HOLLYWOOD no longer even tries to bring out an old-fashioned summer blockbuster each year. In 2025, we did not need one. The British left has been producing all the thrills and heartbreak, all the comic interludes and all the moments of bewilderment that Tinseltown ever could.

Will our intrepid band of heroes make it through to the holy grail (a mass socialist party)? Or will they tear each other to pieces on the way? Which membership portal is the real one? And who has been talking to the Sunday Times?

We have been on the edges of our seats since July.

But an especially exciting plot twist came in mid-September, with the announcement that delegates to the inaugural Your Party conference will be chosen by sortition.

This system — where members of decision-making bodies are picked at random — is most familiar from its use in ancient Athens and in a modern jury. The Athenians, indeed, seem to have regarded it as simple common sense that democracies choose their ruling bodies using a lottery: only oligarchies prefer to elect them.

Of course, some people in Athens did oppose sortition. Plato, a dissident intellectual with oligarchic sympathies, was more than sceptical about it. And Platonist opinions — sometimes even backed up by purely Platonist arguments — have been voiced among supporters of Your Party too.

Plato himself wanted society to be run by an enlightened “philosopher king” or by a team of carefully trained “guardians.” Anti-sortitionists in Your Party tend to want elected delegates, on the basis that the conference will then be made up of “our best fighters” or the “leading activists of the left.”

But the prospect of holding anything like genuine inner-party elections between now and November seems exceedingly implausible. The nascent party does not yet officially even have any branches — although some groups of enthusiasts have proclaimed themselves to be such.

At best, elections held under these circumstances would hand power in Your Party to a mixture of local celebrities and members of existing far-left parties (who are accustomed to pushing their slate through meetings of notionally broad front organisations).

It may not be quite a coincidence that some of the most vociferous Platonist commentary has come precisely from these left groups.

As it happens, the latest word is that members of “other nationally registered parties” will be excluded from Your Party membership. This is undemocratic and unenforceable.

Certainly, it can be irritating to sit through a meeting where everybody knows perfectly well that Bill is in (let us say) the Workers Socialist Party, but somehow it is an unacceptable faux pas to mention it.

But the solution is not to subject Bill to a bureaucratic witch-hunt (or to encourage him to keep his membership a secret): it is to establish an organisational culture where everyone is open about their affiliations: “Bill, he/him, central ward, WSP” — then we know where we are.

Attempting to exclude the left groups by decree is a mistake (and really could deprive Your Party of some of those “leading activists”). But that does not mean we need to adopt conference arrangements where these groups would be vastly over-represented.

Not all the left groups, in fact, have signed up for election instead of sortition. The organisation that some still think of as the Militant Tendency has called for the conference to be made up mostly of delegates from affiliated trade unions.

There are no affiliated trade unions.

Only two actually viable ideas have been put forward for how to run this conference. One is sortition. The other is “one member, one vote” (OMOV), in the form of a livestreamed debate followed by a series of online polls.

It is helpful to compare both proposals to the ideal democratic gathering: all the members getting together over a long weekend, discussing the issues in full, and then voting on them.

An organisation with tens of thousands of members obviously cannot do that. OMOV and sortition both keep parts of the ideal, and both lose parts.

OMOV keeps the idea that everyone gets a vote — but instead of allowing people to debate and discuss together, it limits their participation to a few yes/no votes.

Sortition keeps the genuine debate; but instead of inviting everybody, it invites a statistically representative sample.

If one Your Party member in five lives in London, then about a fifth of the randomly selected conference delegates will turn out to be Londoners.

Similarly, if half the membership are trade unionists, then trade unionists will make up roughly half of the conference. If 1 per cent have a pet budgie, you will get something like one budgie owner for every hundred delegates.

And a sample that looks like the membership can be expected to behave like the membership. Unlike OMOV, where the real power is in the hands of whoever sets the questions, sortition is a close approximation to what you would get if the whole membership could reason together and then decide.

Or so you would think. Because (Your Party theme music plays) there is another twist: we are told the conference will consist of no fewer than 13,000 delegates, half attending on the Saturday and half on the Sunday.

This is absurdly too many. It means any possibility of genuine participatory debate goes out of the window. Hardly any of the delegates will get a chance to speak.

It is even too many to be a properly representative sample.

Attending a conference in another part of the country costs money. Everyone from outside Liverpool will incur travel costs, often substantial. People coming from further afield may need overnight accommodation, even if they are only being asked to attend for one day. Many will need childcare.

Your Party’s total assets, as declared to the Electoral Commission, come to £855,000 in cash. It could easily cover the expenses for a few hundred delegates (which is the sort of number that could participate meaningfully); it would struggle to do it for 13,000.

So the attendance will be heavily slanted in favour of people who can pay for train tickets and a night in a hotel out of their own pockets.

As a matter of urgency, democrats (and sortitionists in particular) should urge the leadership of Your Party to reconsider.

They should also resist the semi-Platonist fallback position: sortition is OK for now, but we should switch back to elections as soon as possible. No system of election can give you decision-making bodies as representative as the ones produced by sortition.

Writing in 1956, the Trinidadian Marxist thinker CLR James connected Athenian sortition to Lenin’s vision of a society in which “every cook can govern.”

Your Party has the opportunity to start making that vision a reality, by incorporating sortition (and plain rotation) at every level of its organisational life. But 13,000 cooks in one cookshop would almost certainly spoil the broth.

So the sortition-based launch conference is an inspiring initiative. It holds out the promise of something new and radically better in British politics. But the half-botched way it is being done risks squandering that potential entirely, if not discrediting the whole idea.

Why should it be unlike anything else about Your Party?

Edmund Griffiths’s book Sortition and Socialist Democracy will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.