The infighting at the top of the Your Party project is demoralising, but a change of direction could be our best hope for an answer to the crisis, argues Michael Lavalette

On Wednesday, Your Party supporters and members woke to another leaked story in the Guardian informing the world that ‘legal action’ was being considered against ‘rogue YP members’ over party registrations and monies being held by ‘MoU Operations Ltd’.

MoU was set up when YP was in early stages of discussion. The three directors were nominated as they were seen as trusted and valued members of the original organising group, with broad support and good standing in the movement.

The three, Andrew Feinstein (former ANC MP and Independent candidate at last year’s election), Jamie Driscoll (former North of Tyne mayor) and Beth Winters (the former Labour MP), are now being accused, according to the leak, of ‘going rogue’ and failing to hand over monies raised or the data of people who registered when Zarah Sultana set up a membership portal for YP membership.

It should be noted that Feinstein, Winters and Driscoll vehemently deny any wrongdoing doing and in a statement on Thursday they made their position clear whilst announcing their resignation from MoU.

The spat is just the latest in a depressingly long list of conflicts at the top of YP being fought out in public. The fractional infighting has led to growing disillusionment with the YP project and demoralisation amongst a layer of activists.

Earlier this week, Independent Alliance MP Adnan Hussain outraged activists in a tweet that suggested that far-right activists and anti-fascist protestors were essentially the same. Hussain’s interventions into the various YP debates have been remarkably crass and right wing, emphasising that the IA MPs, elected on a pro-Palestine ticket have (with the exception of Corbyn) got very weak politics. Hussain’s attack on anti-fascists follows IA members’ recent interventions such as expressing support for rogue landlords and calling for troops to break the bin strike in Birmingham.

The Your Party project is now in grave danger of collapse, or being reduced to a small rump left-wing electorally focussed minor party. Urgent action is needed to change direction and make YP the kind of party we need.

The need for a broad left alternative

There is absolutely no doubt that the objective circumstances in Britain are crying out for a broad, left-of-Labour alternative. The mainstream parties are failing, their base eroding and Reform and the far right are growing by scapegoating minorities for the problems of the world.

A party committed to expressing working-class interests and tied to broad campaigns and movements for change offers hope to those facing immense difficulties imposed on us by the present crisis.

The cost-of-living crisis is driving increasing numbers of families into a desperate struggle to pay the rent, pay the bills and put food on the table. Food inflation over the last five years is running at 33%, energy-price increases over the same period have gone up almost 40% but, of course, wages are being held down and people are getting increasingly desperate.

Services are crumbling. This week, it was suggested the NHS needs £3 billion to stop it implementing health-care rationing. Our schools need investment and our teachers a pay rise. We need an urgent council-house building programme to address the housing crisis and provide good quality homes at affordable rents.

The public utilities continue to pay huge dividends to shareholders and exorbitant salaries to executives. Yet bills go up and services decline. Polling shows the majority want renationalisation, a significant number without compensation to the fat cats.

Labour has continued to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza slavishly, in Ukraine, they are at the forefront of the Western campaign to continue the slaughter. The demand for welfare not warfare is popular and makes sense to large numbers of people.

These conditions meant that when YP (eventually) announced a sign up, close to 800,000 people registered to get more information and get involved.

We were promised a bottom-up party. We were promised a party that would be intimately connected to the various social movements, trade unions and community campaigns for change.

We were promised openness and a new way of doing politics. To date, we have seen none of this.

Fights at the top of the Party. Threats of legal action between warring factions. A conference where delegates will be unaccountable and selected by ‘sortition’. Assemblies run like NHS consultation processes or Human Resource inspired ‘workplace consultations’ have been politics light with little room for motions from the floor, discussions of problems or significant influence on the construction of the founding documents.

So far, this has been the antithesis of democratic, bottom-up organising, instead, there has been centralised, top-down instruction that might even make the Labour Party blush.

The in-fighting has clearly caused significant demoralisation. We don’t know membership numbers, but it is far below the 800,000 people who registered initially. YP was never likely to get 800,000 members, but half that number could, surely, have been possible. In reality, membership might be hovering around the 50,000 mark.

YPs sluggish, bureaucratic start is also in contrast to the rapid increase in membership the Greens have witnessed since the election of Zack Polanski. Polanski has clearly got the Greens on an upward trajectory and the contrast between his approach and the YP leadership omnishambles is stark.

We now have an urgent task to try to save the YP project. For this to happen, we need politics front and centre.

YP needs to embrace the early claims that it would be a ‘social movement’ party, linked into our movements for change, building those movements and, in the process, building YP. YP must become an organic part of our social movements, and not simply see the movements as a source of members.

It must be clear that it is a party that intends to break decisively with the policies of privatisation, cuts and austerity that have wrecked this country over the last few decades and the disastrous foreign wars Britain has been involved in.

It needs to be democratic and accountable. We need to build local branches that are open and built upon democratic norms. There should be a national conference early next year, which takes motions from branches, where delegates are selected by branches and accountable to them.

Representatives, whether councillors or MPs, are there as representatives of the party and megaphones of the movements. They are members, no more and no less, like any other member.

Staff of the party should be just that: employed staff, there to implement our decisions and run our party in our interests. They should not be involved in political decision making.

Political disagreements are not a problem, but should be settled by fraternal debate. Socialist organisations should not turn to the state to sort out arguments!

If we start to implement some of these principles, we can still win back the lost ground that the over-cautious, bumbling leadership of the IA have ceded.