After a bitter campaign, Your Party has the opportunity to put factionalism behind it and become a united, insurgent party, writes Shabbir Lakha

The Your Party CEC election has finally concluded resulting in a victory for Jeremy Corbyn and The Many slate. Of the 24 people elected to the leadership body of Your Party, 14 belong to The Many’s slate, 7 to the Grassroots Left slate supported by Zarah Sultana, and 3 are independents.

Michael Lavalette, Counterfire member and Preston Independent councillor who stood as an independent in the public office holders section received 10% of the final vote. He stood on a platform of for unity and an end to factionalism, and for an outward-looking broad-based socialist party that was rooted in the social movements and working-class struggle.

In a video statement after the results, Michael Lavalette said,

“The votes that we received were very significant for somebody standing on their own and I think it indicates that there is a real constituency within Your Party for those who want to put the faction fighting behind us and think about Your Party as an outward focusing, radical, and insurgent party”

The election campaign demonstrated that factionalism has only become further entrenched in the party, but there is now an opportunity to unite and push the party forward and outward as so many desperately need it to.

The danger ahead

The turnout was 61.8%, with 25,347 members voting. How small this number is compared to the 800,000 people that initially showed interest in the launch of the party is a sad indictment of how much damage the months of public faction fighting has done. In the wake of YP’s internal blood-letting, the Greens have filled the vacuum, and the Gorton and Denton by-election (and indeed many seats that won’t be contested in May) show the opportunities being lost by complacency.

The conduct during the election will have done little to win back that lost support. Any hopes that the election would be conducted in a comradely, outward-looking or positive way were dispelled from the outset. Both slates and their supporters doubled down on their differences, increasingly referring to the other as ‘TM’s and ‘GL’s and focused on trying to discredit one another.

The Many declared this as a ‘decisive victory’ and in a statement that reflects the manner of their campaign, announced on X, ‘We’ve only gone & won it!’. This isn’t entirely surprising given the reach the Corbyn camp had and its repeated thinly-veiled threats to abandon the project if The Many didn’t win.

So now The Many has an absolute majority on the CEC and immediately following the results, announced Corbyn will be the leader of the parliamentary Your Party.  There is little doubt that this is meant to mean de facto leader of the party – despite conference explicitly voting for a collective leadership.

Just as the interim leadership maintained the ban of members of the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party despite conference voting for dual membership, and used the most conservative version of the Single Transferrable Vote for the election, it is a continuation of using administrative means to bypass democratically-decided political positions.

It is positive that members clearly want the party to be a mass, inclusive party, and the newly-elected CEC  should respect that will by overturning the expulsions of socialists, stopping its witch-hunt, and ending the public faction fighting that has marred it so far.

The objective situation that created the space for a new political party to the left of Labour remains. That Your Party should be a united party of the left that is insurgent and embedded in working-class is a view that has widespread support amongst the party’s members, and even more so among the hundreds of thousands who were initially enthused but have since abandoned it.

Despite the fractured relations between the two sides, the party still has the opportunity to unite over a simple, radical program that addresses the issues facing working-class people; to get branches formally recognised around the country and get stuck into building the 28 March demonstration against the far right, the Nakba Day Palestine demonstration, the 20 June International Anti-War Conference as well as electoral campaigns in the May elections.

Too much time and good will has been squandered already, but the party can yet become the insurgent left-wing force that’s sorely needed.