the endorsements stage is that we’re down to around seven and a half thousand (that’s the total of national endorsements divided by 4, because each member got four votes). 7500 people who are engaged enough to endorse candidates. 7500 out of the original 850 000 supporters. It appears that a small majority of those who remain are opting for Corbyn first, but not enough were choosing The Many candidates, to ensure he has a team around him that would work well together.
Most of the regional lists include a mix of ‘The Many’, independents and ‘the Grassroots Left’. I wasn’t sure whether to write my next couple of thoughts but, whilst thinking about it, I joined a range of Your Party Whatsapp groups and took a look at some of the conversations candidates were having with members. It galvanised my intention to say this:
Whilst team Sultana are spending their campaigning time painting every action of the party interim organisers as corrupt, and having rows with members over ideological differences, The Many candidates are doing things like this…
Click here to read Laura Smith’s latest in the Morning Star
Our choice
We could have Corbyn’s ‘The Many’ team, augmented by some inspiring independents to keep things outward facing, and set to work to rebuild the mass movement that gathered around Corbyn last time around, the one that focused on saving our health service, reclaiming our transport, energy and water services from the companies that are fleecing us all, dealing with the housing crisis and addressing the horrendous problems of eternal war and climate crisis…
Or we could have ‘the grassroots left’, and gradually shrink into being a minority group on the side lines, tussling over its ideological purity, having eternal rows about pronouns, whether anarchists are better than these or those kinds of socialists, who is or is not doing anti-racism properly and who should or should not be allowed to join Your Party…
To be sure of ‘The Many’ version, we need a lot more people voting in the February than we had at the endorsements stage. Are you signed up? Are you going to vote? Do you know anyone else you could persuade to do so? If you do, now is the time for those conversations. The deadline for joining and receiving a vote is 5th February.
Have you had it with party politics? (My goodness, I’ve said that enough times in recent years.) Please bear in mind you’d only need sign up for a month or two to vote in the current elections and see a new team off the starting blocks.
A genuinely socialist party led by a team determined to focus on the issues that matter to everyone and win back the 800k members we started with would only be the beginning of the solution to the terrible, worldwide problems we’re all facing but it’d be a very good beginning. Let’s help it happen.
Click here to sign up to Your Party
And when the polls open on the 9th February, get in there, and vote for The Many and your favourite independents.
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Kay Green 