‘Your Party Conference
Well comrades, I’ve been licking my wounds since conference. Absorbing arguments from each side, reflecting on what happened and what it means. I’m left bitterly disappointed and thoroughly disillusioned. Unless Jeremy leaves and joins somehow with the Greens, the ‘Corbynista’ movement is dead.
I was one of the 800,000 who signed up to support a Party of the many and not the few. The vast majority, by definition, were not the revolutionary left fringe factions who’ve consistently failed to unite and build a Socialist movement over decades. Most will now navigate to the Greens, along with much of the disaffected 55,000 members of YP at present. Now it will become the Party of the few, who’ve abandoned the many.
The Leadership factions go back to ‘Collective’ in 2023, one group mainly around JC with the other faction seeking to sideline Corbyn in favour of a coalition of left Party’s and groupings.
While both leadership factions worked with revolutionary groupings, Corbyn himself, made it clear he wanted a coalition not of the left, but of community activists, Trade Unionists, Muslim communities and our young people.
Rather than some kind of innocent, genuine faith in bottom up democracy, what I saw at Conference was a hijacking by the revolutionary factions and an anti-Corbyn coup. The impotence on the show of respect for Jeremy amongst speakers, including Zara, was palpable. What was on show, was barracking of speakers and stealing the mic from alternative voices, cynical, aggressive calls for ‘fighting’ and ‘defeating’ opponents. No room for speeches of ‘hope’ and appealing to ordinary voters concerns. No listening to debates, no thinking for yourself, only the ‘party line’. As one delegate put it:
“To me our principles should include integrity, fairness and listening to people. The behaviour of a lot of the speakers was in direct opposition to this. Unbalancing the debate by pretending to speak for one side then speaking for the other showed none of these qualities.”
Despite a prominent SWP person being barred from Conference(a Party that bans factions itself) many of its members were in Conference voting on bloc. As were many of the other factions(I counted 10!) handing out leaflets with instructions on voting decided by each of their external leaderships. Party’s openly organising within a Party. Knowing the history of the British left, how long does anyone think this ‘left coalition’ will last until the infighting starts up again?Duel membership and all power to the branches(rather than regional) is exactly the battleground the left factions wanted to aim for- controlling branch delegate positions being the war aim.
The narrative that has gained most traction, is that Zara has suffered a deluge of misogyny, bullying and unprovoked attacks. An alternative narrative might be she was working with Feinstein to sideline Corbyn from early on. Hence her jumping the gun on the launch of YP, seizing the membership portal and peoples money(including mine), all without the consent of JC and massively disrespectful to someone who she claimed would ‘co-lead the formation of Your Party’. I think this leadership faction never wanted to share it with Jeremy. They saw an opportunistic route to sharing the leadership themselves, using dual membership with revolutionary Party’s as a power base to push aside ‘Corbynism’, a move to eventually reach their end goal. The ‘collective leadership’ model will very quickly fall apart and elected spokespeople will be de-facto leaders anyway.
The Jacobin wrote:
“In a conference report for Novara praising Sultana and the new “collective leadership” of YP, Steven Methven appears to welcome the death of Corbynism, which he defines as being “socialist principles carried by a single figure,” pushed by a political party, with an “inclusive, warm and optimistic message” that has “a tendency to placate rather than confront.””
An ‘inclusive and optimistic’ message and a ‘different style of politics’ is what attracted so many people to the Corbyn project in 2017. Over 12 million people voted for his manifesto! Mamdani was successful in New York City with a similar coalition offering ‘hope’ not ‘confrontation’ as Methven would have it.
The Jacobin continue:
“The success of Corbynism required more, not less, of that dynamic. It is depressing to witness the jettisoning of such a powerful legacy of mass social politics in favor of constitutionalizing a small project with no hope of politically progressing. It can only have satisfied those with an active interest in political procedure, poaching members for already-existing parties, and a few decent diehards who will never give up.”
This Party was not mean’t to be your Party. This Party was not for the leadership factions. It was not for the revolutionary factions, activists or even the membership!
This Party was for everyday people, working class communities, minorities, people with disabilities and those on social security, our next generation, who all desperately need our support.
When clamouring for your position to be adopted, when demanding policy purity or absolutism, remember that demanding the Party is unequivocally for a ‘one-State solution’ in Palestine for example, is not only Western chauvinism(dictating to the Palestinian people the future of their liberation) but ‘dancing on the head of a pin’ to ordinary people who just want an end to the genocide and occupation.
They want policies that are achievable in the here and now. That means working in Parliament as well as community based activism. It means forming coalitions with people you might not always agree with, it might mean, god forgive!, a little compromise.
The Jacobin Magazine
Inside The Founding Of Jeremy Corbyn's New Party -PoliticsJoe
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