DESPITE the disputes that have troubled its launch, the founding conference of “Your Party” this weekend is an important moment.

Its gestation dates back further than the (itself controversial) announcement it was coming by Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana in July.

People have called for Jeremy Corbyn to found a new party at least since his suspension from the Labour Party by his turncoat successor.

The reason is obvious. The mass movement that sprung up around Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is of enduring significance.

It cut through the Westminster consensus over a privatised economy and deregulated markets, recognising this as a cloak for a decades-long erosion of working-class power and wealth — through breaking the power of trade unions, forcing wages down and profits up as a proportion of GDP, and degrading the “social wage” represented by public and municipal services and assets.

It revealed a hunger for redistributing wealth and taking back control through public ownership — which bagged Labour its biggest vote increase in seven decades in 2017. Even when badly defeated in 2019 Labour received more votes than under any other leader this century.

That movement was bloodied by the 2019 general election, but its erasure from national politics was a cheat. Labour was dragged back to the right by a lying leader elected on the promise of continuing Corbyn’s policies.

So the basis for “Corbynism” still exists, if we consider public anger at grotesque inequality, the ruin of our country by predatory profiteers, and an exhausted and increasingly illegitimate political system. It was always likely that stopping up Labour as a channel for these grievances would lead to them bubbling up elsewhere.

All that would be true even without the genocide in Gaza. But the British state’s complicity in a live-streamed genocide has changed the game — arming Israel, advising Israel, carrying out RAF surveillance flights for Israel as it massacred a starving and trapped population.

Carried on without a blink between governments of both Britain’s traditional “big two” parties, it opened eyes to the lie that British military power is benevolent or defensive. Falling living standards is one reason combined support for the two traditional parties of government has sunk to unprecedented lows, but the Gaza genocide is another.

In this volatile situation old verities — “it’s a two-party system,” “left of Labour parties never succeed” — need questioning. Liberalism is in crisis right across the West. Currently the far right is exploiting this most successfully: this adds an urgency to building a mass movement of the left.

“Your Party’s” much publicised trials and tribulations have led many to conclude it cannot lead that movement. This would be premature.

It has been overtaken for the moment in membership by Zack Polanski’s Greens, but as Jeremy Corbyn tells the Morning Star, it is, unlike them, a party of the labour movement, in the traditions of working-class power, even if formal union affiliations on the Labour model are unlikely.

Its 50,000 paid-up members make it the biggest socialist party in Britain in 80 years and its mass deliberative meetings up and down the country show its local organising potential — vital if it is to become “an antidote to Reform in every community” as Corbyn demands.

Debate over the wisdom or otherwise of its founding process, conference arrangements and particular policies is necessary: defeatism is not.

Even in opposition, as Corbyn’s Labour showed when it drove a Tory home secretary from office for wrongly deporting people or forced Tory prime ministers to disown austerity, a mass movement of the left can change politics for the better. We aim higher than that, of course.

Not everyone will agree on Your Party as the best vehicle for putting the left back on the map. But its emergence on the political scene is welcome, and all socialists should wish its founding conference every success.