YOUR Party’s founding conference brought thousands of people to Liverpool at the weekend.

Many more of the party’s 50,000 members participated online. They voted for collective leadership; for dual membership with other parties to be permitted; for the party to be explicitly socialist and for the social alliance it seeks to build to be centred on the working class.

Like every chapter of the Your Party story so far, the conference was beset by controversies, but any assessment of the new party must bear those facts in mind.

It is, by the standards of the British left, a big party. Despite legitimate concerns about conference arrangements, its membership have taken important decisions about what it will look like, some of those against the preferences of the interim leadership.

There is a world of difference between declaring you are rooted in the working class and actually being so, but the intention is important, particularly given a likely overlap in appeal with a left-leaning Green Party.

Your Party is a product of the labour movement tradition, one that seeks to end capitalist exploitation through organised working-class power. That matters.

And it is a party with considerable appeal. A recent YouGov survey suggested 12 per cent of the population could vote for it — a figure widely reported as a setback, as it is lower than in some previous polls.

But any existing left-of-Labour party would be exuberant at such polling — and it comes after months of widely publicised infighting.

Most people do not follow these political fallouts as closely as the activist left, and if Your Party can stop cutting off its nose to spite its face and move on from its conference in unity, early squabbles could quickly be forgotten.

Unfortunately that remains a big if. The conference itself did not proceed in unity: a last-minute attack on the Socialist Workers Party caused significant ill feeling; needless controversies were occasioned by the withdrawal of conference passes from particular attendees, based on unrealistic fears of disruption; co-founder Zarah Sultana boycotted the whole first day, continuing the trend of mutual escalation of disagreements that has so scarred the party’s formative process.

There is no guarantee the collective leadership will put an end to these rows, but if it does not it is hard to see the new party intervening effectively in British politics.

The antecedents of the new party in the original Corbyn project give it strengths in terms of profile and familiarity, but potential weaknesses too.

Some are of significance to the whole left. For example, the common but mistaken belief that “zionism” or the Israel lobby played the decisive role in defeating Corbyn’s Labour through smears that it was anti-semitic.

Electoral evidence shows this was a minor issue compared to its disastrous handling of the Brexit question. That’s important — because it was not merely a failing of Corbyn himself or even his supporters, but of the labour movement generally, exposing a gulf between the institutions of organised labour and the majority of the working class.

Closing that gulf is essential to any revival of working-class power and to defeating Reform, whatever one’s view of Your Party. A project for all socialists and trade unionists.

Rebuilding class-conscious trade unionism is increasingly recognised as a priority in our movement. But doing so requires developing a popular understanding of the economic basis of society, and exploitation in particular. The General Federation of Trade Unions’ first political economy conference at the weekend is an example that sections of the movement understand this.

Over the coming year, events marking the centenary of Britain’s only ever general strike — including the Morning Star’s conference on April 11 — will debate how to build a mass movement of and for the working class. It is a question far wider than the fate of Your Party, but those fighting for the latter to be a class conscious, community-organising and anti-imperialist socialist party are helping to answer it.