New Spanish anti-establishment party Podemos kicked off its tour of Britain with a bang as hundreds of campaigners assembled in London to hear the story behind its success.

Over 250 people crammed into the London Welsh Centre to hear Podemos MEP Tania Gonzalez and firebrand organiser Inigo Errejon speak alongside academic Cristina Flesher, film-director Ken Loach and journalist Owen Jones. 

The event was held by Podemos members living in London but also attracted British socialists inspired by the new party. Mr Loach, who is an outspoken critic of the Labour Party, said Podemos was an example of how to organise protest movements into a party. 

“I think the difficult questions we haven’t dealt with yet is how do we organise,” Mr Loach told the Morning Star. 

Other speakers suggested Podemos — now with over 120,000 registered members — holds some of the answers to those questions.Mr Errejon issued a rallying cry to the London crowd, urging them to reclaim democracy from elites who want to turn a “country of citizens into a country of serfs.” 

But he insisted there was no cookie-cutter solution to general exclusion of the average citizen from mainstream politics. 

The man who masterminded the campaign that landed the new party five seats in its European Parliament elections in May insisted: “Each country has to find its own tools.”

The day came to a close with speeches of solidarity from several other new European left-wing parties such as Sinistra Ecologia Liberta from Italy, Syriza from Greece and France’s Front de Gauche.