It will surprise no one that Your Party has split. Why can’t the left stick together? Last weekend, Your Party officially split, with 250 members voting to start a second leftwing party, the Socialist Federation. Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana represent this new faction, with both remaining in Your Party.
While many of those members are part of “Grassroots Left”, Sultana’s faction of Your Party, she has no role in the new party, and is still technically a Your Party MP. Corbyn’s faction, “The Many”, has de facto had the reins of Your Party since he was elected its parliamentary leader by the executive committee in March. Two independent MPs who originally supported Your Party, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, have quit, and two – Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan – remain.
Since before it even had a name, this party has had its disputes in public. When Sultana announced its foundation on X last July, Corbyn seemed peeved and surprised, even though he was apparently co-leader. By the time of the conference in November, Sultana was boycotting it and they were in a bitter wrangle about what had happened to the 800,000 early sign-ups, in terms of data, but also in terms of that wasted potential. Many members were kicked out because they also belonged to the Socialist Workers party, which, on the one hand, was a clear breach of Your Party’s rulebook, and yet, on the other, was such an Animal Farm-ish echo of the Labour party’s left purges from 2020 onwards that it drained the colour from the proceedings.
As open as many key figures of Your Party are about one another’s failings, it’s remarkably difficult to find out what, if any, are the ideological differences between them. They talk about stitch-ups and witch-hunts, unauthorised mailouts, Corbyn’s male-dominated team and bunker mentality, Sultana’s impulsivity, all of which is laundry that would air quicker indoors. The only contested issues to emerge are on trans rights and whether someone who is anti-Zionist (Sultana) can coexist with someone who doesn’t like that term, yet supports Palestine (Corbyn); those debates are had too openly for anyone to assume them resolved, yet not openly enough that you can discern any progress.
So, it looks like two things: first, a question of who, between the rivals and their hench people, deserves the blame for being so monumentally difficult as personalities that they squandered the goodwill (and data, and crowdfunding potential) of nearly a million people; second, the leftist infighting that onlookers have been mocking since the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front.
But it only makes sense if you look at it as part of a history of battles within the Labour party – from Brexit, Iraq and clause IV to nuclear disarmament and everything in between. Each of these clashes has created its own insiders’ vocabulary, but essentially these were all versions of the same fight, between Labour’s left and its right. While Your Party is a grouping of leftwing members and activists, the same disputatious history informs their divisions, as it does other wings of Labour, leaving MPs and their staff embattled, paranoid and unable to forge alliances between those with different ideas or interests. So even though the Labour landscape is completely fractured – Your Party, the Socialist Federation, the Labour party, Peter Mandelson Inc, the Tony Blair Institute – you can still see throughlines.
The political sticking points for Your Party, trans rights and the language around Israel and Gaza, read like they were handed to them by an antagonistic interviewer. They are issues upon which views diverge, but it should be possible for individuals to work out a common ground, rather than splitting into two parties. This doesn’t mean the Labour right has it all figured out, far from it. As embodied in Starmerism, it no longer has a political identity except to defeat its own left flank and, in its absence, projects a short-tempered purposelessness that even those with no interest in any aspect of Labour politics can perceive.
It has often seemed so paradoxical as to be almost cute that this party was forged with solidarity as its mission, and yet couldn’t remain in harmony with itself for five minutes straight. The more understanding lens is that precisely because the labour movement takes collectivity so seriously, it can neither rest nor progress until the collective will has been agreed. It has gone past the point where it can stay together for the sake of the kids, sorry, the electorate. Each of its elements have to figure out who they are, when they’re not fighting the others.
