There is something I’ve been thinking for a while, but have been reluctant to write down, but now it needs to be said: the launch of Your Party has been a complete and utter shambles. It has been a disaster class in how to launch a political party. If the other parties wanted to sabotage Your Party, they could not have done a better job.
They haven’t even given themselves a proper name yet (they’re apparently having a vote at the end of the month), and I feel embarrassed every time I have to say “Your Party”—it just doesn’t sound serious. And don’t get me started on the shambles that was the original membership portal and the instruction to tell people to cancel their memberships, only to later change their mind.
A party that does not want to give itself a name, and does not want to open itself up to members, and did not even want to announce its existence, and dithers on making the slightest step forward, is not a serious party. I can hear the right-wing laughter from a mile away. There was an incredible amount of enthusiasm and somehow all of that momentum has been destroyed. It is truly extraordinary.
Please understand, I write these words not out of any sort of glee, but out of despair—a despair that is rapidly turning to anger. Our hope is being eroded, day by day.
Since its launch, and even before, Your Party has been marred by infighting that has played out on social media, and in briefings to the mainstream media, in a staggering lack of professionalism.
The latest episode came as Your Party MP Zarah Sultana got invited to speak on BBC Question Time. As far as I’m aware, this was the party’s first chance to show itself to the nation and win the public over. All that was needed was a show of unity and strong messaging, but instead of supporting Sultana, the Independent Alliance of MPs that form the backbone of Your Party made a lengthy social media post undermining her.
The below post is in relation to the membership portal that was initially set up by Zarah because the other MPs were dragging their feet and had not set up a portal within the agreed time frame.
It gets worse, they used the official Your Party Twitter page, even though this was not an official party communication. It was a message from the independent group that each of them had apparently signed, only Corbyn says he did not authorise it, even though his name was attached. Shambolic isn’t the word.
The reaction from social media users was as negative as you can imagine with even a Your Party branch calling it out:
From what I’ve gathered, Your Party had raised £800,000 in pre-membership donations before Sultana launched the membership portal that brought in another £500,000. The party will have raised more money from the current membership portal. All the funds are tied to the same company, MoU Operations Ltd.
Sultana said of the matter: “The MOU directors were already in the process of transferring ownership and all of the resources of MOU, and that legal process is now nearing completion.”
A spokesperson clarified: “The first £200,000 was scheduled to be sent on 12 November and all remaining funds would be transferred once the company’s costs, expenses and liabilities are settled in full.”
This hardly sounds like a matter that should be settled through Twitter, does it?
Now I don’t care about the blame game. I certainly don’t give a crap about factionalism. I care about only one thing: fixing our society. The only way you achieve that is through democratisation, but it seems that is not what we are going to get.
The following tweet from Twitter user Elvis Buñuelo has summed up my thoughts, but now I’m even struggling with the “encouraging noises” part. The tragedy is that I was ready and willing to fight so hard for this party.
Sienna Miller reports in Politics Home that one source told her: “The whole thing is like an elaborate leftist self-parody performance,” adding: “We’ve got more factions than MPs”.
The whole point of this party was that by leaving Labour, we could leave the infighting behind, but sadly, too many on the left would pick a fight with their own reflection. The establishment does not need to send wedge issues our way, we are more than capable of finding them ourselves.
Former Northumberland mayor Jamie Driscoll has bowed out of the project and he was arguably the party’s biggest asset. He was a hugely popular mayor who was deselected by Labour for factional reasons, and he was a potential Your Party MP and future leader. Driscoll is exactly the type of person who should be associated with Your Party and to lose him, speaks volumes.
Driscoll had been helping the party get set up, but he has now clarified: “I’m not a member of Your Party, and won’t be joining. I do feel sorry for their members who joined on a prospectus of a new kind of politics, only to find people at the centre repeatedly issuing anonymous briefings that damage Your Party. You’ve really got to ask why their political leadership is allowing this to happen.”
One MP, Adnan Hussain, has already left Your Party. Hussain had attracted criticism for his socially conservative views, but the one criticism he could not avoid was the fact he is a landlord. Landlordism is antithetical to democratic socialism, and while I applaud Hussain for his principled stand on Gaza, he was not in the right party.
Hussain issued a damning statement in which he lamented the infighting and felt the party was not welcoming towards Muslims, but while there is validity in some of his words, I don’t see him as blame-free. His social media posts fanned the flames, and as an MP, he should have been more disciplined.
Megan Kenyon, a political correspondent from New Statesman, shared the following on Twitter:
It’s hard to deny that the decision to put control of the founding process into the hands of six MPs was stupid, given that it is the opposite of what a democratic socialist party should be. I’m not letting Sultana off the hook though. She should never have launched a membership portal without the knowledge of the other MPs, regardless of her frustrations. No one is coming out of this looking good.
Unsurprisingly, it looks like Corbyn and Sultana are not going to co-lead Your Party. There will be a leadership contest next year, assuming the party lasts that long, and the pair may well stand against each other. Personally, I don’t think either of them should lead. My choice would have been Jamie Driscoll, but now he is out, I honestly have no idea. Perhaps it will have to be Corbyn, in which case, I would expect him to step down after the next election and make way for new blood.
While many of us have resisted sticking the boot into Your Party in the hope it could sort itself out, the MPs have behaved like squabbling kids. Here is what I think is going on: firstly, I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn’s heart is in this project. I think he is emotionally tied to the Labour Party, doesn’t believe in the MPs he has associated with, and probably feels he is getting too old. He has a moral obligation to offer an alternative to Starmerism, but I just don’t see the fight in him anymore.
I think other MPs in the party are terrified of democratic socialism because the moment the members get a say, their petty behaviour will not be tolerated. There is a push to turn this into another top-down bureaucratic monster like Labour, and if it succeeds, there is no point in the party.
People feel they have no voice in the system and are dictated to by politicians who are not interested in their concerns. Your Party was supposed to be different, it was supposed to be your party, but all the signs are that it is their party. It pains me to say this. It really does.
Something ridiculous like 800,000 people signed up to register interest in Your Party, yet when it launched, it barely scraped 50,000 members. Make no mistake, those 800,000 people were real. All Your Party needed to do was look vaguely competent to get a huge chunk of them on board, but trust has been eroded to the point where most, myself included, just aren’t signing up.
If Your Party wants me to join, it has everything to prove. If it can’t stop the infighting and hand democratic control to the members, it’s dead in the water.
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It's so very sad. At the onset, a lot of us were filled with hope. That first fiasco over joining and then being told we weren't joining was beyond belief. I emailed them, asking what was going on and would they please reassure me that they have finally sorted themselves out. I've yet to get a response. I won't be joining them after all. This was the perfect opportunity to found a proper socialist party and they blew it. Meanwhile, the Greens are busy picking up the crumbs of the undecided...
I, like alot of people are annoyed with all this bickering. We had so much hope and a real chance of change but sadly I don't believe Your Party is going to achieve what it's initial aims were and I agree with Ricky's analysis of Corbyn - so sad and a lost opportunity