I am taking the plunge into Your Party. My worries remain about its centralist tendencies and lack of democracy, but I will work against those from within.

Your Party is not a unionist party. It does not yet have a policy on Scottish Independence. I shall of course be striving for it actively to support Scottish Independence. I feel fairly confident that this will succeed.

The Left in Scotland is overwhelmingly pro-Independence, just as the Right is overwhelmingly anti-Independence. There do exist Scottish unionist socialists, but they are a small and shrinking minority. It may turn out they are disproportionately represented in Your Party, but I do not believe that is likely to be the case.

More to the point, for years opinion polls have shown that at least a third of Scottish Labour voters support Independence. There is now a major and consistent gap in opinion polls between support for Independence – averaging around 52% – and support for the SNP – averaging around 31%. 21% of Scottish voters support Independence but will not vote for the SNP. That is a significant source of potential support for a viable alternative pro-Independence Party.

It is worth recalling that ten years ago support for the SNP and support for Independence were very tightly correlated. That is now absolutely not the case, for the simple reason the SNP pays no more than lip service to Independence.

A Corbyn-linked, pro-Independence Party in Scotland would have the capacity to destroy the Scottish branch of the Labour Party – which is already in deep trouble and polling around 15%.

There have been a number of attempts to provide a home for the Independence voters disillusioned with the SNP. The Scottish Greens currently show good polling figures, but they are a rather strange party, entirely separate from the English Greens, and far more interested in gender issues than in anything else.

I was a member of the Alba Party until the leadership made very plain I was unwanted, for reasons that don’t seem any more profound than their personal ambitions. While led by Alex Salmond, Alba was the obvious vehicle for Independence support, but since his demise it has torn itself apart. There are others – including the Independence for Scotland Party and Liberate Scotland – which contain some great people, but are currently very small.

Your Party can become a vehicle for a socialism that, as part of its universal commitment to anti-Imperialism, supports Independence for Scotland and Wales and supports the reunification of Ireland. I see that as a transformative position in British politics and a truly radical response to the need for fundamental change in the British state.

I might add that I have never heard Jeremy Corbyn express any personal opposition to Scottish Independence. He supports self-determination and anti-Imperialism around the globe and supports Irish reunification. I think those who note he did not support Scottish Independence whilst leader of the Labour Party are being obtuse. It was not the position of his party. He now has a different party, and I am very confident he would follow the party position.

The rather shadowy leadership cadre of Your Party is anxious to fudge the issue by adopting a policy of “the right of the Scottish people to decide”. This is basically to say that they support a second independence referendum. That is slightly useful, but it is a peculiar abnegation of responsibility – and very easy to say in the knowledge Westminster will not agree.

Of course the Scottish people have the right to decide. That must be the starting point for any socialist party. But that is not a policy. You might as well state that the people have the right to decide whether utilities should be renationalised. Of course they do. But our policy is to renationalise utilities.

A party that just says “we believe in the will of the people – whatever that may be. We don’t actually have an opinion” is not much of a political party.

Which leads me on to the question which I think is driving Your Party’s lack of discernible structured democracy and voting process so far: Israel.

The leadership seem desperate to avoid a commitment to a single state of Palestine, from the river to the sea. The reason for this is that Jeremy is still surrounded by the same group of “soft” zionists who wrecked his leadership of the Labour Party, by continually attempting to placate the zionist lobby through apology after apology. They committed expulsion after expulsion of lifelong antiracists and socialists.

The preferred formula of proponents within Your Party of the Bantustan two-state solution is: “Let the Palestinian people decide”. Often accompanied by the plausible-sounding “it is not for us to decide for the Palestinian people”.

The problem is of course the Palestinian people have a gun to their head. Literally. They have no free will to decide anything. And of which Palestinian people are you going to take the word? Universally reviled Abbas and the Palestinian Authority? Some US-installed puppet administration under the Gaza fake Peace Plan?

No. The only solution any socialist should support is a Palestine free, from the river to the sea. Then it should indeed be for the Palestinian people to decide. Within the free, secular, democratic state of Palestine for which we should strive – and which now has more support from the people of the world than ever. If the free people of Palestine voluntarily then decide to give some land for a Jewish ethno-state, so be it.

Finally, it seems to me that Your Party needs to support massive socio-economic change.

Late-stage capitalism has resulted in inequalities of wealth which are simply staggering. These are not the natural order of things. They are a result of deliberate, state-imposed structures, including the creation of currency within the banking system, the state paying banks interest on currency of which the state itself licensed the creation, taxation structures where the burden of payment falls upon the poor, enterprise ownership structures that promote wealth accumulation, and a housing market tending to ever-greater concentration of capital and the permanent subservience of working people to a landlord class.

The economic changes required are profound. The Greens have adopted one idea I have consistently promoted: limits on CEO pay and benefits relative to the workforce. They have I think suggested 10 x the average salary in the enterprise, whereas I suggested 8 x the lowest salary in the enterprise, but it is the same policy.

Rather to my amazement there was a really good editorial in the Observer yesterday suggesting some policies that directly start to tackle a number of the problems I have outlined, not least the state borrowing its own currency from the banks.

I used to favour a modified capitalism where share ownership lay largely with workers, but as states have evolved into far more complex financial systems where huge volumes of financial transactions do not relate to the purchase of goods and services, that approach is now only a small part of the answer, and the role of the state needs to increase. I am not sure I have quite finished reconciling this with my libertarian instincts, nor yet fully integrated those parts of modern monetary theory which are self-evidently true. But I am working on it.

To return to Your Party, I profoundly distrust the “Assemble” model of meetings split up into little groups. These avoid votes or any genuine effort to actually determine the will of the meeting. Instead they give the power of divining the “consensus” to unseen central figures. I have been told this system combats patriarchalism. That is obvious nonsense – I am pretty sure you will find patriarchs behind the curtains, dictating what was “decided” by the touchy-feely groups. And if they are matriarchs, that would be no better.

The national Conference is to be on the basis of sortition. The key question is this: Who gets to be there without going through the sortition process? How many and who are they? That seems to me essential to know. I have already seen direct evidence that a very large number of the little political groups who are dictating matters behind the scenes will avoid sortition by being present as “stewards”. As though stewards could not have been forthcoming from among those selected by sortition.

There are also officially going to be “VIPs” not subject to sortition. Who chooses them? Will a list be published?

The sortition itself, according to the documents circulated to members, will be fixed to make sure groups are fairly represented. What sort of groups? Ethnic? Gender? Political? This undermines the entire basis of sortition itself.

I have the deepest possible reservations about the manipulation of “democracy” within Your Party. But there are bound to be teething troubles at the start, and while there is plainly a huge amount of plotting for control, I don’t see anything we the members – and I am now one – cannot sweep aside as we get the party going.

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