Your Party – as the new political project once launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana is now officially known – promised to do politics differently, and it’s certainly managing that. Traditionally, political parties wait until they get at least close to power before descending into chaos and backbiting.
Last weekend marked its launch conference, a chance for its members to codify its constitution and draw a line under an increasingly bitter war of words between Corbyn and Sultana’s camps which saw several prominent early supporters quit the project entirely.
This got off to an inauspicious start when Corbyn – a man who infamously referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” – refused to say the same of Sultana, who was throwing her own rally independently of the party that same night. She was downgraded to “colleague”.
But the biggest drama was elsewhere. Several delegates on their way to Liverpool were associated with the revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party, a political grouping generally shunned in polite company, not least for their handling and covering-up of allegations of rape and sexual assault against some in its senior ranks.
Your Party’s rules specified that people could only join if they weren’t members of any other political parties – but the SWP believed they had an exemption, not least because they are not registered with the Electoral Commission. It came as a nasty surprise, then, when senior figures found themselves disinvited from the event while on the same train to it as Corbyn himself. Shouting matches ensued.
Sultana threw in her lot with the SWP and boycotted the first day of the party conference, which was successively disrupted by points of order and activists from the floor. The chair eventually shut down all points of order from the floor, and cut the livestream every time the event was disrupted. Participatory democracy has its limits, apparently.
Among all this chaos, one of the independent grouping of MPs affiliated to Your Party, Ayoub Khan, decided to help the PR debacle by revealing he had once killed a dog with his bare hands (he said it was a rottweiler that was attacking a baby).
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Any hopes that things would improve after this chaos were dashed on Sunday. Members voted overwhelmingly for Sultana’s plan to allow dual affiliations for members – re-opening the door to the SWP, but only if the party committee decides to let them in, setting up a major confrontation.
Beyond that, members voted by 52% to 48% – that ratio again – to say Your Party should have “collective” leadership by committee, rather than a single leader. This avoided a Corbyn vs Sultana showdown, but guaranteed a steady supply of backroom drama for weeks and months to come, which kicked off when the Corbyn-backing Democratic Socialist group of party members considered action to overturn the new rule before ultimately deciding they supported it after all.
Sultana had won two victories, but that did not stop her from making a speech in which she lambasted the Corbyn faction, them of using “the Labour right’s playbook”. She said: “We have to confront what took place yesterday, the expulsions, the bans, the censorship on conference floor are unacceptable.
It’s undemocratic. It’s an attack on members and this movement. And those decisions were made at the top, not by you.
“Many of those people expelled found out only after they had arrived in Liverpool, people who had travelled across the country took time off work, booked hotels, spent hundreds of pounds that they could not easily spare, discovered at the door that they had been barred, and the shocking sight of a Muslim woman being manhandled and dragged out of conference is something that should shame any party that claims to stand for equality and justice.”
The future of left wing politics is, it seems, fractious factionalism, lengthy committee meetings, accusations of betrayals and “witch hunts” and rows over whether or not to include interlopers. How retro. It was hard to suppress a snigger when Corbyn wrapped up his closing speech with “what a wonderful weekend. What a wonderful conference.”
