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Following the electoral defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and his subsequent expulsion from the Labour party, the decline of mass, street-based mobilizations like the 2010 student movement, and the global rise of the far right, the British Left — which in some ways appeared to go from strength to strength just a decade ago — has felt like a diminished, marginal political force. Yet unexpectedly, in 2025 there began to be signs of life. The Green Party became a major political player under Zack Polanski’s leadership, while the socialist Left began to regroup and realign under a new party: Your Party. After five years in the doldrums, something approaching hope began to feel palpable.
Shanice McBean is an activist, co-author of the award-winning winning book Abolition Revolution, and co-host of the podcast Life of the Party.
Yet, even a cursory observer couldn’t miss the ugly scenes playing out around Your Party’s founding. Besieged by drama, in-fighting, and factionalism, doubt has been cast on its ability to meet the expectations of its supporters, let alone the millions who voted for Labour during Corbyn’s heyday but have been alienated by the party’s term in government under Keir Starmer. Perhaps more fundamentally, some question whether there is space for two left-wing electoral projects in British politics.
A Product of Crisis
The founding of the largest socialist party in Britain since the early decades of the twentieth century does not have one, definitive story. That is partly because its very rise is the result of the complex interplay of political, economic, and social dynamics both old and new.
Most salient, perhaps, is the collapse of the two-party electoral system. For as long as everyone alive in Britain can remember, the Conservative and Labour parties have dominated the political arena, acting as the custodians of British capitalism. During times of economic crisis, the Conservatives have stood in to offer tight-fisted, austere economics. During times of social and political rebellion, Labour have ridden that wave and offered the allure of progress. For over a century, election victories bounced reliably between the two, and although they danced to somewhat different rhythms, both parties worked together to fulfil the functions of the capitalist state.
This constellation began to buckle during the 2008 financial crisis — not so much the crash itself, but the aftermath. During the 2010 general election, David Cameron’s Conservative Party warned of hard times, but promised austerity would eventually see the country renewed and recovered. But fifteen years, hundreds of broken promises, six prime ministers, four general elections, Brexit, and one pandemic later, it’s even harder to see how Britain could emerge from its economic malaise. Living standards have collapsed and millions of children are trapped in poverty, while inflation, wage stagnation, and soaring rents and housing prices mean life for many is harder than ever. The pandemic put the icing on this bleak proverbial cake, accelerating a generational transfer of wealth from the working to the ruling class. In today’s Britain, the wealthiest have never been richer.
The founding of the largest socialist party in Britain since the early decades of the twentieth century does not have one, definitive story.
One of capitalism’s tried and tested strategies of crisis management is to distract and blame: the issue isn’t capitalism, it’s migrants. The issue isn’t the rich, it’s trans people. The issue isn’t in Westminster, it’s your neighbour. In the absence of a political establishment capable of offering an economic and political paradigm that ensures basic needs and aspirations can be met, people look for both radical political alternatives and proximal threats.
This dynamic has found institutional expression in Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant Reform Party, now poised to trounce the old establishment parties in the 2029 general election. It also finds expression in the rise of nationalist and fascist violence on Britain’s streets, with rioters burning down hotels housing migrants and attacking Black and brown people in summer 2024.
The collapse of the centre also had repercussions for the Left. The marginalization of Labour’s left wing and the expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn signalled the final defeat of Corbynism, and the end of an era where the natural yet uncomfortable home for the Left was in the “broad church” of the Labour Party. Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech — echoing Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 — and his government’s insistence on implementing “Reform-lite” migration policies have led to wholesale moral indignation among the party’s traditional base and a sense that Labour are ushering Reform into Parliament.
All this coalesced at the same time as mass disgust over the British political establishment’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza had left millions feeling both electorally homeless yet politically engaged. These factors combined to create a huge opening to the left of Labour in British politics, and it is this space that Your Party now seeks to occupy.
Contested Visions
Beyond the political backdrop, of course, there is a less glamorous reason why Your Party’s story is complicated: it is being shaped not only by history but by the subjectivities of its protagonists. Their personalities, ambitions, fears, hopes, manoeuvres, shortcomings, and idiosyncrasies are, like it or not, central to the party’s trajectory.
In July 2025, Zarah Sultana unilaterally announced she was co-founding a new socialist party with Jeremy Corbyn — a move he neither approved nor knew was coming. The response across the country was jubilant: 800,000 signed up to express interest and a left-wing party that did not yet exist was polling at around 15%. A huge sigh of relief could be heard across the UK’s progressive movements: there was now hope the rise of fascism would be met with a serious, socialist opposition. What no one knew at the time was that Zarah’s unexpected announcement was merely the first public expression of a factional civil war that would quickly dash the hopes of thousands.
Tensions had been brewing between different camps of the nascent party. One camp around Sultana wanted the founding to be led by a diverse and large group of respected movement personalities — marginalizing Corbyn. The other camp wanted the founding to be led by the smaller group of independent MPs close to Corbyn —marginalizing Sultana. One side was likely building for what they hoped would be Corbyn’s coronation as leader, whereas others wanted a co-leadership model.
Some have argued that Your Party should focus on base-building and cohering the scattered and disparate forces of working-class power.
There were also deep political ruptures emerging: Sultana wanted an explicitly socialist, anti-Zionist party that campaigned around, among other things, trans rights. Several of the freshly elected MPs in the Independent Alliance — a parliamentary group of independent MPs around Jeremy Corbyn, such as Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, were using social media to advocate for political positions contrary to the trans liberation movement, arguing that they were brought into the Your Party umbrella with the understanding it would be a broad political church that could accommodate people who subscribe to socially conservative views. And Corbyn? He was characteristically indecisive and avoidant, at points refusing to meet Sultana to address the escalating factional disputes.
These tensions reached a head in September when, fearing she was about to be cut out of Your Party by the launch of a membership portal she had no access to, Sultana launched her own. Nearly 20,000 people signed up in two hours — an incredible show of support and enthusiasm — but Corbyn quickly threw cold water on the launch by releasing a statement claiming it was unauthorized and essentially a fraud. Sultana countered that she was being cut out of Your Party by a “sexist boys’ club”, and that her move was an attempt to protect Your Party’s internal democracy from unelected bureaucrats.
But whereas her unilateral move to announce the party was met with grace by a movement frustrated with Corbyn’s foot-dragging, her second attempt to side-step Corbyn was totally miscalculated. It was met with near-universal scorn, as people felt their trust and money had been used as a factional football. After a week of each side threatening legal action against the other, Sultana’s membership portal was eventually shut down, and a new, “official” portal was launched by Corbyn’s camp.
By that time, the damage had been done. Weeks of undisciplined and frankly unprincipled briefs against Sultana in the mainstream press, fractious rows online between MPs and members, ill-judged unilateral manoeuvres, the collapse of the initial co-leadership model, and the resultant split between the bases of the two camps meant that two months after the official launch, membership sat at a mere 55,000 — a far cry from the initial hopes of a mass party of hundreds of thousands.
Democracy for Whom?
The party’s long-awaited founding conference took place against this chaotic backdrop at the end of November 2025. Regional assemblies, sometimes with hundreds of members, debated the direction of the party, its politics, and how to make the conference a genuinely democratic occasion. Online voting systems were used to suggest edits to the founding documents, submit motions, and influence what would eventually make it to the conference floor. Organized, member-led groups such as the Democratic Socialists, Organising for Popular Power, and the Trans Liberation Group forced motions onto the agenda that challenged the orthodoxies of Your Party’s provisional leadership.
It was clear that the conference would be a struggle. On one side stood the old guard of established figures with decades of experience in the trenches of national politics, but carrying with them a bureaucratic understanding of politics as backdoor tussles for power and factional wranglings. On the other side stood the broader membership who, although enamoured with Corbyn and Sultana as beloved political figures, were fed up with the fighting and wanted something very different to Labour 2.0.
Beyond all of these largely self-inflicted challenges, Your Party is also yet to address the elephant in the room: the rise of Zack Polanski’s Green Party.
In my view, many of the debates were won long before any speeches from the podium were made. One of the defining features of Your Party’s political culture is online debate — primarily on social media but increasingly on alternative left media platforms like the podcasts Bold Politics or Life of the Party, along with bulletins circulated at the The World Transformed conference. Fractious, sometimes toxic online debates ended up dominating how people litigate party politics and strategy, and even impacted what made it onto the agenda at the local level. For example, most of the positions advocated by the younger, more social media-literate but terminally online section of the party — and supported by Sultana, who is far more “online” than Corbyn — were won: collective leadership, dual membership, and an explicitly socialist and pro-trans platform.
I believe these votes map out the correct political and constitutional direction for the party at this moment, but I share concerns about this way of conducting political debate and the impact it will have on Your Party’s internal culture moving forward. These concerns are compounded by the fact that members also voted for sortition (random selection) for conference delegates, and online voting on conference motions according to the principle of “one member, one vote”. This means branches will not be the only mechanism for getting to conferences, and the conference floor will not be the only space where members can be influenced to vote in one direction or another.
Sortition certainly meant the composition of the founding conference was much more diverse and representative than many of the regional assemblies, and philosophically, sortition is underpinned by the great socialist ideal that “every cook can govern”. Yet it disempowers branches by creating voter blocs unaccountable to local constituencies, while online voting means social media will remain an equally influential medium for debate alongside branches and the conference floor. This could undermine some of the factionalism from the top by creating alternative spheres of influence not tied down by central bureaucracies, but could also entrench a leadership cabal able to mobilize more passive and disengaged members who participate in the party primarily through their screens, rather than with other members in physical spaces.
Difficult Decisions
Beyond all of these largely self-inflicted challenges, Your Party is also yet to address the elephant in the room: the rise of Zack Polanski’s Green Party. With Polanski now regularly polling second, below Reform but ahead of the main two parties, the space to the left of Labour is clearly wide open, but is there room for two? There is certainly a case to be made that the Green Party aesthetic may prove more appealing to a young, urban, racially diverse section of the electorate looking for an alternative to Starmer’s floundering government. Zack Polanski has openly said that the Green Party will invest significant resources into targeting the nearly 40 seats where the Green Party came second to Labour.
Perhaps Your Party might muscle its way onto the electoral map in the gaps where the Labour vote has tanked but the Green Party has less organic appeal. But in a world where political storytelling, messaging, and powerful communications win votes on the left and right, it’s difficult to see who in Your Party has the natural charisma and oratory to compete with Zack Polanski and the Greens. Perhaps the upcoming Your Party collective leadership elections will throw up a fresh, vibrant, relatable group of leaders. Given everything that’s happened, this feels unlikely, but even if it does, the Greens will have had a hefty head start.
Before it can size itself up against the Greens, let alone approach a position to negotiate with them on electoral strategy, Your Party needs to figure out what it is, what it’s for, and who holds the reins.
Meanwhile, reconfigurations within the trade union movement leadership mean the balance of power within Labour’s executive has shifted in ways that make the possibility of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham ousting Keir Starmer as Labour leader slightly less remote. With Polanski hinting at a willingness to work with a new Labour leader to keep Reform out, a situation where Your Party is doomed to electoral oblivion — squeezed between an energized Polanski and the soft-left “King of the North” — is not impossible.
Some have argued that Your Party should focus on base-building and cohering the scattered and disparate forces of working-class power — tenant and worker unions, social movements, community groups, worker co-operatives, etc — into a national umbrella that could lay the basis for the kind of co-ordinated, working-class movement that sits at the heart of any vision for socialist transformation. While I might sympathize with this position, the reality is that it is not what the vast majority of Your Party’s members want or envision for the party. Thus, even if this is what Your Party should be doing, it’s not clear who would be available to shoulder such a huge, generational task.
Politically, perhaps there is a sweet spot to be found between Zack Polanski’s socialist minimalism — supporting headline policies that speak to people’s economic anxieties like taxing wealth, but providing no longer-term socialist horizon — and Zarah Sultana’s socialist maximalism, which advocates for nationalizing the entire economy but fails to tell a persuasive story that bridges this future goal to people’s lived reality. Nevertheless, before it can size itself up against the Greens, let alone approach a position to negotiate with them on electoral strategy, Your Party needs to figure out what it is, what it’s for, and who holds the reins.
Last summer, it looked like Britain would see the largest socialist party in its history. That dream seems a long way away now, but remains urgently and desperately needed.
