Your Party: leaderless or just hopeless?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, we're in Liverpool to see if your party can get it together.

0:22Now is the moment you've all been waiting for. It's taken five months, countless regional assemblies and a lot of bickering. But finally, this weekend, in a conference hall in Liverpool, it came down to a vote. We have principles, and above all, we have a name. 17 ,000 people have spoken, and the permanent name for the party, temporarily known as Your Party, is... Your party is the name of your party. The next big question was, who should lead it? Jeremy Corbyn, Zara Sultana, both of them at once? You voted for a collective leadership. Ultimately, members decided they wouldn't have a single leader at all.

1:06The party will be led by committee. But will it end the chaos?

1:14Guardian reporter Geraldine McKelvey was in Liverpool on the weekend for your party's conference. And you found members disappointed but determined to make your party work. So what do you think about the fact that your party has had a fairly chaotic start to life? I mean, I think the organisers have made a right mess of it. I do think a lot of the organisational mistakes have been very regrettable and I don't want to see the same people in charge of the party. So one of my friends, she describes the process of creating a new party a bit like giving birth to a child. Like, the process is very difficult.

1:45By the end of it, you've got something that you sort of love and nurture or the rest of it. I think it's a moment. You know, I think this is a really historic moment.

1:57But can a party so mired in disagreement really unite the left, especially with Zach Polanski and the Greens on the up? And when its inaugural conference began with one of its founders' boycotting proceedings? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, can a leaderless party really hope for electoral success?

2:26Morning everyone and welcome to Liverpool and welcome to the first Your Party conference. So Geraldine, you spent your weekend in Liverpool at the first ever Your Party conference, you lucky duck. They promised it would be momentous, a new dawn for the left in Britain, was it? well actually when I first got there on Saturday my first thought was that it was quite subdued it felt very different from the Labour Party conference which had taken place in the same venue two months ago it was really lively there was loads of protests there were loads of people leafleting outside and it felt very very muted in response to that but when I actually got into the hall it felt quite fraught and quite chaotic you know lots of people didn't know where things were supposed to be happening and that kind of thing.

3:17And I did sense some frustration among some delegates who perhaps felt that the purity of the socialist project was being given priority over actually talking about the issues that affect voters. Right. And at one point they were talking about maybe 12 ,000, potentially 13 ,000 people turning up to this thing. What was the reality? How many people showed up and what sort of people were they? So I don't think there were anything close to 12 ,000 people there. The official line from your party was that there were around 2 ,500 delegates who were picked by a sort of lottery system called Sortition.

3:51There were some other people outside, some people from the Communist Party and other socialist parties who were handing out some leaflets, but it was nothing close to those numbers. It was quite a diverse group of people. There was a lot of people from cities, a lot of people from London, but a lot of people who lived in Liverpool where the conference was being held. Almost everybody I spoke to at some point in their political life had been a member of the Labour Party. There were some people who had joined the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn and then left when he was no longer leader. So we're sort of pure Corbynites.

4:26There were other people who had been sort of old school left wing Labour activists and members and organisers for years. People who would be probably on the left of the traditional Labour Party. We offer something democratic and something inclusive that challenges what I call the triopoly of political thinking in Westminster, where you've got Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems fundamentally on the same page on economic thinking. They believe in austerity. They do not believe in redistribution. I think the key things that people were angry about were what they saw as an inadequate response to the situation in Gaza and Labour's pivot to the right on immigration and asylum.

5:05Yeah, and I noticed on one of the days on the weekend, there was a former Labour MP, Claudia Webb, who was chairing the whole thing. And for those with short memories, Claudia Webb was expelled from the Labour Party after she was convicted for harassing the new partner of her ex, and yet there she was, centre stage. So you have one further task, Conference, and that is for you to now vote on the two papers that we discussed yesterday. And there were two people who you would really expect to be there on day one of this momentous conference. Jeremy Corbyn and Sara Sultana and only one of them took part on the first day.

5:50What was all that about? So I, for several days before the conference started, I'd been trying to get an interview with Zahra Sultana and her advisors had always indicated that she was willing to do it, but the logistics kind of were shrouded in mystery until the last moment. And I expected to be meeting Zahra Sultana somewhere within the conference venue. So I was a bit surprised when her advisor said, would you actually be able to meet her at a coffee shop, which was about a mile from the venue? So first of all, there's a lot of disaffected Labour voters out there. Why should they pick New York party as opposed to, for example, the kings?

6:21The Labour Party got elected on a manifesto. And this was all kind of going on while Jeremy Corbyn was making his opening address to conference. Good morning, everybody. I introduced myself, Jeremy Corbyn, political activist from Islington North. I thought that was quite strange. And I asked her how she was getting on with Jeremy Corbyn. And she insisted that she was getting on well with Corbyn. and they wanted conference to be a sort of positive, joyful experience for the delegates. But she did say that relations were still very fraught with some of his advisors, who she accused of briefing against her, particularly to the right-wing press.

7:01I have experienced the toxic culture myself. I have been briefed against to the Murdoch press. I have received legal threats. There has been bullying. There's been intimidation. there's been smears, there's been acts of deliberate sabotage. And then several years later, about three years later, it transpired that Zahra Sultana wouldn't be attending the first day of the conference or at least wouldn't be on the conference, entering the conference hall. And the reason she gave for that was that some would-be delegates had turned up and were told that they couldn't get into the conference. And the reason for that was that they had membership of other left-wing political organisations, to particularly the Socialist Workers' Party.

7:47And Zahra Sultana's position was that the conference should be for all socialists and that shouldn't exclude people from attending. Right, OK. So she boycotted the first day of the conference celebrating the party that she co-founded. Yes, so that kind of probably sums up how factional and divided your party is at the moment.

8:13Peter Walker, you're a senior political correspondent at The Guardian and a familiar voice to our listeners. So thank you once again for taking the time for us. It is a pleasure. Always a pleasure. And you published a really great long read, looking at the chaos that has been swirling around this party ever since it was born and in the run up to the conference on the weekend. And that chaos continued in Liverpool, where you had Zahra Sultana boycotting her own conference. What has it been like reporting on this party? I mean, it's interesting in the sense that I've been talking to people off the record.

8:46I've been trying to get them to be as honest as they can. And I've been speaking to as wide a variety of people as possible. And a lot of people are quite bruised by it. Some of the interviews, I felt I should like invoice them for a therapy session. There is this worry that your party is becoming this kind of cliche of a laughingstock of a left-wing party that, you know, completely falls out. And one person did say, you know, that at one point they had six MPs and four factions between the six. Yeah, it is certainly suboptimal. And we did an episode about the first few rocky months of your party, which we will link to in the episode description.

9:21But to recap for those at the back, discussions over starting a new left party began in earnest probably after the 2024 general election when Corbyn won his seat as an independent. He'd been booted out, of course, by Keir Starmer. And there were four other independents who won Labour seats in the urban North and Midlands on what you could loosely describe as pro-Gaza tickets. And then Zara Sultana gets on board after she loses the Labour whip after a series of rebellions and then things get messy very quickly. And it all sort of comes to a head one Thursday in July when Sultana appears to jump the gun and goes public.

9:59She says, hey guys, I'm forming this new party with Jeremy Corbyn. And from Corbyn came nothing. There was just a complete silence. And when he did eventually say something, it was, shall we say, equivocal. He said, discussions are ongoing. And that Thursday when she went public, I've seen it referred to as terrible Thursday for your party. And things haven't really got much better from there, have they? But tell us, what was this party originally supposed to stand for? What united its founders? I mean, in some ways, they've got a lot of common ground in that there are people broadly from the left, who felt that there was an electoral opportunity, but also an ideological opportunity to take advantage of the fact that the Stama government was being seen as tacking towards the right.

10:44I knew that this Labour government wasn't going to bring about socialism. But I did not think it would be this bad this quickly in I mean, it's slightly complicated by the fact that the Gaza independents, to loosely call them that, I mean, they don't like being called that because that's just one strand of what they do, represent electoral coalitions that are slightly more socially conservative, tend to be Muslim, and were not progressive in the cultural sense of things. Corbyn can probably work with that, but Zahra Sultana has got quite a punchy approach to social media and she has very strong reviews on things like trans rights and so on.

11:24And if people don't have pro-trans, pro-migrant, anti-racist values, then like I said, there are plenty of other political spaces that you can enter, but not this one because we have to have our values. Sultana's allies say she's just standing up for what she believes. But other people have accused her of having this kind of slightly student politics approach to it, where she will not cooperate, will not compromise. And one of the effects of this is that two of the four guards of independence have now completely cut ties with your party. One of them in particular said that they were really disillusioned by infighting this atmosphere.

12:06They said it was very toxic. What else was going on behind the scenes? there seemed to be a real muddle over the membership database and the money that had been raised for the party. Well, this is the other thing. This is the bit that connects the two strands there. In mid-September, there was another fait accompli by the Sultana team where she basically launched a membership portal, which was this kind of website saying, if you want to join your party, then give your details here, sign up, you know, pay X pounds. And the problem was, this was, again, Again, this was something that she unilaterally launched.

12:40And Corbyn was openly outraged by this. He said he was going to report her to the Information Commissioner's office for unauthorised use of data. Because she basically, they said, used her own personal portal saying this was a Your Party vehicle when it wasn't. And all the data and all the money went to her. I mean, it officially went to this slightly strange holding company where the directors were three people kind of semi-associated with the Corbyn project in the past. But Team Corbyn were not ready for this to take place. And, you know, this is like a story which shows just how split all this was, because apparently by this point, your party had spent£13 ,000 on software to have their own membership portal.

13:24And they were getting ready to jointly launch one. and apparently Sultana wanted to use this membership portal and was about to do so, but Team Corbyn got wind of what she was up to. So sent her staffer into the office at three in the morning to change her passwords to lock her out of it. What? So these are people who are supposed to be working together that are kind of conducting black ops against each other to try and sabotage. Well, I mean, not sabotage, but basically they would say to stop her from unilaterally doing this. So you had the situation where Corbyn was accusing her of mishandling data.

13:54What a mess. At one point, Sultana in return said she was consulting defamation lawyers because of what she said was this tirade of abuse from what she called a boys club. Yeah, a sexist boys club, she said, didn't she? A sexist boys club, indeed. And things have settled down since then, but things are not good. Various people have told me that basically in around September, Sultana kind of exited the mass WhatsApp groups in your party. And since then hasn't really had much direct communication with them. They're still officially all part of the same group. but they're not really talking to each other.

14:27And what a lot of people have been saying to me as well is just this sense of disappointment that when Sultana launched this initial kind of call out for people, she got hundreds of thousands of people wanting to do it. And then when she launched this membership portal, getting£800 ,000 is a huge amount of money. They're saying, if we'd done it properly, if we'd been obviously unified, there's so much interest in this, how much better could it have been? Yeah, and you said that Sultana was getting impatient. I think quite a lot of people would have sympathy with that because all of this is playing out just as Zach Polanski enters the scene as the new leader of the Green Party.

15:01His profile is soaring. He's massively increased membership as well as the Greens' popularity in the polls. I wonder how much the rise of Polanski in the Green Party has been troubling those involved in your party and how threatened they feel by him. They're very aware of it. I mean, an important point of context to put in is that pretty much everyone, even his allies and friends, agree that Corbyn can be slightly frustrating to deal with. Late summer and early autumn, where a lot of the decisions had to be made. And as someone said, he's got a tendency to disappear to his allotment for 24 hours without his phone.

15:35And other people were saying it's very difficult to know what he means. Someone was saying that there's this whole industry of what they call Jeremy whispers, who try to interpret what he actually says. And so you can understand if you've got someone, you know, like Zahra Sultana, who is younger, more forthright, keen to get things done, it could be very frustrating. But in terms of Zapolansky, they're aware that this is potentially an opportunity lost, because Green membership has gone up massively. And I think there's quite a lot of people who were tempted by your party who've now joined the Greens, which might partly explain the Green Party membership surge.

16:12You know, I don't think all is lost because, you know, I think the Greens are temperamentally and ideologically still a slightly different beast. So there's quite a few people who would still be more tempted by this slightly more traditional Corbynism. And it doesn't mean they necessarily can't work with each other. As one person was saying, that if your party does actually get going, you might end up in a situation where they kind of informally ally with the Greens and stand aside for each other. But it is very true that a lot of people who've been involved of your party, look at the Greens and have this slightly wistful thing of, you know, this could have been us.

16:50Coming up, after a start like this, is there really any hope for your party?

17:07Hi today on Focus listeners, Lucy Hoff here. I'm excited to let you know that I'm hosting a new evening edition of the podcast called The Latest. I'll be bringing you up to speed on the news story that everybody's talking about in just 10 minutes every weekday. And in very exciting news, you can also watch The Latest from Today in Focus on YouTube.

17:29There was a lot of build up to this conference about what shape the party would take, how it would be organised, what it would be called and, of course, who would lead it. what did they actually decide? So they had put to members that there could be two options for leadership there could be a single leader model which is kind of the traditional way political parties are run where the members elect one person to run the party or there could be a collective leadership model where there's a sort of committee of lay members lay members being people who aren't councillors or MPs to take charge and take all of the kind of key party decisions that a traditional party leader would normally take.

18:08Now there was a split between Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultana on this. Jeremy Corbyn favoured a single leadership model and indicated that he would probably stand if that was what the members decided. Zahra Sultana favoured the collective leadership model and in the end the members voted very narrowly I think by about 51.6 % for the collective leadership model so that is how your party at least initially will be run going forward. Right okay and I guess one reading of this is that Corbyn has kind of been outflanked on this matter by people further to the left than him. If he was the one saying do you know what guys I think it'd be better if we just had a single leader model and then he was albeit narrowly outvoted.

18:52I think the phrase that Sultana used when I spoke to her on Saturday was that they were trying to ensure maximum member democracy so every decision that's made seems to have a big kind of buy-in from the membership. And I think that's the model that they're kind of aiming for going forward. Yeah, and I guess anybody who's been to Labour Conference might think, well, fair enough, because if you go to Labour Conference, there's this slightly odd scenario where delegates, so ordinary members of constituency parties, get up, don't they? And then they propose motions. Conference votes for these motions.

19:22They're often quite left-wing motions. And then the party leadership completely ignores them and carries on as they were before. So this does feel like potentially a fresh way of doing things, whether it will work out is anybody's guess. I think that's what they're aiming for. I think Sultana said at the weekend they don't want to be Labour 2.0 so they don't want to be a slightly more left-wing version of the Labour Party. They want this to feel fresh and to feel like a completely different model from what's gone before. Whether in practice having votes, member votes on so many issues is workable and going forward and is sustainable for a political party will remain to be seen as the months and years go on.

20:03Yeah, and you actually spoke to both Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultana about all of this in Liverpool. Did you get a sense that they are on the same page? The short answer is no. I think that they're quite divided on some key issues. The other thing they were obviously divided on was dual membership. And again, Sultana seems to have won that argument because the party members have voted to allow members to have dual membership of some other left-wing organisations if their values are seen to be aligned with that of your party. The one thing they did agree on was that they would consider doing electoral pacts with the Greens.

20:43I think that they were concerned about the rise of reform, about the rise of the populist right, and I think that they would consider, you know, standing down candidates in order to let the Greens have a decent one at a seat in order not to split the left-wing vote. And that was something they both were keen not to rule out.

21:10And I guess we might have expected this founding conference for a new socialist party to have really laser-focused on presenting a really clear left alternative to a Labour government that are incredibly unpopular. Did they? The impression I got from delegates was that, from some delegates, not all, was that they felt that some of the really pressing social issues that are facing Britain today, I'm thinking of things like the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, Labour's immigration policies, the unpopularity of the policies on things like the new asylum system they're proposing, were not given as much prominence as sort of really procedural stuff like what the party should be called, what its leadership model should be, should identify.

21:54explicitly as socialist should identify explicitly as working class there was lots of time on the floor giving up to those kind of questions and while some of the social issues were touched upon there were some delegates who were like I really want to talk about rogue landlords I really want to talk about housing I really want to talk about the cost of living crisis and and one delegate actually told me he really wanted to talk about how your party would support small business and where small businesses would fit into the your party model because he was a small business owner Well, you know, I mean, the first step is to start listening to small businesses.