For a few days in Manchester last weekend, there was a utopia. The World Transformed conference of British socialists had taken over Hulme – the once rough but now bohemian part of the city – and in the middle of it all, at the Community Garden Centre, a collectivist’s dream was established. All day comrades sat there in the sun on the edges of flower beds and on picnic benches, having doctrinal debates, eating vegan food, reading homemade pamphlets. The garden centre was the conference’s locus, where attendees mixed joyfully between workshops and discussions away from the horrors of the real world. ‘Comrades have done an awful lot of work to get us to this point,’ said one lounging revolutionary.
And they were right. The two years since the 7 October attacks on Israel have been a great success for the radical left. The war in Gaza acted to unite the three causes of anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism and trans activism into a single family, and this resurgent group has found political representation in a set of leaders. With Zack Polanski in charge of the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana starting their new party, progressives can feasibly argue that Britain is on the edge of the greatest hard-left revival in a generation. If the Greens and Your Party cooperate, supporters think they could win a combined 50 seats at the next general election.
The World Transformed has previously been run alongside the Labour party conference, but in their buoyant mood comrades are no longer content with being the sideshow. This year they severed ties with Keir Starmer’s party. When activist old-timers look at the excitement of this current moment, it reminds them of glory days past. Tim, who I met in the garden centre one evening, was once a radical environmentalist. He ‘got burnout’ from too much protesting in the 1980s and withdrew from the scene for a few decades, but now he was back, inspired by those campaigning against the war in Gaza. As night fell he sat among his political descendants, educating himself on the new causes. ‘What is “food sovereignty”?’ he asked.
The activists genuinely get on. The problem is that the politicians don’t. People who know Your Party say that Corbyn doesn’t reply to emails, is late to meetings, and in his heart ‘doesn’t actually want to do this’. He has delegated lots of responsibility to Karie Murphy, his chief-of-staff from when he was leader of the opposition.
The new venture has split into two crude factions: Murphy and her allies in one, representing Corbyn, and Sultana and her backers in the other. In June, Murphy’s faction tried to install Corbyn as the sole leader of the party, despite those close to Sultana saying he promised she could be co-leader if she left Labour. This backfired when Sultana’s team put forward a proposal, which was voted on and approved by Your Party’s organising committee, to confirm her position as joint leader. Sultana immediately announced the news on social media to confirm her position.
Even now, four months later, disagreements about the party’s leadership continue. ‘I’m not a big fan of co-leadership,’ Alan Gibbons tells me, who drafted the first proposal to put just Corbyn in charge. Sultana’s allies disagree that she was dropped because of high principles. At one point, they claim, Corbyn’s team wanted Lutfur Rahman, the Mayor of Tower Hamlets who was convicted of electoral fraud in 2015, to co-lead Your Party with him. There have been other scraps about finances, policy and the party’s structures. Those close to the organisation are not kind when asked to describe its inner workings. ‘A bin fire? A train wreck? I don’t know,’ says one.
Your Party’s problems have slowly bled through to its supporters via leaks to left-wing publications. There were flickers of anger at The World Transformed conference at the state of things. On the first day, after an interesting event called ‘Madness under capitalism’ (where attendees declared themselves ‘mad and proud’ and broke down the various ways our economic system was giving them mental disorders), comrades gathered in a storage unit on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Hulme to discuss the new venture. ‘There are people at the top of this party who want by hook or by crook to remain the hegemonic force in it,’ Max Shanly told the room. He is an influential left-wing activist and former Momentum official, and he was presumably referring to Murphy.
Sultana is making it difficult for the four independent alliance MPs to remain in Your Party
Members are also beginning to question the inclusion in the party of the ‘independent alliance’ MPs, who were elected last year mostly for their opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. In the storage unit meeting, Mish Rahman, a former member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, told the room he couldn’t understand why the independent alliance MPs were being allowed into Your Party. All four of them voted against introducing VAT on private schools, and some of them are landlords. Throughout the conference, in private and public, members questioned whether they were all that committed to transgender rights. They are not pure enough for the movement.
Sultana herself is making it difficult for the independent alliance group to remain in Your Party. At one conference event with Polanski – who she attacked for refusing to commit to withdrawing Britain from Nato – she said the new organisation would adopt a policy of mandatory re-selection. This means local members will decide each election whether their sitting MP is allowed to contest their seat again. This is seen as a threat to the independents whose voters in places such as Blackburn and Leicester are less likely to be members of the new party. Pressure is also being put on those MPs by Your Party officials to sell their rented properties.
In the Hulme Community Garden Centre everything was fine. Comrades laughed and drank and slapped each other on the back and asked: ‘How has your Transformed been?’ They lay about while their children, the future comrades, ran freely, and they listened to the conference’s custom radio station which crackled lightly from a set of speakers and told them everything was going just great. But that happy scene was fake. From socialism’s resurgence has emerged a dogfight.
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