Your Party Founding Conference took place in Liverpool on 29 and 30 November 2025. On the Saturday, I attended a fringe event organised by the ‘Socialist Unity Platform’ and on the Sunday attended the conference itself.

The Founding Conference

Mixed feelings are in order for the conference itself. The obvious positive is that a mass, socialist, working-class party with collective leadership now exists. This represents a historical advance for the British Left. This should not be neglected amid the multitude of reservations at other outcomes and criticisms of the organisation of the conference.

As stated, it was encouraging that votes on whether the party was ‘socialist’, ‘based in the working-class’, and ‘mass’ all passed decisively on the first day. I was very pleasantly surprised that collective leadership won over the single leader model too. The vote was tight but this was a significant repudiation of the failures of the party’s founding leaders. The party will now be led by a Central Executive Committee of 16 ordinary members with only four places reserved for public office holders. This is a major victory for the grassroots which now has a chance to build this party itself with our incompetent and selfish representatives in Parliament fully subordinated to the membership as a whole.

The counter to these positives is that the substantive votes on the second day were almost entirely disappointing. This included supporting all members voting on conference motions online (rather than only delegates); the use of sortition to top-up elected delegates to conference; for motions to conference to be proposed online and prioritised by pre-conference online voting; and for local policy development to take place online too. These decisions all undermine a vibrant in-person democracy where the branch is the key locus of party life, democratic deliberation, and accountability. They also make it much harder to organise around specific political agendas as democracy becomes the aggregation of atomised opinion as well as being vulnerable to influence by the celebrity leaders with the largest mailing lists. The situation is not irredeemable, though, but impels factions to develop a sophisticated strategy for communicating with the whole membership.

More broadly, the conference was organised poorly with inadequate time given to debating amendments brought via the online platform. In particular, participants were angry that a motion for a workers’ wage for public office holders and party officials was ruled out of order for a typo. The chairing was particularly bad at times. One chair displayed almost unimaginable levels of incompetence while another lost the room as she abused her position by making (pro-leadership) factional speeches, cutting off speakers who criticised the leadership, and berating the room as a whole for challenging her. Many participants were allowed to speak from the stage twice or even three times (often those with the weakest contributions) while many others were given no chance. 

Contributions from participants were of an extraordinarily and often excruciatingly low quality. This reflects a general lack of political understanding and skill among the membership but is also a devastating indictment of sortition as a process. Many of those who spoke were self-indulgent, incoherent and evidently would not have been elected as delegates by any rational group of members in a branch. A key lesson: as well as ensuring accountability, delegate elections obviously serve an important function for ensuring that the standard of debate at a conference is high. This is an important consideration for future Your Party conferences. We will make very little progress if the same low standard of debate persists.

One of the big controversies of the conference was the very last minute expulsion of senior members of the SWP and Counterfire (two far-left sects). This move was widely condemned by the membership as a whole (regardless of a general disdain for the corrosive SWP) which recognised that the anonymous leadership of the party had no authority to make such a decision. The tactic was clearly inherited from our previous enemies in the Labour Party and was clearly a major error as it further radicalised members against the Corbyn milieu (I’m sure this played a significant role in Single Leader losing to Collective Leadership) and ingratiated participants to the SWP. It also fuelled the far-left sectarian paranoia about a ‘witch hunt’ (which is not a characterisation I share) which significantly disrupted members’ attempts to organise around the key issues.

Zarah Sultana’s speech was electric and without a doubt the best contribution of the entire conference. It began by condemning the failings of the wider leadership and apologising for her role in the disgraceful events of the founding process. She went on to articulate an energising class-war socialism which certainly reminded me of the importance of this party. There is no other formation in British politics which can cohere (at least) tens of thousands of socialists around demands to go after the rich, nationalise large sections of the economy, for a single democratic state in Palestine, abolish the monarchy etc etc etc. Her strategic decision-making requires some work, but it is clear that she is Your Party’s most powerful voice in Parliament.

The final announcement of Sunday was that Your Party’s name would be… Your Party. It received 37% of the vote against the other options: Popular Alliance, For the Many, Our Party. They were all astonishingly bad options. When I heard of them on the way to the station on Friday night I genuinely considered throwing myself in front of a train. With some time to reflect, my judgement is that Your Party is a just about tolerable choice (for now, and notwithstanding the several occasions that someone has genuinely thought I was talking about a house party I believed they were organising). The continuity means that we are spared the embarrassment of changing the name to something worse. It also means that there is still scope to change the name to something good in the next couple of years without the embarrassment of changing it all the time.

The Fringe

This was the only fringe event organised in parallel to the conference (that I was aware of). It was attended by no more than thirty people at any one time. My impression that attendees were mostly derived from the below organisation.

• Socialist sects, including:
  • CPGB (PCC), although generally introducing themselves as coming from a different organisation due to paranoia of expulsion
  • The Socialist Party
  • Socialist Alternative (though I’m not 100% sure on this one)
  • Workers’ Power
  • Anti-Capitalist Alternative (though I think their members only attended for my panel)
• Your Party factions
  • Democratic Socialists Your Party
  • Organising for Popular Power
  • Trans Liberation Group

I attended the first three sessions (including my own). My session ‘Climate change and eco-socialism’ went well. Last minute, I invited a representative from Organising for Popular Power to join me as it would have otherwise been just me speaking and taking questions. I outlined Eco-Socialist Horizon’s political and strategic programme for Your Party. The OPP comrade argued for building branches as the core of a strategy to build Your Party and respond to climate change. The group discussion was useful. Comrades advanced critiques of ESH’s platform including around the need for a more revolutionary approach to climate, emphasising the climate-ness of everyday issues, and the possibility of a legislative programme for decarbonisation. My biggest takeaways were a) the need to refine ESH’s communication of the nuance of transitional climate politics straddling both the technicalities of decarbonisation and the necessity of revolution/transformation, and b) that an ESH campaign focusing on a specific issue (i.e. binding together cost-of-living and a demand to destroy the fossil fuel industry) could be a useful point of intervention in the first phase of YP policy development.

My overall reflection was that my session at the SUP fringe was useful for testing ESH’s ideas to a different (i.e. more self-consciously revolutionary socialist) audience.

It was notable that there was no larger fringe organised by the movement Left, either by or in the spirit of TWT. This is likely due to the chaos around the organisation of the Founding Conference which both disillusioned many activists as well as making it logistically challenging (i.e. with very short notice). Furthermore, TWT was only a few weeks earlier and played a similar function. It was notable, though, that despite the relative energy around Your Party at TWT, most attendees did not also come to Liverpool.

I would suggest that organising a fringe (TWT or otherwise) around future Your Party conferences would be expedient for cohering the movement Left around the party.

Conclusion

There is as much to be excited about as there is to be cautious. My impression is that much of the coverage – whether from press, other parties, or non-aligned left activists – is defined by sneering at the audacity of creating a socialist party of a new type. That’s all part of the game, I guess, but it does not represent an accurate assessment of where we’re now at.

We have birthed a mass, socialist, working-class party with collective leadership. This is an indescribably monumental advance. Its limitations are obvious: a politically uneducated and unskilled membership, a predominantly online democracy, and a bad reputation emanating from the incompetence and selfishness of our founding leaders. This, too, though, is all part of the game. They don’t call it the struggle for no reason etc etc.

There is now an incumbency on all socialists who treated the founding process with righteous suspicion to abandon their pessimistic detachment and embrace their historic responsibility to build this party into everything that it can and must be.