It is probably no bad thing that health struggles have delayed my writing up Your Party’s extraordinary Liverpool founding conference. Perspective is definitely helpful to process something unique.

Personally, I could not help but be struck by the number of participants who approached me as regular readers of my blog, certainly well into three figures.  I did scores of selfies and even signed several booklets. The very large majority of these – and you may be among them – were very enthusiastic about the experience of the conference.

They loved the feeling of a new beginning, of taking the fight to Blue Labour and Reform, of openly espousing socialist priniciples and policies. They enjoyed the more heated debates over party structures as evidence of functioning and lively democracy. They were uplifted by the speeches of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, by Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan, and by the guest speakers from European left parties.

I felt some of this myself. The speeches were indeed uplifting, and the heated arguments were the bit I enjoyed the most, where it felt that the opinion of members mattered.

But all of that was to ignore the undercurrent of extreme factional infighting that had dogged the formation of the party, and resulted in only 45,000 joining out of the 850,000 who had signed up to register their interest.

I am not going to rehearse the history of conflict and infuriating dispute between Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn that led up to the conference.  But the continuation of this into the founding conference itself was a petulant betrayal of the good people who are working to put together a new Left party.

That Sultana and Corbyn could not find it in themselves to just stand side by side on the stage together, smile and wave for five minutes for the photographers is pathetic. The power play on the eve of conference to expel members of the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire and other socialist groups, in such a way that many did not find out until they were in Liverpool, was extraordinary.

This is what happened. Broadly speaking the organisation of the party has been in the hands of factions broadly aligned to Jeremy Corbyn. The founding draft documents state that the Alliance MPs are the steering committee of the party.  There has so far been no democratic input from members in control of the party.

While the conference was to adopt a constitution setting out a new Central Executive Committee and its election, there was no provision for any interim democratic input until that executive is elected – probably five months from Conference. A number of left wing groups were therefore planning to propose that the conference itself should elect a temporary steering committee, to run the party until the executive elections.

The last minute expulsions were a reaction against those who were believed to be leading the plan to elect a temporary committee from the conference. Other measures were also put into effect to stop it – for example it was imposed that no points of order could be made from the floor, that no motions or amendments could be expressed from the floor, and burly security men were brought in to impose this “order” on the hall.

Now I should make plain all of this bothers me. I did not know of any plan, but I would have voted that conference should elect an interim committee. I deeply dislike the way that decisions are being made with nobody knowing who makes them, and on what authority.

The prime example of this is the decision to expel people. Nobody seems able to say who made this decision, and on what authority. To be plain, it was not only members of the SWP affected. Three friends of mine have been expelled, for reasons I simply cannot fathom.

SImilarly, it is impossible to know who selected what could be debated by conference. There were indeed heated debates – but the agenda was set and the wording decided by invisible and unnamed people, drawing on divided up “Assemblies” which were always designed to produce no clear democratic outcome.

So, for example, the proposal that MP’s should receive a workers’ wage and give the rest of their salary to the party was not chosen for debate, despite being the most popular in the online poll.

The leadership suffered a hefty defeat over dual party membership, with members voting strongly in favour. The one man one vote system of online voting for all members used I strongly support. But the dual party membership debate is a precise example of the abuse of control of the agenda.

The two options were both drafted by the leadership which opposed dual party membership, and you were given two choices. The first choice was no dual party membership. The second choice was dual party membership, but only with a list of parties to be decided by the Central Executive Committee and agreed by Conference.

As there is no such list yet, and indeed no executive committee yet, all those expelled who come from the SWP and other organisations, remain expelled at least until Conference in Autumn 2026.  This was against the strong sentiment of the Conference.

So I could not shake off the awareness of all this counter-productive machination and could not enjoy the conference. I find all this distasteful, and highly reminiscent of the worst behaviours of the Labour Party. I have to state I left Liverpool with a lower opinion of both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana than I turned up with.

We had one informal and one more formal meeting of the Scottish delegates, and that was indeed more unified and more hopeful. There will be a Scottish Conference in Dundee in February 2026.

There are two central questions for the Scottish conference – will Your Party Scotland be fully autonomous, and will it support Scottish Independence? Just for me personally, those are fundamental questions governing my membership of this new entity. My feeling is they will be resolved in the positive. But they are not by any means the only questions for me.

I will I think be much happier if these issues of power and control get resolved and we finally get to talk about policy. I was never likely to enjoy a conference where sessions are called “constitution” and “standing orders”.

The problems of the party are self-reinforcing. The failure of the mass mebership to materialise means that small groups of already dedicated political activists on the left have disproportionate influence within the party at present. I see and understand the problem the leadership is trying to counter – but you can’t suppress democracy because you don’t like the membership.

It is absolutely essential that a party arises to the left of Labour – there is a huge space there – and  opposes both neoliberal economics and Imperialist foreign policy, while openly countering racism.  I therefore really want Your Party to succeed. I also want it to support the dismantlement of the irredeemably imperialist UK state.

I think there is still hope Your Party will fulfil these roles. I shall continue to work for that. There are a great many good people in Your Party. In a time of dizzying change and fragmentation in British politics, we have to do what seems right at this moment.

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