Your Party CEC elections

Over the next two weeks voting will take place for the Your Party Central Executive Committee. The rs21 steering group outlines what’s at stake.

There’s an old joke about someone who asks for directions only to be told ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.’ It seems apt when thinking about the problems facing Your Party as elections to its leadership body open. The Central Executive Committee (CEC) will run the party, overseeing staff and resources, guiding its strategy and putting decisions from the founding conference into action. It will elect from its ranks a Chair, Vice Chair and public spokespeople.

On its announcement in July last year, Your Party channelled a widespread desire for a political alternative to the Labour Party. Over 800,000 people registered interest in the project within a month of its launch, and the possibility of socialists openly engaging in mass politics seemed to be on the table for the first time in years.

Yet behind the scenes, a power struggle was taking place between rival factions of the leadership. At this stage, these divisions had not crystallised around major strategic differences; the core argument appeared to be whether Jeremy Corbyn should lead the party alone or whether he should co-lead with Zarah Sultana.

This power struggle led to a series of decisions that have alienated many of those 800,000 initial supporters and dramatically limited Your Party’s mass appeal. Those who had been leading the process behind the scenes dragged their feet for so long that the initiative risked arriving too little too late. Sultana’s initial intervention to make the process public was welcome to many of us desperate for a new left party in British politics, yet it was also the beginning of a breakdown of trust and collaboration between Sultana and Corbyn. The subsequent unilateral launch of a membership portal by Sultana was a mistake, compounded by Corbyn’s misjudged public repudiation and threat of legal action.

In founding Your Party, a decision was made not to build it from local branches up, but instead to begin by deciding the party’s structures at the national level through a highly managed exercise in digital democracy. The decision to orient the opening phase of the party’s life on questions of structure in this way led to months of paralysis in which tens of thousands who might have thought of joining the party instead became part of a surge of recruitment to the Greens. 

Several radical campaign groups emerged, including the Democratic Socialists of Your Party (DSYP), who focused on arguing for maximum member democracy, Organising for Popular Power (O4PP), who argued for an outward focus on base building and organising, and Trans Liberation Group (TLG), who sought to ensure a principled position on trans politics in Your Party, along with the Greater Manchester Left Caucus and others. DSYP in particular made a significant impact on the conversations going into the founding conference about democracy in the party, and TLG succeeded in getting an amendment on trans liberation through the arcane amendments portal and voted through by a significant majority.

Had its launch not been so badly mismanaged, Your Party could now be a mass organisation in which the radical left is an active, constructive minority. We could have worked with Your Party’s openness to community organising and the ability of members to shape the development of local groups to “create facts on the ground” around useful forms of organising while trying to win a hearing with members about a strategy.

However, the narrower scope of the organisation has meant that the far left has played an outsized role in terms of providing ideas and infrastructure, but also as a bogeyman and convenient scapegoat for the leadership clique. DSYP’s proposals for the organisation were largely adopted by Zarah Sultana as she sought to build a base in the organisation amidst its most radical wing. Meanwhile, an unelected and unaccountable leadership around Corbyn has taken a paranoid stance towards sects and factions, including farcical expulsions around the Your Party conference in November and ongoing undemocratic manoeuvring. 

On the face of things, a very clear division has now developed. Two slates are standing in the elections: the Grassroots Left, which is backed by Zarah Sultana; and The Many, associated with Jeremy Corbyn. The Grassroots Left puts forward an extensive platform of maximum member democracy, which would mark a welcome change from the flagrantly undemocratic practices of the current leadership. The Many, by contrast, have a minimal ‘Where we Stand’ statement that emphasises getting the process back on track, looking outwards, and campaigning on core issues.

Yet much of the debate hinges on how open Your Party should be to the radical left and socialist politics. Grassroots Left champion the inclusion of the far left, while The Many frames its position against the disunity of factionalism and against what they describe as ‘the sects’. They argue for the need to rebuild a multiracial coalition – a reference to the resignations of Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, independent MPs who left Your Party after being challenged over transphobia. But their idea of that coalition increasingly looks like a shallow strategic unity, rather than working through political issues together to create a deeper unity and shared political identity.

From the outset of discussions around the CEC elections, rs21 was insistent on the need for left groupings at the base of the party to unite independently of both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, but also that both had to be part of the CEC. While they had made disastrous decisions throughout the founding process, they and the wings of the organisation they represent are both required to make it a success.

Last summer rs21 members voted to engage in Your Party and to promote the following broad principles:

• Anticapitalism
• Opposition to the British state and to its imperialist interventions
• Solidarity with all oppressed groups, a refusal to allow compromise with chauvinism, and in particular championing Palestinian liberation and trans liberation
• Prioritising the broader class struggle over narrow electoralism
• Commitment to building transparent democratic structures 
• A healthy democratic culture

We encourage people to attend hustings and question candidates for the CEC in their local areas to establish their commitment and track records on these principles.

The polarisation in Your Party is now existential: a CEC controlled by Corbyn’s camp will likely lead to the ostracisation of the radical left, while one controlled by Sultana’s may lead to Corbyn’s departure.

The best outcome for these elections would be a balanced CEC, including the best of both slates and independents, with an orientation to building the party from the grassroots rather than backroom dealing with either camp. However, we are not in a position to influence the fine details of the CEC’s final composition.

As the election is run under Single Transferable Vote, members may look to strong independent candidates, but rs21 suggests you give your voting preferences to the Grassroots Left candidates above those on The Many slate. Even aside from our political differences with them, The Many slate has the unfair advantage of being supported by Your Party’s current undemocratic de facto leadership.

We are broadly supportive of the platform put forward by Grassroots Left, though we have been critical of the backroom nature of its establishment, as well as its confused messaging in recent days around the Gorton and Denton by-election. On that last question, a win for the Greens would be the best outcome under the circumstances, and Your Party should not make the mistake of distancing itself from the Green surge.

The stakes for Your Party could not be higher. If we cannot stabilise and start developing a positive vision and way forward for the left, one that does not rely on trying to play catch-up in an electoral sphere increasingly dominated by a well-developed and growing Green Party, Your Party will not survive as a project that can carry forward hope for socialists. There is a real risk that the CEC elections are a pyrrhic victory for the majority winners. We need to do what we can to avoid that and to orient Your Party to building power and coalitions in communities and workplaces in order to win real gains for working-class people, popularise socialist politics and pose a serious alternative to Labour.