Will I see you there?

***This is a long post, a personal account, which I hope will be helpful to those who maybe haven’t been in the thick of the Your Party goings on, but have been worrying about it.***

Let us suppose Jeremy Corbyn’s team are a battle-scarred political family. Let us suppose they had not entirely recovered from that five years running the office of a politician who the media and the holdfasts in his own party were hell-bent on destroying, by any means they could find. Let us suppose that, when Corbyn let the world know they were well on the way to setting up the new political party, it triggered something overwhelming.

Not paranoia, because the most powerful political and media groups in the world really were out to get them. It’s not paranoia when you really do have slavering hounds snapping at your heels. It’s plain old-fashioned existential terror. It’s what is known in other circumstances as PTSD.

I’m saying that perhaps the team who were joined by the likes of Jamie Driscoll and Andrew Feinstein to set up the party were in quite a state before it all even started, and perhaps we failed to allow for that when we called them slow, and defensive, and secretive.

[Disclaimer: this narrative continues to be my suppositions, based on what I saw and heard. Don’t take it as gospel — it’s a personal account of how things seemed to go. I’m writing in search of understanding and reconciliation for those who remain.]

Let us suppose there’s a young MP, in a way the last of her kind, building a fierce head of political ambition in Westminster. Zara Sultana was just about the only new era ‘wokey lefty’ candidate left in the Labour party. One of the few who managed to get into Westminster during the reign of the Corbyn movement. She was not what you’d call a grassroots candidate, not a ‘working class girl made good’. We often talk about ‘the political class’ that fuels mainstream politics: those public-school educated rich kids, who ride all the way from their posh schools through posh unis and a gap-year world tour into the establishment’s ‘political school’, and arrive in Westminster with all the advantages and precious little ‘real life experience’. What we often forget is that as well as the centrist and right-wing types, there is an equally cosy route for left-leaning professional class kids to ride in on, and that’s where Sultana came from.

She was quite isolated. She arrived as the Corbyn movement folded. For a while, she was pretty much the only radical voice, amongst the very few anti-genocide voices, heard in Labour. Soon, she had millions hanging on her every word. In that situation, who would not start getting big ideas about themselves and their own importance?

That’ll explain why, the day she officially left the Labour Party, she forgot about everyone she wasn’t personally interested in and surprised team Corbyn by announcing that ‘Jeremy Corbyn and I’ would be leading the movement to form a new party of the left.

Let us suppose that, like just about everybody these days, team Corbyn, Sultana and various other big political hitters – Feinstein and Driscol among them, were working out the hows and whys and whens in a Whatsapp group. After all, it was when Feinstein was kicked out of a Whatsapp group that those of us paying attention first said ‘uh-oh…’ Let us remind ourselves what Whatsapp is.

Whatapp is Mark Zuckerberg’s property. It is run by the same people, on the same principles, as Facebook always was. The core idea is that they make money by keeping people online as much as possible. People stay online when they’re feeling righteously angry, or when they feel challenged, and need to win something. Keep them at odds, keep the quarrels running endlessly – that’s what keeps the money flowing on social media sites. That’s why no-one should be surprised that the battle-scarred Corbyn crew and the student-politics-driven Sultana crew were getting into a long-drawn out tussle in their Whatsapp group about how to take things forward.

Let us suppose that Andrew Feinstein was first amongst those who lost patience, and encouraged Zara Sultana to go it alone. Out of the 800 000 and more who signed up as supporters at Corbyn’s initial announcement, around 20 000 immediately signed Sultana’s new membership portal. Withdrawals, denials and threats of legal action ensued. Sultana called our most precious asset, our group of Your Party oriented independent MPs a ‘boys club’, implying anyone trying to slow her down was acting out of misogyny. Team Corbyn declared her portal invalid, and they were all stuck in a legal nightmare, with membership fees pouring into the portal, money held by the team who were supposed to be the whole group’s financial officers, and no clear answer to whose money it was, or whether anyone was the data-manager for what was rapidly becoming two opposed groups.

The conference

The conference appears to have been dominated by people who completely ignored that line on the membership sign-up (the official one, that came after the Sultana one), the one that said you may not be a member of another party. Some degree of confusion was understandable as somewhere along the line, it appears to have been agreed that it was okay to be a member of local parties (such as our nascent Hastings People’s Party where I am) that had been set up during the Starmer years to fill the gap for people who didn’t want to vote for the failing Westminster parties in council elections, but could not yet vote for the promised new left party.

We asked Feinstein about that when he Zoom-talked with a meeting in Hastings and he said yes, it was so people like him who had formed local, council-focused parties could join in but – well, by then there were two groups of Your Party people in many towns – one a re-convening of the ex-Labour, Corbyn-supporting activists and the other dominated by the SWP or other small parties who’d joined Your Party without declaring or renouncing their other memberships.

At conference, those people with a strong interest in preserving their dual membership were rallied the night before conference by Sultana. It was stated during their rally that if they didn’t get their way they’d ‘storm the stage’ at conference, then they complained when the conference organisers were defensive and security-obsessed on the day. Conference voted for dual membership to be allowed ‘at the discretion of the Central Executive Committee’ and also for several quite deeply divisive ideas – for example conference voted, by a majority of 68%, to support the Trans Liberation agenda (meaning self-ID and transitioning kids without parental involvement). These votes were laid down in defiance of formerly well-respected socialist and trades union speakers who’d advised that we keep to issues and ways of going on that we, and in fact most UK citizens, broadly agree on (because that’s how you do movement building).

Internal elections

At this point we’d already lost two of our independent MPs due to social-media mobs led by Sultana rounding on people suspected of having ‘socially conservative views’.

When we finally got to the bit where we were running elections to choose the executive committee, we were very, very clearly two camps. Sultana branded her end of things ‘the grassroots left’ and even in public events like marches, was promoting that, rather than Your Party as a whole. Because of that, a group of women came together to try and re-establish the ethos of the Corbyn movement, and campaigned under the title ‘The Many’.

The Whatsapp groups

The campaign mostly seemed to consist of rows in the Whatsapp groups. Some days, I thought I should take part in some of them, rather than just looking in for info occasionally. But when I did look in, I saw endless wails of ‘it’s not fair!’ from the grassroots end of the campaign, buckets of bile being spent on those we thought were running things (‘why don’t we know their names?’, ‘Who’s making the decisions? We want to shout abuse at them directly!’).

I do get that there were secretive meetings and anonymous decision makers, but I also get that these were people from the Corbyn movement days, desperately trying to get to the point where we have a national committee that can take charge and deal with all this shit; they were trying to protect volunteer administrators from all the bile going around by not naming them in the meantime.

I didn’t join in any of the whatapp groups because they simply did not look inviting and anyway, what can you say to people who, for example, post comments like ‘Steptoe’ whenever anything Corbyn-related comes up; but also, our local group had stopped railing against ‘people with socially conservative views’ and were straight-up calling older feminists ‘transphobes’, and reviling anyone who still thinks they’re allowed to talk about women’s sex-based rights, or safeguarding youngsters.

In short, they were allowing Whatsapp to do what Whatsapp is for. The grumpy posts, the furious and the abusive posts, never go away – there’s always someone to click on them and bring them back around for another row to keep the pot a-boiling. Mark Zuckerberg is the only winner.

Maybe there’s an upside to this – as the election process continued, more and more people saw how much of the grassroots left was dominated by the fatal combination of student-style, ‘my way or the highway’ pronouncements and SWP misogyny (now fashionably wrapped in trans pride colours). Maybe that’s why, come the time, The Many side of the ticket won a clear majority on the Executive Committee.

Long and loud wails of ‘it’s not fair!’ ensued.

I think they had a point, in as much as we’d been handed a rather inappropriate form of proportional representation, and thanks to Sultana’s ‘grassroots left slate’, and the women who formed The Many slate as a reaction to it, an internal election was run like a two-party oppositional campaign, turning the already deep division into an unnavigable ravine.

Soon, there was a petition going around – ‘horror of horrors, we’ve ended up with a committee that’s almost all (eurgh!) women!’

Long and loud wails of ‘discrimination!’

I think they had a point, but I barely care – the irony of a bunch of misogynists dropping everything to cry ‘discrimination’ when, for once, a less-than-ideal set up falls out in favour of women is just too hilarious to get upset over.

And then, as the SWP and the other grouplets continued to yell and try to pull things their way, the now active executive committee applied its discretion, as conference instructed, and put out a statement on situations and parties where dual membership would be disallowed. They also put out an ‘invitation’, as friendly as they could manage, suggesting to those named groups that they either align their rulebooks to Your Party’s, so that dual membership isn’t going to harm the party, or else approach the committee to talk about alliances, mergers etc.

The SWP etc left the Whatsapp groups.

Long and loud wails of ‘purge!’ and ‘witchhunt!’

Sam Gorst social media post calling out false claims — This is a bit garbled (as things get when passions run high on social media) but what Gorst is saying is that no-one is being targeted for endorsing anyone – rather, the committee is going through the groups and parties that have, or have had, members in Your Party and working out which ones align, and which don’t, so that the ruling on dual membership will be specific and applicable. It’s what conference required them to do.

NB Sam Gorst stood as an independent (ie, not one of the slates) candidate for the Executive Committee.

This is the beginning

Well it is, if anyone’s left standing. Here we are – I think most of the 800 000 have wandered off and taken up stamp-collecting instead of politics, or else joined the Green Party (which in the long run probably amounts to the same thing) but we have a party, the kind of party Corbyn was originally suggesting – an attempt at the party Labour SHOULD have been. It’s not ideal. It’s certainly not what team Sultana wanted, it’s not entirely what I wanted. I’d washed my hands of party politics when I left the Labour Party, still fuming from the way both Labour and the Green Party had been treating women’s rights campaigners (or in the case of the Greens, any women who dared utter a single comment regarding sex-based rights). I’d taken my political energies elsewhere – to feminism, to local assemblies, to the Palestine campaign and to political education projects, but it seemed to me that those who’d been a part of the Corbyn movement really should try and support Corbyn’s new party – it seemed so to 800 000 people, at first, too.

How many are still keen? Now, as a new row breaks out over the Scottish committee splitting off, it’s hard to believe it matters much. We’re all busy trying to stop World War Three, marching for Palestine, or holding up bits of cardboard to try and force the government to acknowledge what is or is not terrorism, or backing the very promising independent, community candidates who’ve stepped up to fill the vacuum in many of the up-coming council elections.

I think it’s going to take at least another year now, for the not-so-new party to recover from all that’s gone on, and be ready to do any serious politics. It likely needs a new name and a general rebranding, but in the meantime I guess there’ll soon be a call for people to attend branch-founding meetings and I’m hoping that when the call comes, and there are real-world meetings without the irritating presence of wedge-drivers from those disallowed parties, people will recognise each other’s faces, and remember that they’re all old comrades from the Labour party, or from the anti-war and anti-austerity movements, or from years of Trade Union campaigns, and so long as they don’t start arguing over what went on in those goddammed Whatsapp groups, they’ll remember that they agree on the vast majority of the political issues Your Party is there to address.

Your Party meme listing the Labour goverment's anti-refugee measures - 'where Reform lead, Labour follow'

Your party meme calling for an end to US using UK military bases.

Your party meme flagging up water company failures and sky-high bills and calling for nationalisation.

Your party meme listing private NHS companies' profits and calling for a fully funded, fully public NHS

Your Party meme listing energy company profits and calling for nationalisation

I’ll probably go along to a branch-founding meeting if/when one happens where I am. I’ll go and say ‘hi’ to everyone, and see how it’s going and just maybe I’ll want to get involved again.