The party’s two faces, ex-Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, remain at odds with each other. Most members are divided between their camps. Yet there is still hope for a turnaround.
The victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race has provided a revamped electoral-media strategy and canvassing model for the left.
It remains to be seen whether such a model could be applied on a national scale. Even if Your Party manages to transcend its contentious beginnings and derive strength from its internal differences, it will take both hard work and good fortune for the party to become a meaningful political challenger in 2026.
Oliver Eagleton’s new book Your Party: The Return of the Left conveys the scope of that challenge and the steps being taken to address it.
The interviews Eagleton collected explain the thinking behind Your Party, including many of the ideas being discussed at its founding conference last month in Liverpool.
Ultimately, members of Your Party adopted a radical constitution, establishing a unitary, democratic structure with local branches and delegates appointed by sortition and election. Considering the tension between the Corbyn and Sultana factions, this is an impressive achievement.
So is the fact that Your Party has more than 55,000 paid-up members drawn from over 800,000 supporters. But Your Party would be even bigger had its emergence not been blighted by confusion, unforced errors and internal rows.
While Your Party struggled to make progress, the Green Party of England and Wales made rapid progress after electing Zack Polanski as leader in September. The Greens are rising in the polls with an influx of new members, including disaffected Your Party supporters.
While Your Party should rival the Greens for progressive votes, Polanski has the advantage for now.
Polanski and Sultana have both expressed support for a pact between the Greens and Your Party. They have also shared platforms.
Although many Your Party members appear open to some form of alliance with the Greens, others have expressed strong opposition to the prospect.
The primary reason for this antipathy is that the Greens helped to destabilise Corbyn when he led the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020, undermining him on two fronts: Antisemitism and Brexit. That’s undoubtedly why Corbyn himself has ignored Polanski.
It’s more than a little ironic, then, that this memory of grievances has not done more to shape Corbyn’s approach to party-building. Strangely, he now finds himself on the side of process-obsessed party officials. This reverses the situation in which he led the opposition. At the time, Corbyn was besieged by MPs in Parliament, while his supporters were excluded from bureaucratic power. But now, Corbyn is positioning himself as an insider.
By contrast, Sultana has positioned herself on the side of mass party democracy. She has also pivoted to insta-socialism with calls to “nationalise the entire economy”. This demand has raised more than a few eyebrows, but it demonstrates her appetite for the kind of bold thinking that has almost entirely disappeared from Westminster.
A Democratic Roadmap
The Corbyn-Sultana split appears likely to be a defining element of Your Party for the foreseeable future, whether we like it or not.
The dynamics that played out during the Liverpool conference fell along these factional lines.
Many members prefer not to question Corbyn himself and pin the blame on advisers, specifically Karie Murphy and, sometimes, the lesser-known Amy Jackson. Both of whom worked for Corbyn during his challenging years as Labour leader.
Others blame Sultana for “jumping the gun twice.” First, Sultana announced the party’s launch ahead of schedule. Subsequently, she established a membership portal without the necessary support.
The latter decision may end up costing the new party dearly with legal proceedings underway. However, the immediate impact was to disillusion a large number of potential members.
It’s impossible to read the interviews Eagleton conducted for his book without thinking about the divisions still playing out in Your Party.
Eagleton, who also authored The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, makes Your Party’s case against Labour in his introduction.
This is crucial for understanding both the enthusiasm Your Party rapidly generated and the disappointment its difficulties have caused for those who flocked there from out of disgust with Keir Starmer.
The book features interviews with Sultana herself, Corbyn adviser James Schneider—who has since walked away from the party—and pro-Palestine activist Leanne Mohamad, who stood against Labour MP Wes Streeting, nearly toppling him.
Corbyn was expected to feature in the book but declined the opportunity to participate. However, his former speechwriter, Alex Nunns, and his former adviser, Andrew Murray, were interviewed.
Another interviewee is South African campaigner Andrew Feinstein, who ran against Keir Starmer and won approximately 19% of the vote. Feinstein is a key player in the For the Many network of campaigners and organisers.
Most of the people Eagleton interviewed want a unitary party with strong democratic structures and clear socialist politics, one that will pursue an electoral strategy connecting social movements with a national campaign against the Labour government.
But there are also significant dividing lines between them. Murray, who comes from the old Communist Party, favours a return to hard class politics over Schneider’s more sociological, softer class approach.
Although it’s clear that most of the interviewees favour some kind of alliance between Corbyn and Sultana, she seems to have had the last laugh in Liverpool.
The founding conference’s voting results favoured democratic maximalism, class politics over identity politics, local branches, and a mix of elections and sortition. That last point proved particularly divisive for professional activists.
Despite these problems, Your Party’s conference was more successful than not.
Sortition ensured the conference would be attended by a lot of people on the left who aren’t in far-left sects, “left normies”, if you will.
Maybe the best outcome from the conference is that Your Party promises to be more accountable to its members than elected politicians. The vote for collective leadership may separate bureaucratic power from parliamentary authority.
This could be a positive development, given that the Corbyn-Sultana split cast a long shadow over events in Liverpool.
It even affected Eagleton’s book, which was published ahead of the conference. Despite Verso Books, the publishing house of New Left Review, being informed in advance that they could promote the book from a stall, Verso editor Tom Hazeldine claims he was denied access upon arrival at the event.
This was especially galling in light of the fact that the rival left publisher, Pluto Books, was allowed. Tariq Ali, who sits on the New Left Review’s editorial committee, criticised the decision in a Facebook post.
“Is Verso going to be banned from Your Party official events?” Ali asked. “This has never happened in the Labour Party. I hope that the collective leadership will stop this nonsense.”
This story is even stranger when you factor in the small circles of left publishing and campaigning. Ali has known Corbyn for many years through Stop the War Coalition. New Left Review and Verso have both published arguments supporting Corbyn for a decade.
Collective leadership could reduce this type of nonsense in the future. Left normies, rather than MPs or perennial activists, will, at least in theory, hold sway over party governance.
But that is no guarantor of peace and stability in itself. A constitution can only do so much. The people who are developing the party machinery and learning to run it will need to work hard to overcome the petty squabbles overriding party unity. Not to mention the not-so-petty charges of malfeasance that have already tarnished Your Party’s reputation.
Challenges Ahead
A big part of the problem is that Your Party will comprise an unwieldy coalition in the House of Commons.
Corbyn’s team wants something like Labour 2.0 in many ways, with MPs and party bureaucrats in the driving seat. Sultana, on the other hand, seems more wary of repeating the past.
The two socialists were originally meant to be in the same party as four independent MPs with very different politics.
Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan are more like conservative social democrats than revolutionary socialists.
The so-called Gaza Independents Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed have walked away from the project, following a row over trans rights—ignited by Hussain’s tweets—with Mohamed stating the party has a “toxic culture” towards Muslim men.
Right now, Sultana is the only sitting Your Party MP. Adam and Khan are still sitting as independents. Not even Corbyn is officially representing the party, despite his crucial role in founding it.
What this means for collective leadership is difficult to determine. The Liverpool conference was a victory for Sultana, who had always favoured co-leadership, whereas Corbyn wanted a traditional, single leader operating from the House of Commons.
Members voted for a central executive committee, outside Parliament and elected on a regional basis, to wield power within the party. This may create space for a parliamentary leader separate from bureaucratic power, held by elected officials.
This is a significant turn away from a traditional electoralist model, suggesting that the party focus as intently on campaigning and organising as on winning elections.
The problem is that it will require substantial grassroots energy to undertake deep organising over the long term. Perennial activists are much more likely to pursue this approach than working people who have better things to do, namely putting food on the table.
Even if Your Party breaks with tradition in this manner, the question of who will lead it in Parliament looms large.
The parliamentary group may remain split between the Corbyn and Sultana factions, while the party outside Parliament continues to grow and develop. But that won’t happen overnight.
The danger of Your Party’s slow emergence is that Reform UK is the most popular party right now.
Reform has a singular, populist leadership, personified by Nigel Farage, and an anti-democratic business structure in place of a mass democratic party. This structure allows Farage to move quickly through Parliament and the news cycle.
Your Party’s most important battle may not be for the 2029 general election, but the one after that.
Considering how disastrous Keir Starmer’s tenure as PM has been for the Labour brand, the UK of the 2030s could easily be in the clutches of a Reform-Tory coalition government without meaningful parliamentary opposition.
That’s why Your Party campaigners need a coherent strategy for building the organisation into a serious opposition force to fight the likes of Farage.
Photograph courtesy of Alisdare Hickson. Published under a Creative Commons license.
