https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/decent-limits
Tom Hazeldine
10 December 2025 Politics

‘The new Party came out already at this first Congress stronger than the SDF [Social Democratic Federation] or the Fabians, if not stronger than both put together’, wrote Engels of the ethical-socialist Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford in 1893. ‘Of course, there will be stupidities enough, and cliques of every kind too, but so long as it is possible to keep them within decent limits – – .’

And so to the inaugural conference of Your Party on the chilly Liverpool waterfront in the last weekend of November. Sponsored by former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, and pro-Gaza Independents Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan, Your Party has come out of its sometimes-fractious congress with a proud claim of 55,000 members, making it the largest socialist grouping in the country.

For many of its supporters, Your Party represents a break with Labourism. It would never have happened – certainly not with Corbyn at the helm, who is Labourist to his fingertips – had Starmer’s purge not gone out of its way to provoke it. Historically, Labour’s rulers had tolerated a minority socialist current in its ranks, including the ILP observed by Engels above, since its influence was so successfully neutered by the Party’s Fabian-designed construction. This put Labour governments and the Parliamentary Labour Party as a whole (i.e., all Labour MPs) above and beyond any accountability to the members, even if radical motions (occasionally) got through the annual party conferences, dominated by a small coterie of trade-union bureaucrats and a notoriously opaque system of committees.

That complacency was shaken when members unexpectedly chose Corbyn, a veteran anti-imperialist backbench left-winger, as Party leader in 2015 in preference to a slate of second-generation New Labourites. For the vast majority of identikit Labour MPs and apparatchiks, formed during Blair and Brown’s neoliberal high noon, Corbyn was anathema. Following an unprecedented establishment smear campaign led by the Guardian and BBC, and backstabbing on Brexit by his shadow cabinet, Corbyn led Labour to resounding defeat in December 2019. Within six months of his replacement by Starmer in April 2020, he had been suspended from the Party. He was readmitted to membership but Starmer refused to restore the parliamentary whip and the National Executive Committee endorsed this, barring him from standing again for the Party. As a ‘senior Labour figure’ – often a synonym for Mandelson or his epigone, Morgan McSweeney – gleefully briefed the Guardian: ‘Jeremy Corbyn is never getting back in.’

Cast out by Labour, Corbyn launched a minor extra-parliamentary venture, the Peace and Justice Project, but hesitated to convert it into an electoral vehicle that could mobilize the hundreds of thousands quitting Starmer’s Labour Party after 2020. Old allies made clear they were going nowhere. Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell told the New Statesman he wanted to ‘avoid splits and divisions’, and the magazine lauded him ‘for staying and fighting’. Instead Corbyn went into the 2024 general election as an independent, comfortably fending off a Labour challenger. On his return to the Commons he formed an Independent Alliance with four Muslim independents who had toppled Labour incumbents by leading campaigns against British complicity in the destruction of Gaza. But there was still no move to rally the left opposition to Labour.

The spur for a new party came from anger at Starmer’s record in office since July 2024, above all his military-diplomatic support for Israel’s genocidal assault which has generated one of the largest Palestine solidarity movements in Europe. Among those pushing for a new organization were the ex-Respect Party leader Salma Yaqoob, South African campaigner Andrew Feinstein and Zarah Sultana, the 31-year-old MP for Coventry South. A militant and adept communicator with a large social-media following, Sultana was radicalized by the 2010 student movement against tuition fees, worked for Labour’s Community Organizing Unit while Corbyn was leader and won her Midlands seat in 2019. She was one of seven Labour MPs, including McDonnell, to lose the whip shortly after Starmer entered Downing Street for rebelling against the government’s retention of a two-child cap on state benefits first introduced by the Conservatives. (Starmer has since caved to pressure from MPs after a pre-emptive move against potential leadership challengers blew up in his face. He now says that lifting the cap was part of his ‘moral mission’ all along.)

On 3 July, planning for Your Party came to a head. At an online meeting convened by Yaqoob, Feinstein tabled a motion for Corbyn and Sultana to co-lead its founding. Corbyn and his allies demurred, but the motion passed and Sultana made it public. Corbyn was reportedly furious, and relations between the two plummeted. However unlikely to work in practice, the prospective joint ticket of Corbyn and his heir apparent was galvanising: within a few weeks, 750,000 people registered an interest in supporting the provisionally named Your Party, and a snap YouGov poll – however soft – indicated that 18 per cent of voters would consider supporting it, rising to 30 per cent among Labour voters.

It’s by no means a complete break with Starmerism among the parliamentary left. There are over two dozen MPs in the backbench Labour Socialist Campaign Group and none of the others has indicated they will jump ship. McDonnell told the i Paper that Corbyn and Sultana ‘want to be Labour MPs, they were forced out. They didn’t want to go out and set up a new party. Jeremy’s been in the Labour party, like me, over 50 years.’ Diane Abbott, Corbyn’s Shadow Home Secretary, said she warned Corbyn not do it and that she remained ‘at the heart of the Labour Party’.

Although Corbyn was bounced into launching Your Party, his team has asserted his preeminent authority to oversee it. The founding process was to be ‘stewarded’ by the Independent Alliance, though two of its MPs soon dropped out. Operational control fell to veterans of Corbyn’s Leader’s Office, in particular former Chief of Staff Karie Murphy, an ally of union leader Len McCluskey. Sultana was reportedly left out in the cold. An email setting out a ‘roadmap’ to the founding conference was sent to registered supporters on 15 September, apparently without her approval. Three days later she unilaterally launched a membership portal, which in less than three hours 20,000 people had joined.

It was a second high-stakes gambit, and this time Corbyn called it out in extraordinary fashion. He said that legal advice was being taken and members should cancel their payments. Sultana retorted that she had acted to ‘safeguard grassroots involvement’ after being marginalized by a ‘sexist boy’s club’ and warned against ‘Karie Murphy and her associates having sole financial control of members’ money and sole constitutional control over our conference’. The Corbyn camp rejected her accusations and referred her to the Information Commissioner’s Officer, a government quango. She threatened legal action of her own. The negative social-media reaction to these antics from supporters obliged both figures to simmer down. Recruitment of new members slowed in the aftermath. But, significantly, well-attended regional meetings went ahead and proto-branches began to form.

This wasn’t just a personality clash or positional struggle. Sultana has been open about her views on the limitations of Corbyn’s spell as Labour leader, arguing that lessons needed to be learned. Corbyn and the people closest to him find this neuralgic. There was also a tug of war over party finances, with Corbyn going public to complain that Sultana was withholding donations, which she denied. Sultana went back on the offensive at an eve-of-conference rally in Liverpool, criticizing a pre-emptive ban by conference organizers of the small far-left Socialist Workers Party. Corbyn meanwhile hosted a poetry reading across town. Sultana then boycotted the first day of the conference after a member of her team was denied entry to the venue, condemning the ‘witch-hunt’ and anonymous briefings to the right-wing press, adding that she didn’t leave the Labour Party to create another one.

Faced with these squabbles, the bourgeois papers were only too happy to write Your Party’s obituary. ‘Spectacular own-goal squanders a golden opportunity’, crowed the Times, while according to the Guardian the conference showed ‘little sign of achieving [a] fresh start’. By this point, however, spats between Corbyn and Sultana hardly counted as news. The media buried the lede, which is that the conference happened at all, passed off without a split, settled the Party’s constitution and endorsed the bare outline of a socialist credo.

Two-and-a-half-thousand delegates packed into a theatre-sized partition of the vast Liverpool Exhibition Centre. They greeted Corbyn fairly warmly when he opened the conference on Saturday morning in a speech attacking the widely loathed privatized water industry and arguing for support for refugees and justice for Gaza. The main business was to debate selected points of the Party’s structure, political statement, organizing strategy and standing orders. Voting was open to 21,000 verified members including those watching online, just under half taking part. Denied a co-leadership option on the ballot, Sultana threw her weight behind a proposal for collective leadership by an Officers’ Group of elected lay members rather than MPs, whereas Corbyn said he thought having a single leader would cut through better with the public. The vote came down narrowly (52:48) in favour of collective leadership, though it’s open to review in two years’ time.

Larger majorities resolved that Your Party ‘should explicitly signal it is a socialist party’ and permit dual membership with aligned parties, the latter to good-humoured ‘oohs’ from the floor. There were also fraternal speeches from representatives of La France Insoumise, Die Linke and the Workers’ Party of Belgium. Sultana was called to the podium from the conference floor on Sunday afternoon, giving a fiery speech urging that Your Party not become ‘Labour 2.0’ while Corbyn looked on tight-lipped from the platform. She also called for the complete severance of diplomatic ties with Israel. Corbyn closed the conference by revealing that members had voted to retain the name Your Party over the drab proposed alternatives – Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many.

Even though its predictions must be taken with a pinch of salt, Electoral Calculus had indicated before the conference that Your Party might win 13 Westminster seats with just 4 per cent of the national vote, toppling Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in Birmingham Ladywood and Health Secretary Wes Streeting in Ilford North in the process. Your Party’s stated membership is a third of the size of the Greens, who have surged to 170,000 under eco-populist Zack Polanski. So much organized political activity to the left of Labour has not been seen since the 1960s.

It’s one aspect of a broader drop in support for the governing parties. Labour and the Conservatives are down to 18 and 17 per cent respectively in Politico’s poll-of-polls. Reform has been the principal beneficiary, at 27 per cent. The Greens are up to 14 per cent. Renewed Toryism under Reform seems the likeliest scenario for declining Britain, but the fragmentation of voter preferences makes the dynamics of the First Past the Post electoral system increasingly unpredictable, and what happens over the next few years is anyone’s guess. Any serious political challenger will also have to grapple with the condition of the country: stagnant wages, rising costs for housing, food and fuel, stark regional inequalities, a crisis-hit NHS, the Thatcherite privatization of utilities bringing them close to collapse. Cliques and stupidities aside, Your Party has plenty of thinking to do.