JUST in case you hadn’t noticed, the British left is in a bit of a mess at the moment.

While Keir Starmer’s faction is trying to throttle the life out of the left in the Labour Party, the broader left remains divided on critical issues like the war in Ukraine, trans rights, Scottish and Welsh independence and the EU, despite the nearly 10 years since the Brexit vote.  

In this, Britain is not an exception in Europe. Over the last couple of years there have been splits in the French, German, Greek and Spanish left and the European left in the European Parliament.

In Britain this crisis appears to have infected the new kid who isn’t even quite on the block yet. Your Party has managed to prove Marx’s axiom wrong and seems intent on demonstrating that history repeats itself first as farce. Let us hope for the sake of the thousands of socialists who have put their faith in it, that it doesn’t descend into a political tragedy.  

Even given a fair wind, in Scotland anyway, Your Party would have been entering a crowded field, at least electorally. It still has time to stand candidates in the May 2026 Scottish Parliament elections if it can overcome the effects of its breech birth.

However, the polling expert Professor John Curtice has repeatedly argued that electoral support for the left beyond the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) and Scottish National Party (SNP) has largely been given to the Scottish Greens, as opposed to other, smaller, socialist parties. It is the Greens, then, that are likely to suffer most from the arrival of a new left formation.

On cue, on Friday October 24 three Scottish Green councillors and a number of the Green Party’s Glasgow activists defected to Your Party, coinciding with a visit from Zarah Sultana MP for a Your Party meeting in Maryhill, Glasgow, that pulled an audience of around 400.

In the absence of Scottish polling on Your Party, Prof Curtice, in an interview with the National newspaper, pointed to an Electoral Calculus MRP poll published earlier this month on Westminster voting intentions across Britain.

In the MRP poll Your Party was included. Curtice noted: “On average, that poll had Your Party at 5.6 per cent in constituencies in England, 4.9 per cent in Wales, but only 2.9 per cent in Scotland.” Note these numbers are well down on the Ipsos polling which gave 20 per cent support for a putative Corbyn-led party in August this year, before the infighting became public.

In Scotland the magic number is 5 per cent. That is the percentage of the vote necessary for a party to win seats on the regional list for the Scottish Parliament. In Scotland the electoral system for the Scottish Parliament is hybrid, using both first past the post, then “topping up” through the regional party lists to try to achieve proportionality.

At this moment only the SNP wins a significant number of seats first past the post. Labour, for example, is only expected to win a few seats this way in May 2026. The rest will come from the list.

The Scottish Socialist Party won all of its six seats on regional lists at the height of its electoral success in 2003.

Of course, there is a lot about Your Party we do not yet know, for example, where does it stand on Scottish independence? Sultana went on the record on her recent visit to Glasgow committing herself, and by implication the new party, to the “principle of self-determination” for Scotland and to the position that Your Party’s stance on independence would be decided democratically by its Scottish members.

She told The Herald that determining the new left-wing party’s position on Scotland’s constitutional future would be a “high priority” at any potential future Scottish conference.

The issue, of course, is how that “self-determination” is to be expressed. Almost certainly it will take the shape of a demand for independence. There are two consequences of this. The first is that Your Party in Scotland will immediately go into competition with the small nationalist party Alba, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Scottish Greens and the SNP for the votes of those in Scotland who are on the left and support independence and in Your Party’s case, a radical version of independence.

The second is that it will raise issues about the autonomy of Your Party in Scotland. The Scottish Greens, for example, are a separate party from their English counterparts. Logically, as a party demanding independence, Your Party Scotland would be compelled to follow the same path.  

Without the Corbyn/Sultana branding, however, Your Party Scotland would become yet another left, nationalist party, probably hardly distinguishable, in its electoral pitch, from the Scottish Socialist Party which is very much alive, incidentally, though much diminished as an electoral force.

Your Party in Scotland may decide that electoral success is not its priority. For several years now in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, vibrant grassroots campaigns have been in the van where perhaps previously the official labour movement would have led.

Enough is Enough and more locally based groups like Power to the People in Glasgow ran effective anti-austerity campaigns.

Since then, opposition to the war in Gaza and the anti-fascist struggles in defence of immigrants and asylum-seekers have brought thousands more onto the streets. As yet, these have not congealed into an alliance that could give birth to a coherent, broad-based, political movement.

To do that would require a strategy based on a longer-term approach, including building support in community-based organisations and working in the unions and trades union councils.

Such an approach doesn’t have to mean forgoing electoral challenges if they judge it can help the party win visibility and perhaps help form left coalitions in councils and the Scottish Parliament to advance working-class interests.  

I think this would be something that everyone on the left would welcome, including those like me who remain in the Scottish Labour Party trying to work with affiliated unions and its organised left with the same purpose: to advance the interests of the working class.