Why Your Party will end up as no one’s party

Busy as I was watching – and then mourning – Leicester City being dismantled by Sheffield United (no PSG themselves, as it happens), I confess I paid less attention than I should have to the Your Party conference in Liverpool. Having since caught up, and watched the live stream of consciousness that was Zarah Sultana’s speech, I can say with confidence that Liverpool was, once again, the place where parody met socialism.

Much of the weekend’s proceedings were ignored by the working-class people the party purports to represent – probably for the best. Had the country’s disillusioned voters seen Sultana, Jeremy Corbyn and their comrades trying to lay the foundation stones of a new Jerusalem, they might think twice before lending them even a protest vote.

On Saturday, for instance, Sultana boycotted her own conference because Corbyn and his allies had tried to stop the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party joining Your Party. Corbyn, of all people, understands “entryism”, the method by which a small, disciplined cadre of revolutionary Trots can infiltrate and exploit a weak political organisation for their own ends.

This is, of course, what they attempted in Labour in the 1980s, operating from their Liverpool base. Then, Labour figures like Michael Foot, John Golding, Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley had to root them out – while Corbyn himself argued against any “witch-hunt”. It is no surprise that Sultana is now recycling the same language, but it is more of a shock to see Corbyn “doing a Kinnock” to the heirs of Derek Hatton. As Kinnock once said: A grotesque sight.

Corbyn’s argument was that no one could be a member of Your Party and another party registered with the Electoral Commission. Unfortunately for him, the SWP isn’t registered at all, presumably due to its aversion to elections and preference for the parasitical lifestyle of entryism. This left Corbyn in the odd position of resisting infiltration by a party that is unregistered but has a name, into one that is registered but – until yesterday – had no name, and now has one of almost no meaning.

“The Your Party” (I don’t know if there’s a definite article) still has no leader. Unless the labyrinthine processes of the Your Party rulebook – old Labour habits die hard – are set in motion, it never will. Even “co-leaders”, the job-share gimmick abandoned by the Greens, are off the table. Meanwhile, the Polanski-led party has emerged as the biggest winner from the shambles in Liverpool.

If, by some miracle, Your Party won a general election, its dozen assorted oddballs on the Politburo would have to move into No 10 and convert it into a socialist HMO. It would be The Young Ones, with Corbyn as Vyvyan, the foreign secretary.

To understand quite how they’ve managed to get their knickers in such a twist, I offer the words of one Your Party contribution on Facebook: “However, the march of dialectics goes on... The UK, as it is, demands representative personalities in leadership positions. Leaders play the part of symbolic avatars of a political movement’s image. But we now have a collective ruling body (yes, ruling, whether elected or not) which obscures this ‘symbolism’ of what we represent. Who will speak, when all can speak? My concern is that this evident contradiction will bring about discord at some point, between legacy Corbyn or Sultana supporters, versus the Radical Democrats. If Marx (and Hegel) are right, then it’s inevitable that we’ll have to sort this out at some point.”

Couldn’t agree more.

Instead, Your Party is now run by a “collective leadership”, a committee that cannot be chaired by the likes of Corbyn or Sultana (serves them right) and modelled on the kind of Politburo favoured by Soviet-era people’s republics. I suspect it will, inevitably, evolve into a form of Leninist “democratic centralism”, where arguably democratic decisions are implemented with ruthlessness. Out of this, mark my words, will emerge some obscure bureaucrat backed by a clique who uses their guile to take over the organisation. Your Party will not be immune from the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

It was a farce, but not always a funny one. Sultana’s speech was, quite honestly, terrifying in its political culture – hard, vengeful, extremist and strident, if not violent, language.

Among other things, she wants to put Keir Starmer, David Lammy and Shabana Mahmood in the dock at The Hague for complicity in genocide. She wants a one-state Palestine “from the river to the sea”, which at least implies the end of the state of Israel. Wanting to expel the Israeli ambassador and shut the embassy are other clues, I suppose. She wants to nationalise the financial system (which, to be fair, we do only tend to do when it suits the bankers) and drive the billionaires out of the country. Her faction thinks that Corbyn, cruelly nicknamed “Jezbollah” in the capitalist press, is actually a “Zionist”. I don’t like vulgar abuse, but making out that Corbyn supports Netanyahu is nuts.

Could Your Party ever be our party? I’m not sure they can unite their own membership, split as they still are. Somewhere, there’s £800,000 in party donations stuck in a Hegelian limbo between Corbynites and the Sultanans.

But it is on matters of policy that the schism looks even more serious. Just before the party’s messy birth, two of its handful of founding independent MPs abandoned it, shortly after Sultana gave a speech in which she made clear that support for the trans community was non-negotiable – which flies in the face of the social conservatism that prevails in some Muslim communities to which the Your Party hopes to appeal.

For now, the Greens have opted to keep their distance, refusing any discussion of electoral pacts, rightly fearing contamination by chaos. Even George Galloway is wary of getting involved. In due course, it will split and collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, just as Respect and every similar experiment have done.

Your Party is destined to end up as no one’s party – and, deep down, they know it.