Despite the awful infighting at the top, the new left party still has potential if it advances clear demands on jobs, wages and public services, argues John Rees

Your Party, the Jeremy Corbyn-Zarah Sultana electoral project, is stuttering into life.

In a rancorous and botched launch, the two figureheads have not, as Jeremy Corbyn admitted, ‘covered themselves in glory’.

Many on the left are despairing that it will ever become an effective organisation, many more are waiting to see if it can rise above its birth-pangs. Despair, rarely a useful political stance, may be premature.

Even on a worst-case scenario, come next May’s electoral test, the disaster of the Labour government, impacting directly on millions of working people’s lives, will be a political fact of far greater weight than the tribulations at the top of Your Party.

Palestine solidarity is, astoundingly, a motivating factor even greater than it was at the last general election, when four Gaza independents, plus Jeremy Corbyn, were elected.

So even if Your Party remains a loose coalition of like-minded activists, it will have made a modest step forward in organisation and co-ordination from the largely separate and atomised Gaza independents that fought the general election.

But Your Party has the potential to be so much more than this. It could express the boiling discontent felt with the political establishment in every section of a disenfranchised working class, some parts of which are drawn to Reform on precisely this basis.

For that to happen, it needs to develop quickly a simple, clear bullet-point election pitch that addresses the most pressing issues facing working-class communities. Everyone knows what these are: decent jobs and wages, housing and healthcare and education, peace not war, anti-racism not division and chauvinism.

In other words, a crystal clear call to stand with the exploited and oppressed against the new age of corporate greed and political corruption.

That will mean not allowing the populist right to define the left through its own culture-war categories.

Your Party must speak a language that some of the existing left finds hard to master: plain, unequivocal, jargon-free common sense as it is understood by millions of progressively inclined working-class people.

And to do that the internal regime of the party must be democratic in the ordinary sense of the word as it is understood in trade-union branches, tenants’ organisations, and social movements.

It must be free of the controlling instincts that come naturally to trade-union and Labour Party bureaucrats and political advisors. It should not mimic the pollsters’ focus groups, or the fake ‘consultations’ so beloved of social-democratic politicians.

It must empower self-activity and support social movements rather than have an instrumental attitude to them.

It must embody the idea of socialism as the self-activity of working people, not as a gift handed to them by elected MPs. That is a failed model, a model that Your Party must replace.