The direction of Your Party 2025

 There has been a lot of chatter on the WhatsApp group(49 members) about the future direction of YP. On FB, here we have 228 followers and I wondered what your feelings are around the leadership and what kind of politics you want for YP. 

 

For transparency, I’ve reposted the ‘minimum political programme’ agreed upon at the ‘world transformed assembly’ in Manchester recently. 300 people from seven different ‘Socialist’ groupings voted for this programme to be adopted by YP branches. 

Within this document there is explicit opposition to the ‘so-called’ leadership of ‘Corbyn or Sultana’ stating that ‘they are not up to the task’. 


“These groups have agreed they will work together to fight around the founding conference of Your Party on this principled basis.”


Often the word ‘fight for’ is used by these, essentially party’s within a Party. Fighting and opposing the Parliamentary representatives is a recurrent theme. This is because most of these ‘groupings’ are ‘revolutionary socialist’ in nature and prioritise gaining leadership positions in branches and recruiting members to their organisations. There is declared opposition to taking up any minority position in any future government. ‘Your Party’ as a democratic socialist party using Parliamentary politics, is relegated and subsumed by ‘revolutionary politics’. 


So let’s be clear about it. There are apparently 2 factional camps going into the regional assemblies. 


1)

1917 Bolshevism-(a politics that looks back to the Russian revolution. Revolutionary in nature. 

2)

2017 Corbynism-(a politics grounded in 21stCentury UK trade union traditions, using a Parliamentary route to democratic socialism. 


I believe the vast majority of the 800,000 people who signed up to a proposed Party of the left, wish to continue the ‘Corbyn project’ which in 2017 got 12 million votes! 

I believe the majority would want a future YP to enter a coalition(in the event of a hung Parliament) and to extract some concessions in return for holding up a minority government. For example, a change to electoral reform including PR and demand bringing utilities, services and transport back into public ownership. 


I personally agree with pretty much all of the proposed ‘minimum programme’, but oppose the attempt by small revolutionary groups to take control of YP branches and seek to sow division and infighting. They see themselves as a ‘left leadership’ contrary to Jeremy and Zara and Parliamentary politics. The history of fringe left groupings is one of repeated splits and factional ‘fighting’. The constant ‘demands’ of ‘minimum political’ positions always leads to splintering and energy wasted on internal divides, rather than going outwards to talk with ordinary voters and their priorities. 


I also want an end to the neo-liberal consensus the ‘free market’ orthodoxy and a return to public ownership of all the major utilities, services etc. Realistically, a ‘mixed economy’ of nationalised  and private enterprise. Calls for the ‘abolition of capitalism’ and ‘workers control of the means of production’ are for the birds I’m afraid. Firstly, we need to protect the poorest in society against the worst excesses of vulture capitalism. The vulnerable, people on social security and low wages, the disabled, the sick, the elderly poor, minorities and migrants. We can do that with influence over governments from within the Parliamentary system and outside in mass campaigning. Secondly, we can force a redistribution of wealth through taxation and some form of ‘financial transaction tax’ to recoup the bankers ‘bail out’ during the 2008 ‘financial crash’. Thirdly, we can influence foreign policy, campaigning for a free Palestine, whether one-state or two, Russian with-drawl from Ukraine via a negotiated end to the war, thus opposing Western and Russian imperialism. 


The reality is the ‘revolutionary left’ will endlessly wait for the ‘revolution’ and prioritise that over the here and now. My instinct’s have always been with Corbyn (yes flaws exist like anyone) because he’s ‘walked the walk’. He has a lifetime of work to assess and analyse, always on the right side of history. In the tradition of Attlee/Bevan, of Tony Benn, he campaigns within and without Parliament. 

Our ‘revolutionary’ comrades don’t have that record, that experience and never could dream of getting 12 million votes from the ordinary people of the UK.   

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