11.09.2025
Reject this dog’s dinner
Team Corbyn is postponing the launch conference. When it eventually happens, participants will be chosen by lot, things will be run under tight control and serious debate will not get a look-in, says Carla Roberts
Your Party’s launch conference has been pushed back to 2026. That is pretty much the only thing that is currently clear. We have also been told that those at the top have opted for a convoluted system of sortition plus “online OMOV voting” plus regional meetings and a set of pre-prepared “conference statements”. Not that any of the 800,000 signatories have been told any of this. While proto-branches are springing up everywhere, there is only eerie silence from above.
We have to rely on rumours, leaked information and speeches given by the likes of former South African MP Andrew Feinstein, who told a meeting in Bristol last week that the conference would be held “probably within two or three months after November”.1 At the AGM of Jamie Driscoll’s curiously apolitical Majority UK, Zarah Sultana pleaded for “patience”, explaining: “I am just as desperate to get this going, but it will take time to make sure democracy is at the heart of it. It needs to be reflective of the movement; it can’t just be MP-led.”2
Sultana knows what she is talking about. She and those close to her (including Feinstein and Salma Yaqoob) have been locking horns with ‘Camp Corbyn’ for many months now. Corbyn’s inner circle is still furious with her for ‘jumping the gun’ in early July to announce that she was leaving the Labour Party to co-lead a new party. Clearly, a move born out of frustration with the slow pace and secret nature of developments. In return, Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy, kicked Sultana, Feinstein, Yaqoob and others out of the WhatsApp group of Collective, the forerunner of Your Party.
Anti-Zionism
Neither camp will tell us what the conference hold-up is about and what the political differences between the two factions are. In his forensic analysis of the main players in Your Party on the website of the Prometheus online journal, Archie Woodrow comes to the conclusion that “it’s not clear that these are on the basis of clear or consistent divisions on any of the above substantive political questions.”3
Nevertheless, the different attitudes on the subject of Zionism are certainly telling - and hugely important. Sultana has declared online: “The smears won’t work this time. I say it loudly and proudly: I’m an anti-Zionist”. Andrew Feinstein posted a similar proclamation and recently said in Sheffield that “we cannot be making the same mistakes again, when it comes to the anti-Semitism smear campaign. We absolutely must learn that lesson.”4
Quite right. Corbyn, on the other hand, was famously filmed umming and ahing his way through a question on the issue.5 Not an oversight, as Asa Winstanley points out in a useful article6 - those at the top of the Corbyn Party seem not to have learned any lessons from their defeat.
But there can be no doubt that such smears will once again be hurled at us by the bourgeois establishment, their servants in the mainstream media and rightwingers everywhere. Compromising on this issue is political cowardice and, as Corbyn should have understood by now, it does not work in any case. Every single time he rolled over, trying to appease the witch hunt, it just got stronger. Thousands of socialists were sacrificed in the process. We cannot make the same mistake again.
Sultana is clearly to the left of Corbyn and not just on this issue. We understand that she is inspired by the relatively open culture of the Democratic Socialists of America and recently addressed one of their meetings in New York (where she also arranged to meet up with one of our comrades in the Marxist Unity Group).
Her evolving politics might explain why she and the whole ‘Team Zarah’ have now been “effectively frozen out”, as we have been told by one of her supporters (the other side claims she is “boycotting proceedings”). In any case, we know she has been opposing the plans of Murphy and James Schneider to make YP into a tightly controlled, top-down organisation with inbuilt ‘special’ powers for the big names, the MPs, the councillors, a few celebrities and with some local groups and ‘parties’ being allowed to affiliate. We hear that Murphy is thoroughly opposed to the “Marxist sects” playing any role.
Zarah Sultana seems to reject that, and quite right too. But she is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater by supporting ‘one member, one vote’ (OMOV) - which is the most democratic decision-making mechanism locally and in smaller meetings, but turns into the opposite when it is applied to making national conference decisions. It isolates and atomises comrades, who are watching and voting at home. Such a system clearly favours a bureaucracy which can choose the options, how they are presented, who gets to speak, etc.
We can only guess what kind of OMOV comrade Sultana has in mind, because neither she nor any other key figures write or speak openly about their plans for the future of YP in any detail. Some comrades argue that voting to elect conference delegates is a form of OMOV - and if that is what comrade Sultana has in mind, then we agree with her!
Marxists demand that local branches decide who attends conference by a straightforward STV system. Members would explain their political views to each other. Delegates would be accountable to the branch that elects them, they would be questioned afterwards and, if they voted in a way the branch did not like, they should not be elected next time. This would create vibrant branches, make all members into genuinely active participants and create an informed culture.
Sortition + OMOV
Alas, we hear that Camp Corbyn has now settled on an altogether less democratic method for the launch conference: participants are to be chosen via lottery. (This is not the ‘sortition +’ method that Max Shanly has been arguing for in his recent article7 and in the Online Communist Forum of August 31.8 The comrade was arguing for additional representation for factions and political platforms, but that is not going to happen.)
Anyone interested in participating throws their name into a virtual sortition pool and then X numbers of conference participants are drawn: not at random, but “balanced for gender, region, etc” (certainly not balanced for political views!). The hall will be filled with people who are certainly interested, yes, but are by definition not as experienced, as tough or as convincing as those socialists who put themselves forward to become accountable delegates. We want the best fighters in a conference, not the so-called ‘representative’ ones (who are, by definition, average).
We have no doubt that there will also be special spaces reserved for ‘the great and the good’, including Corbyn himself and a spattering of celebrities and famous faces. We cannot expect them to be chosen by lottery, can we? Some people are clearly deemed to be more equal than others.
And what exactly will conference be voting on? There will be a set of pre-written “conference papers”, which have, elsewhere, been described as “proclamations”. Those papers will be published on an interactive “online portal”, which will allow “comments and amendments”. Will delegates, branches or political platforms be able to move their own motions? Alternative programmatic proposals? A different constitution? It appears not.
Who exactly will be able to comment and amend is still unclear. In one set of leaked notes, we read that the “online portal [is] for selected delegates to submit amendments to founding documents and rank documents in order for debate in conference”.
Does that mean only the sortition participants would be able to move amendments to the pre-written papers? Or is there supposed to be yet another set of specially “selected delegates”? Are branches going to be able to move amendments? First they would have to be recognised and supplied with all local sign-ups. In a true OMOV-style set up, of course, every single member would have to be able to move amendments and complexity would thereby go through the roof.
Clearly some kind of selection will have to take place in any case. This puts the bureaucracy in a very powerful position. They control the online platform, they can decide which amendments are acceptable and how they will be presented and moved. It seems the plan is that the ‘delegates’ present in the hall might then be allowed to put those pre-approved proposals in some kind of order and maybe even speak on some of them. But the actual voting will be done not by those “delegates”, but through “full online OMOV” - ie, by isolated and atomised individuals half-watching proceedings on their computer screen.
After the ‘conference papers’ have been voted through (with minimal changes, no doubt), “nominations open for the national committee and leadership”. This sounds like they will be voted on after conference, probably again via OMOV. An online beauty contest that obviously favours well-known names and faces.
Perhaps because those at the top of Your Party are aware of how undemocratic this set-up is, the launch conference is to be preceded with 12 to 20 “regional meetings”, which James Schneider already outlined in an interview with Novara Media on July 25.9 Do not expect anything serious though - or even time to discuss or amend the pre-written “conference papers”.
No, we read that they are going to be “big, bold, fun, participatory, non-sectarian, half-day affairs, with breakouts, food, arts, and lots of note taking”. We didn’t vote on anything in these four hours, but my goodness, we had a jolly good time.
If such regional conferences do indeed take place, we will argue that participants radically open them up, rip up any restrictive agendas, do away with time-wasting breakout sessions or jazz hands and instead make them as democratic as possible, with binding votes. Just as thousands of Your Party supporters have taken matters into their own hands and are organising proto-branches all over the country, members should take hold of regional meetings and make them into something actually useful.
Sudden conversion
As something of an aside, in his July 25 interview Schneider did not argue for sortition. We do wonder what role the growing popularity of comrade Shanly’s proposals played in this sudden conversion. More and more left and even revolutionary groups were getting behind comrade Shanly’s plan - not because they believe it is the most democratic system: they know it is not. But because they share his assessment that it would be ‘less bad’ than what either Camp Corbyn or Team Sultana are planning.
That is not the job of Marxists. We should always and openly fight for what is needed, not for what we think might be the lesser evil - because it might turn out to be the greater evil after all, as has happened here. Yes, comrade Shanly’s proposals were slightly better, in that he wanted 10% of the seats at the launch conference reserved for political platforms, with delegates chosen according to each platform’s support within the membership. But Schneider and Murphy can now turn around and claim that they have listened to concerns from below and have changed their mind. See how democratic we are!
We are hoping comrade Shanly and his supporters now ditch their ill-advised support for sortition and join us in the fight for a system of elected and accountable delegates. With the launch conference having been pushed back, arguments around time constraints no longer hold water. Let us use the time to make things fully democratic.
For example, we should fight for members (or groups of members, branches and platforms) to be able to move motions, not just “amendments” to pre-written “conference papers”. For a start, we clearly need an unequivocal statement that commits Your Party to a position of opposition to Zionism. We suspect such a motion would go down very well with members.
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theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/polanski-pulverises-two-green-mps.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/07/labour-is-dead-zarah-sultana-your-party-launch.↩︎
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prometheusjournal.org/2025/09/09/whose-party-is-it-anyway.↩︎
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‘Taking off … despite the leadership’ Weekly Worker August 21: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1549/taking-off-despite-the-leadership.↩︎
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‘Say it loud. Say it proud’ Weekly Worker September 4: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1551/say-it-loud-say-it-proud.↩︎
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open.substack.com/pub/asawinstanley/p/will-corbyn-allow-zionists-to-sabotage.↩︎
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medium.com/@maxshanly/born-for-life-or-marked-for-death-a12d87220e42.↩︎