THERE is still a good story to be told about Your Party, the new socialist organisation launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

YP is now as well known, alas, for its internal disputes as for its public programme.  

Enthusiasm and credibility have taken a knock, but it is still positioned to make an impact, given Labour’s continued misrule.

It has enlisted 50,000 members, which is not the 800,000 who initially signalled interest, but is not nothing either.

50,000 is a larger membership than any socialist party has ever achieved in Britain, excepting only the Communist Party from 1942 to 1945. And this membership is likely a floor rather than a ceiling, if the party’s propensity to self-harm can be ended.

Many of those members have been taking part in regional assemblies to discuss the party’s founding documents. These nearly all seem to have been well-attended and well-conducted.

There are legitimate arguments as to how democratic and effective this structure is, but it is important to distinguish between a durable constitution for an established organisation and what is needed to get to first base.

Clearly YP, or whatever name it eventually bears, will need a stable branch structure and conduct future conferences on a proper delegate basis, amongst other requirements.

As it is, a process of ballot is being used to select thousands of delegates to the founding conference, to be held in Liverpool at the end of the month. This should be a lively event with, hopefully, positive outcomes.

Certainly there is no sense in anyone on the left wishing YP anything other than success. Even Labour MPs who have no intention of joining hope that it can at least make enough of an impact to pressure the dunderheads in Downing Street into a course correction.

However, an assessment of its prospects must also address some strategic weaknesses.
The three most significant seem to be:

First, the Green Party is already occupying the electoral space where YP hopes to pitch its tent. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests large numbers are now choosing to join the Greens in preference to YP, a result of the rows but also the election of Zack Polanski as the party’s new leader.

Opinion polls now show the Greens overhauling Labour as the most popular electoral force on the left, a historic development. That can generate a self-reinforcing momentum.

Polls taken in the summer had indicated that YP might do the same. In fact, they showed it outpolling the Greens and indeed winning many voters from them. That was pre-Polanski and pre-rows, so it may be doubted that the same would occur now.

Nevertheless, there are large areas of the country where YP, led by politicians with a history in the Labour Party, should perform better than the Greens.

YP should also start ahead of the Greens in many areas with large Muslim communities, but Polanski’s party is not standing still here either.

Some form of unity with the Greens will be electorally essential. Slugging it out in the voting booths is the road to mutual ruin.

So YP now needs to give reasons for progressives to join it rather than the Greens, while not lapsing into sectarian posturing which invents or exaggerates differences and impedes alliances. That is not so easy.

Second, YP risks looking like continuity Corbyn rather than continuity Corbynism.

None of those politicians who played the leading role in Labour during the remarkable period of the Corbyn leadership, those who formed his strategy team and served in key shadow cabinet posts, can be found in Your Party.

John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Jon Trickett, Ian Lavery, Richard Burgon, Becky Long Bailey all played key parts in shaping “Corbynism” and are still on active service, but as Labour MPs. That does not look like changing anytime soon.

It is striking that those Corbyn once led are now not following, despite their personal admiration for him.

Rather they are sniffing the air for signs of a breach in the wall of Starmerism. The defeat the left inflicted on the government over welfare cuts was the first drawing of blood.

The rebels suspended vindictively after that episode have now had the whip restored. Angie Rayner is a visible and audible presence in the Commons once more, her campaign of self-rehabilitation proceeding apace.

All the talk is of the skids being under the wretched Prime Minister, after next May’s elections, if not earlier. That seems to many like a more interesting conjuncture.

So — how does YP attract more front-rank socialist politicians, and how does it relate to those who remain Labour?

Third, there is the matter of trade union support, or lack of it. Official affiliation by large unions was never on the agenda but unions disaffiliated from Labour, or never affiliated to begin with, could be won to engage with YP on some terms or others.

The one union closest to an official relationship, the Bakers, is now disillusioned with how things have gone and is keeping its distance. And several leaders of maybe-sympathetic unions have complained that no-one from YP has reached out to them.

This is a problem because while trade union engagement is far from the only way to generate a genuine, as opposed to rhetorical, working-class base, it is certainly the most straightforward.

Right now, YP will struggle to represent the working class in all its diversity and communities.  

One solution would be to give a greater role to Beth Winter, a former Labour MP from the south Wales valleys who could refresh the parts other YP politicians struggle to reach.

These issues are more important than the endless debilitating rows which, like smouldering fires, suddenly leap into flames once more when there was reason to hope they might have finally extinguished. Some people like the heat more than they like the house it is burning down, apparently.

None of these challenges originate in YP’s internal turbulence, although the very public hostilities have definitely not helped.

Nor are likely to be resolved at the Liverpool conference, which has been set a more limited mandate of putting the party on a firm foundation and will probably spend more time on constitution and organising than on politics per se.

All this speaks to a deeper problem. The Your Party project is undertheorised. The initiative has been founded on the basis of correctly identifying a large void to the left of Keir Starmer’s Labour, where those disenfranchised by the expunging of Corbynism wander looking for political expression.

But there is no underpinning analysis of the class struggle conjuncture internationally and within Britain, no assessment of the historic crisis of social democracy, no attempt to address the changed structure of the working class in Britain, or the problems of identity politics.

The dangers of imperialist war and fascist reaction are addressed in broad-brush rhetoric, but how these menaces might be opposed, and which forces need to be assembled in a bloc to do so, and then how such an alliance might seek political and parliamentary expression are not clarified.

Of course there is no need to tick every box before launching, nor to find a solution to everything before starting to solve anything.

But the traditions of British pragmatism are deeply embedded in a labour movement averse to theoretical constructs and ideological engagement and are expressed, inter alia, in a preference for organisational forms and constitutional arrangements over political and programmatic clarity.

Still, YP has the chance to do it right. “Right” must include avoiding any stampede to a lefter-than-thou sanctimoniousness, which reaches its reducto ad absurdum in the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn as insufficiently anti-zionist.

Also, it must include ending the endless briefings against Zarah Sultana, which former PCS union leader Mark Serwotka described, at a London meeting last week, as “shameful and disgraceful” and the “worst form of labour movement skullduggery.”

If it falters, one part of the energy YP has unleashed will be channelled towards the Greens, which ultimately is not a party for socialism however great the overlap on immediate demands, another back to pre-existing local independent initiatives, which self-evidently cannot transcend localism to challenge the state, and a final part will be dissipated.

And that will not be the worst of it. It will degrade another obstacle standing between the working class and Farageism. That should be enough of a threat to induce everyone leading YP to put their best foot forward.