Your Party has in its short life inflicted enormous damage on the left in Britain and has destroyed the promise of a mass socialist party, with 800,000 registering their interest last year and over 60,000 signed up to be members. Socialists up and down the country set up branches, city and regional networks, held meetings, prepared candidates for election, supported local campaigns, mobilised against the far-right and helped organise strikes.
An unelected clique, staffed by the team that filled Corbyn’s office when he was leader of Labour, used every bureaucratic trick in the book, and leaked red-baiting stories to the press about socialist organisations, and, what is still, the only official Your Party MP Zarah Sultana. They watched on as Scotland got organised and then ignored whatever was decided. Through this clique’s efforts, the party has been beset by crisis after crisis and now, after banning the entire left, is clearly in a death spiral. At best, it will become a Momentum-style organisation, without an active membership and occasional email referendums.
Over several weeks, we have been discussing the way forward, for our own organisation and what proposals we will take into the movement. Some wanted to stick it out in Your Party, some wanted us to back an almost immediate split, others wanted us to take a path between the two. All three approaches had merits and reflect the questions being posed by the collapse of Your Party. Collectively and democratically, we settled on an approach that keeps us working in the branches and structures built by Your Party members, while also looking beyond. We will support and critically participate in attempts by branches and socialist organisations to find a new way forward, towards the party we have been fighting for since our inception.
We will be launching a campaign for a Democratic Socialist Party/Communist Party and in this process are looking to draw together socialist factions and organisations, with whom we want to work collaboratively and openly on the way forward. We will review and build on the documents we have developed together, starting with our proposal for a draft programme called ‘Workers Deserve the Earth’, which evolved throughout our work in Your Party and the Grassroots Left slate. We need to start building the kind of democratic socialist party that we actually need: unashamedly socialist, internationalist and anti-Zionist and with an open and democratic culture that does not just allow differences, but enshrines the right to form open tendencies and platforms. Only such a party could hope to make a real difference – when it comes to taking on the state, the fight for democracy in our trade unions or strengthening the movement in our local area, in Your Party branches, community organisations or campaigns. United we would be so much stronger!
Everyone who wants to get involved in this fight is welcome to join our organisation as we start our re-founding and launch our next campaign. We have a lot of work to do.