The Trotskyist left and ‘Your Party’

Professor John Kelly

Just two months after Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched their new leftwing organization on 24 July, the Your Party website had attracted approximately 750,000 expressions of interest from individuals all over the country. Despite the absence of any party structures or constitution, local meetings have already been convened in numerous towns and cities including Ipswich, Leeds, London, Manchester, Norwich, Preston and Sheffield. These have typically been well attended, with numbers usually in triple figures, and appear to have generated considerable enthusiasm amongst many of the participants. A membership portal was opened on 18 September but this turned out to be a peremptory and unilateral measure by Zarah Sultana, and swiftly led to a denunciation by Jeremy Corbyn and the other independent MPs followed by an unseemly and very public row. Less than one week later however, on 24 Sept, the official membership portal was opened though it is too early to say how many of those who expressed interest over the summer have translated this sentiment into dues-paying membership. Various commentators have already explored the background to the September dispute between Corbyn and Sultana, covering their differing ideas about the structure of the new party, the process of party-building and the arrangements for the founding conference, now scheduled for late November. (Archie Woodrow’s article provides the most detailed account of the disagreements and the personnel involved). It has now been decided that conference delegates will be chosen by lottery rather than elected in local branches, a decision criticized by Sultana amongst others. These issues in turn have been interwoven with a complex and secretive structure comprising multiple groups and private meetings but largely excluding most of those who initially signed up to express interest.

A less well-known strand in the evolution of the new party is the response from organizations of the far left, particularly the Trotskyist left. With only a few minor exceptions, they have expressed delight at this leftwing break from Labour and devoted extensive press and online coverage to its potential policies and structures. Britain’s largest Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), an organization of around 3,000 dues paying members, declared on the day of the Your Party launch that,

‘Socialist Worker hopes that a new left alternative is a broad and pluralist umbrella, which the revolutionary left can be part of and stand candidates under.’

They strongly urged their members to sign up to the new party website and to join as soon as a membership structure became available and the same themes were reiterated one month later in their short pamphlet, ‘The New Left Party: Seize the Time’. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP, formerly Socialist Appeal) was equally enthusiastic and urged its 1,200 members to, ‘join Corbyn and Sultana’s new party, to build a mass left alternative to the rotten political status quo.’ The Socialist Party, formerly the Militant Tendency, has long argued for ‘a new mass, workers’ party, based on the trade unions’ and numerous articles appearing through the summer in its weekly paper The Socialist clearly regarded the Corbyn-Sultana organization as a potential vehicle for the achievement of that aim. (For some of the reasoning behind its thinking see the Socialist Alternative pamphlet The New Party We Need, September 2024). A further 11 of the UK’s 20 Trotskyist organizations have adopted a similar position so that in total approximately 6,500 Trotskyists have been strongly urged to join the new party and to get involved in shaping its policies and structures. In rough order of descending size they are Counterfire, rs21, Socialist Alternative, Anticapitalist Resistance, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Socialist Action, Workers Power, International Socialist League, Spartacist League Britain, International Bolshevik Tendency and Consistent Democrats. The highly sectarian Socialist Equality Party simply dismissed the new organization as a ‘Labour Party Mark II’

Elsewhere on the far left, reaction has been far more muted, if not hostile. The Communist Party of Britain, perhaps worried about its influential position on the British left and the standing of its daily newspaper, the Morning Star, declared that ‘Communists should be cautious and realistic as well as broadly positive’. George Galloway, leader of the Workers Party of Britain, congratulated Corbyn on the day of his new party’s launch and expressed his hope that the two organizations could reach ‘an electoral agreement to avoid clashes’ (Facebook post 24 July). In contrast, the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) founded in 1996 by former miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and with a 2024 membership total of just 329, dismissed the prospects of Corbyn’s new organization and urged him and his supporters to join the SLP.

Several months after the new party launch Trotskyist hopes of exerting significant influence within its structures appeared to suffer two major blows. An email sent on 15 Sept to the new party’s supporters announced that delegates to the November national conference would be ‘chosen by lottery to ensure a fair balance of gender, region, and background’, an unusual selection method for a British party but similar method to that of Melenchon’s La France Insoumise. Trotskyist groups had repeatedly argued for the creation of local party branches and for branch meetings to elect delegates to the upcoming national conference. With a proven capacity and ability for mobilization, and the presence in their ranks of many experienced and articulate activists, they would have hoped to secure significant numbers of conference delegates. That in turn could have allowed them to punch well above their weight in debates on conference motions, and to push for popular Trotskyist policies such as ending arms shipments to Ukraine. Delegate selection by lottery clearly puts paid to that scenario.

The second, and potentially fatal blow, came on 24 September when the new membership portal stipulated that in order to join ‘You must be over 16, resident in the UK, and you cannot be a member of another political party.’ (italics added). On the face of it the prohibition of dual party membership appears to eliminate any prospect of Trotskyist influence within the new party, but there are ample grounds for thinking the actual outturn will be far messier and more complicated.

In the first place, the few organizations that have responded in public to the membership rule have simply rejected it. The SWP hasn’t wavered in its commitment to get involved in the new party and claimed the support of Zarah Sultana herself for their right to join. The Socialist Party declared on 25 September their ‘members will be joining Your Party’ and indeed leading Socialist Party member Dave Nellist (formerly a Labour MP) is due to speak alongside Sultana at a Your Party meeting in Coventry on 17 October. Counterfire leader Lindsey German declared that she has joined Your Party and a similar position has been taken by several other Trotskyist organizations.

Secondly, some of the organizations asserting their right to join the new party and operate as factions within it, a policy known as ‘entrism’, have a track record of doing exactly that inside the Labour Party. The most famous example is the Militant Tendency, public face of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), a secret Trotskyist organization created in the 1950s by Ted Grant and his associates. Expulsions of leading group members began in 1983 and eventually most of the RSL quit the Labour Party in 1991. A few small groups of Trotskyists hung on through the Blair years, most notably Socialist Action and Socialist Appeal, and they were joined by several other groups following Corbyn’s election as party leader in 2015.

Third, the policy of entrism has the great virtue of being initiated and promulgated by Trotsky himself. In 1934 he encouraged the tiny and ineffectual ranks of his French supporters to enter the country’s socialist party, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), operate as a revolutionary faction and recruit as many SFIO members as possible before their voluntary departure or expulsion (Trotsky, L. (1934) ‘The state of the League and its tasks’, in L. Trotsky Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), 2^nd edn, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974). This entrist policy, now known as the ‘French turn’, has since been replicated by Trotskyist groups all over the world, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, and is a staple element of the movement’s organizational repertoire.

It therefore seems certain that Trotskyists will continue to join Your Party, undeterred by the party rule which declares this to be illegitimate, and will seek to turn the new organization into an anti-capitalist, revolutionary socialist grouping. How will the party leadership respond? On the one hand they could adopt a sanguine posture, safe in the knowledge that the random selection of conference delegates will throw up very few Trotskyists and that even fewer will be elected to the new party’s ruling body. Consequently, their influence could prove to be minimal. On the other hand, the Trotskyist groups are serious and determined, and will do everything in their power to shape the positions of the new party. Virtual exclusion from national policymaking will not inhibit their presence and activity in local branches, through which they will seek to challenge party rules and amend policies deemed to be insufficiently revolutionary. Insofar as this activity remains localized and relatively ineffective then it may go unchallenged by the new party leadership. But if it becomes highly visible, with a significant number of branches embroiled in debilitating factional struggles, then pressure to act against Trotskyist activists will increase. Even in that scenario, the new leaders may be reluctant to spend the first few months of their party’s existence in multiple rounds of expulsions and appeals. Of course, the expulsion of prominent and well-known Trotskyists would be constitutionally straightforward, but the same cannot be said of the many rank and file Trotskyists whose party affiliations remain private and therefore difficult to prove. That prospect of inner-party conflict would surely hinder the new party’s performance in its first major electoral test, the May 2026 local council elections.