Your Party founding conference – a workers’ party needs to be fought for

Editorial of the Socialist – the paper of Socialist Party Scotland, issue 81

Socialist Party Scotland welcomes the formal launch of Your Party at its founding conference in Liverpool at the end of November 2025. Our members participated in the conference alongside our comrades in the Socialist Party England and Wales.

We have been participating in Your Party since the process began, seeing it as an opportunity to build a mass fighting socialist party with the working class and its organisations – the 6.4 million strong trade unions – at its heart.

Many will have attended the conference fearful that further divisions may have erupted. The fact that the party has now been formally launched is a step forward, although there should be no covering up the weaknesses that currently exist.

The fact that Liverpool confirmed that Your Party won’t be launched as a workers’ party with a fighting socialist programme is, in our view, a missed opportunity. Not least given the almighty crisis that has engulfed Starmer’s pro-big business Labour government and the burning need to offer a fighting alternative to millions of working class people across Britain.

It means that Your Party will not currently have the ability to reach into working class communities and workplaces sufficiently clearly with its alternative. Something that is so clearly essential given the political vacuum and the rise of Reform UK.

The conference showed both the opportunities and the problems that currently exists with the initiative led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

Around 2,000 people from across the UK attended. This drop-off in numbers from a conference originally planned for over 14,000 people underlines the dampening of enthusiasm since 850,000 expressed their interest in July 2025.

In part, this is due to divisions in the leadership, which continued at conference, and its top-down character with official branches not yet being formed, the question of affiliations undecided and no election of delegates.

Positively, large majorities (votes were open to those who attended conference and all of the around 20,000 “full members” who could vote online) voted for Your Party to stand for “socialism” and be based on the working class in its founding political statement.

Socialist Party members urged support for this in the debates. Four options on the name were presented by conference organisers, none of which were explicitly socialist.\

The fight for democracy in this new party continued at conference and will be ongoing. Hundreds of motions never made it on to the agenda, and one supported by the Socialist Party for the trade unions to have a central affiliated voice was disqualified by the unelected Standing Orders committee.

Militant

On the eve of conference a few members of the Socialist Workers Party received emails saying they were being removed from membership as they were in another “national political party”. Nevertheless, the vast majority of SWP members who attended were able to take part in the conference.

Socialist Party member and Liverpool trade union activist Alex Smith received rousing applause when he opposed any attempts at excluding socialists. Speaking from the floor of conference, Alex cited the words of Liverpool City Council leader Tony Mulhearn, who when being expelled from the Labour Party in the 1987 said: “you can expel me from the Labour Party, but you can’t expel me from the working class.”

This was a direct reference to the witch hunt of the Militant Tendency by the Labour right in the 1980s. In the vote of whether Your Party members could also be members of other socialist organisations, 70% voted for a “dual membership” motion.

This was a step forward, although not what the Socialist Party has consistently put forward which was the right of socialist organisations and trade unions to be able to affiliate to Your Party.

The soon to be elected Central Executive Committee will decide on which organisations this can apply to. No doubt those who oppose socialist organisations having dual membership – some of those who are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in particular – will come back at that stage for another bite at the cherry on this issue.

Importantly, more than 90% of conference backed an amendment to the organisational strategy committing it to a anti-austerity stand in the May elections based on no cuts budgets. This was moved and supported by Socialist Party members.

Unfortunately, conference voted to not stand widely in the local elections in England in May 2026, which is a significant missed opportunity. Although they did agree to stand in “areas of strength”.

Conference also supported Your Party backing independent socialist candidates, which we will argue should include the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates where Your Party is not fielding candidates.

Trade unions must be central

While some sections of the left at the conference uncritically supported Zarah Sultana, at her fringe meeting on the eve of conference she continued to argue against trade unions having the right to affiliate to Your Party. This is a significant mistake in our view.

As we argued in the run up to the conference: “Your Party should instead make real the assertion in its political statement that it will be a party with the “working class at its heart”, by allowing for trade unions – locally, regionally and nationally – to have a collective democratic voice.

“It should be approaching the executives of the trade unions asking for a discussion about how Your Party politicians can best fight in their members’ interests.

“Socialist Party members have been part of organising discussions of trade unionists in 11 different unions, to discuss how to fight for the unions to take steps towards building their own political party.”

“There are those who argue that right-wing union leaders would use affiliation to hold back Your Party. But the right-wing trade union leaders were not able to hold back the wave of strikes in 2022-23. It was that wave of industrial action which has most recently won concessions from the then Tory austerity programme.”

The Scottish conference of Your Party is due to take place on 10/11 January. Socialist Party Scotland will be taking part and making the case for a widespread socialist election challenge for the Holyrood elections in May 2026.

The struggle for the building of a mass workers’ party with the trade unions playing a central role is a vital one. By basing itself on the trade unions as the existing mass organisations of the working class, Your Party can develop into the new mass workers’ party needed, which would be a huge step forward in the struggle for socialist change.

If it does not it will fail to make the advances for socialist ideas inherent in the current political and social crisis. Either way the struggle for such a party of the working class has now entered a new stage