It would not be exaggerating to say that the hopes and expectations raised by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s appeal in July to join “a new kind of political party” to take on the “corporations and billionaires” have dimmed as the process of actually founding the new party has gone on.
The inaugural conference of Your Party in Liverpool, taking place after this edition of Socialism Today has gone to press, might achieve a reset of sorts. On the other hand, the unresolved differences between its leading figures and their supporters, not least between the separate camps around Corbyn and Sultana, could come to a head sooner rather than later.
As the conference date approached two of the four ‘Independents for Gaza’ MPs victorious at the 2024 general election – Adnan Hussain in Blackburn and Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury & Batley, part of the Independent Alliance established as an official parliamentary group with Jeremy Corbyn in September 2024 – resigned from the Your Party steering group (but not from the Independent Alliance), protesting at “allegations and smears” made against them and “clique-like behaviour and gatekeeping”. Whatever the outcome of Liverpool is, there is no prospect of an immediate rekindling of the enthusiasm that saw 800,000 people respond to the initial call, with the possible imminent creation of a new, mass vehicle of working-class political representation that was posed then.
Nevertheless, with a reported signed-up membership of 53,000 and a presence still in parliament and some local councils, Your Party – if that is to remain its name – could yet play a not unimportant role in the future development of such a party. Perhaps analogous to that performed by Keir Hardie and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) after its founding in 1893 in paving the way for the formation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900, the immediate precursor organisation of the Labour Party.
But that broader task of establishing a new, mass socialist workers’ party – capable of politically cohering the main mass organisations of the working class, the trade unions, with the anti-war movement, community campaigners, and others – remains to be fulfilled. And part of accomplishing it is for socialists and worker activists to honestly examine why the potential which was so clearly revealed in July has not been realised this time around.
Muslim workers and a new party
Given the failure of the workers’ movement to act before the general election, that it was possible to begin the foundation of a new party with an already existing bloc of MPs in place was due to the mass movement against the war on the Palestinians that has developed since October 2023, with its especial impact on the consciousness of workers and others from a Muslim background towards the Labour Party. But that also raised the complex question of how that break with Labour could have been consolidated and expanded to other sections of the working class in the process of establishing Your Party.
This is not to suggest, of course, that it is only Muslims who have protested at Starmer’s acquiescence with the slaughter of the Palestinians, or that the discontent with Labour of Muslim workers has been limited to that. However, as Socialism Today explained in our post-general election analysis, in the 92 parliamentary constituencies where a tenth or more of the population identify as Muslim, Labour’s vote in 2024 fell to 1.58 million from 2.41 million in 2019, a drop of 34%, compared to the overall fall of 5% in the absolute number of votes won by Starmer in his ‘mile wide but inch deep’ general election victory. There is, indisputably, a differential consciousness here.
But has the process of establishing a new party since the election acted as a bridge to draw Muslim workers towards seeing their common interests with other sections of the working class? Or raised insistently in the trade union movement the danger of entrenching divisions in the working class – between Muslim and non-Muslim workers certainly – if the unions continue to be seen as politically tied to the Labour government and its austerity and war agenda? Socialist Party members in the unions, for example, have been arguing for the Independent Alliance MPs to be invited to union executives to discuss the question of working-class political representation. But have the MPs in turn – and others involved in the Your Party foundation process – been pushing for the same?
In his resignation letter Adnan Hussain spoke of being “deeply troubled by the way certain figures within the steering process, particularly Muslim men, have been spoken about and treated” by some supporters of the new party. He also defended his vision of a movement “including working class communities like in my own constituency, people of faith, and those who may be socially conservative yet economically left-leaning, while holding firm to a commitment to equality, justice and anti-racism”, which has been denounced by some as being incompatible with membership of Your Party. If this now leads to Hussain and his support base turning to the idea that Muslim workers should instead ‘look only to themselves’ and, as organisations like the Muslim Vote pose things, ‘defend our community by negotiating with all parties alike’ within capitalism rather than organise for system change, that would be a step backwards and a blow to workers’ unity.
All ideas within the workers’ movement pitting one section against another, including ‘social conservativism’, should of course be firmly but patiently challenged politically as also threatening workers’ unity. But that, unfortunately, hasn’t been the approach of many in both camps in Your Party who have looked instead to administrative measures to answer political issues, with the result that divisions have not been lessened but exacerbated.
Fundamentally, however, it is true that divisive ideas could be most persuasively answered by workers’ organisations, above all, the trade unions and authoritative leaders of the workers’ movement arguing for a new workers’ party, showing in practice that the working class can be united with a socialist programme that challenges the capitalist system in the interests of all. But that hasn’t been the role – barring a handful of exceptions – of the trade union leaders both before and during the seventeen months to date of Starmer’s rule and it is they, above all, who are responsible for the missed opportunities there have been to create a mass political vehicle for the working class.
The role of the unions
Was it ever a realistic prospect though that the trade unions, or at least those with leaders standing on the left, could be pushed into taking the lead in the establishment of a new workers’ party? Even those who have appeared on platforms organised by Your Party supporters have done so to support ‘somebody else’ in the organisation of a new party, not to take responsibility for establishing a working-class political alternative themselves.
But that could have been challenged. Trade unions are the basic core organisations of the working class because they are the first line of defence for workers’ material interests, the conditions they share with each other, their collective class interests. They are also, it is true, institutions, with an inevitable conservative tendency to not risk the position they have established in capitalist society, but they are not monoliths, unchanging and unchangeable. They contain within themselves the possibility for far greater collective consciousness and action than even other numerically comparable voluntary organisations.
Some in Your Party, however, have approached the trade unions as though they were supplicants to the new party, with structures and programme presented to them rather than for the unions to democratically decide themselves their own position on how a mass workers’ party could be formed. Some have also spoken, in rejecting the idea that trade unions should be able to affiliate to a new party with democratic rights of representation within its structures, of ‘special privileges’. That is totally wrong. If the capitalists can organise for their class interests within a political party through their control of the media, the education system, the parliamentary officialdom and other institutions of wealth and power in society, why shouldn’t workers be able to organise for their interests?
Ironically it has been alleged ‘lefts’ in Your Party who have been the biggest proponents of the ‘immutability’ of trade unions and, therefore, opponents of their participation in it as collective organisations. In the article by Hannah Sell in the previous edition of Socialism Today (Your Party And The Left, No.292, November 2025), the argument was made that “it would be a serious mistake not to take on the fight to win unions as a whole to affiliating to a new party, on the defeatist grounds that the inevitable result would be a party being derailed by the trade union bureaucracy”.
“Are the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and RS21”, it went on, “really arguing that it would not be a step forward if a union was to elect a left leadership, a Bob Crow figure for example, that argued in favour of their union affiliating and playing a role in building a new party on clear, class lines?” This has been ‘answered’ by critics who counter, but would it be a step forward if right-wing led unions like UNISON affiliated so as to try and stymie the new party and prevent it developing to the left?
Actually, the answer would still be yes. If the right wing in UNISON or the GMB etc did successfully push to disaffiliate these unions from Labour and to affiliate to a new party that would be a step forward. But what support base would they rest on then to persuade the membership newly liberated from Labour to oppose, for example, a fighting anti-austerity stance in the new party? Certainly not without opening up a new fight, in the new party and in the union. Unlike in the long post-war boom period, when right-wing general secretaries ruled the unions and through them the Labour Party on the basis that they were delivering reforms, their counterparts in this new era of deep capitalist crisis can offer nothing to their members but further attacks.
The fundamental point is that neither the right wing in the unions, nor indeed the left leaders, want to take responsibility for providing a governmental alternative to capitalism and its political representatives because they have no programme to do so. But it is by pushing them to ‘take the power’ that Marxists can best prove the leaders’ inadequacy, and the need for a full socialist programme, not just for a minority of activists but for the broader mass. It was on those grounds that Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s great collaborator, welcomed the formation of the ILP, which then went on to play an important role, in the trade unions but also in the working-class cooperatives and other social movements, to push for the formation of the Labour Party, which it joined as an affiliated organisation.
But today’s left leaders? Even compared to Keir Hardie, never mind the leaders of militant ‘New Unionism’ like Ben Tillett and Tom Mann? But that is why the reference to Bob Crow is also important. As Peter Taaffe wrote in the Socialist Party’s obituary for Bob on his untimely death in 2014, his emergence as a leader was also a tribute to “the strength of the British working class to produce such fighters”, even in the difficult period since the collapse of Stalinism in the late 1980s and early 1990s threw back socialist consciousness and workers’ organisation.
The working class has created its own party and socialist leaders before and, in the stormy times to come, will have opportunities to do so again. And the process will be all the more speedy and certain if all the lessons of current and previous attempts are fully discussed and learned.