THE initial announcement of Your Party’s formation in July 2025 was greeted with huge enthusiasm, with more than 800,000 people signing up to support it in a clear confirmation that large parts of the public are desperate for a change from what some have called the “uniparty system” since Keir Starmer took over Labour and dragged it hard to the right.

The old certainties are collapsing. The Westminster consensus — that comfortable arrangement between Labour, Conservative and even the Liberal Democrats, that cartel of neoliberal orthodoxy — stands exposed as a fraud. And Britain’s working class has stopped believing in it.

In 2017, that same rebellion found a home. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour won the biggest vote increase in seven decades. Millions poured into the streets, into meetings, into campaigns, believing that democratic socialism was finally arriving. That movement did not die in 2019. It was “betrayed.” It was suffocated by a leadership that ran toward the very billionaires and bankers the movement had named as our enemy.

However, from an impressive 18 per cent of the public saying in July 2025, they would likely consider voting for a Corbyn-led party in a general election (and polling first of any party among 18 to 24-year-olds in at least one poll) — astonishing for a just-formed party — it had fallen by a third, to just 12 per cent, polled without Corbyn’s name, a few days before the conference.

With Britain facing a far-right government at the next general election and the current government reinforcing racist narratives in its attempt to “out-Farage Farage,” the newly formed Your Party should have no time for sectarianism, infighting or factionalism. 

Still, with over 55,000 members, arguably Your Party is the biggest socialist party in Britain, and if the buzz, passion and energy at the founding conference is anything to go by, Your Party can represent not just “pressure from the left” on Starmer’s Labour, but a real electoral challenge to the burgeoning far-right politics of the misnamed Reform UK. The public’s hunger for a real alternative to austerity, hate and scapegoating has not disappeared. The Greens, it can be argued, still have trust issues in working-class communities and I believe that many people will quickly embrace and support Your Party as soon as it demonstrates that it has its head firmly in the fight.

Your Party represents what should never have needed resurrecting: a political formation rooted in the labour movement, animated by socialism, committed to redistributing power and wealth back to those who create it through their labour.

This weekend’s Your Party founding conference reflected the largest socialist party in Britain in 80 years. That is not an accident. That is a response to a vacuum. Hundreds of thousands more have signed up. In communities across this country — in Hulme, in Coventry, in London, in Leicester, in Glasgow — people are gathering in Your Party’s halls, asking: how do we fight back? How do we build power? How do we win?

It is my view, that Your Party, its official name confirmed at conference, voted on by a majority of members, must become an antidote to Reform in every community. Not through better rhetoric or charisma — though we must communicate clearly. But through organisation. Through rooting itself in workplaces, in housing estates, in schools, in the communities devastated by 40 years of neoliberalism. Through connecting the struggles of workers in Manchester and Liverpool with the struggles of Palestinians in Gaza. Through insisting that internationalism is not sentiment — it is strategy. When British workers organise, when British workers refuse to participate in imperial wars, when British workers withdraw their labour from machines of exploitation and death — that is power that ripples across the world.

Your Party urgently needs to clarify the relationship it wants to have with the trade unions and the rights, if any, it will give them.

One of the other challenges to Your Party’s formation is whether the collective leadership model, that I announced at conference (I was in the chair on Sunday morning) as formally agreed by members who voted, can compete for their attention in the media, given the mainstream media’s (“MSM’s”) preference for personalities and their desire to build narratives around a single figure.

As Ash Sarkar put it on a social media post, “a camel has a better chance of getting through the eye of a needle than a committee does cutting through in the media. It’s all well and good having a party spokesperson, but they don’t have the same legitimacy as an MP/candidate to audiences.”

Thus, some will say: “You cannot win. The two-party system is too entrenched. The media will destroy you. The ruling class will not permit it.” They said this about Corbyn. And we won 40 per cent of the vote in 2017. We forced the Conservatives to disown austerity. We proved that mass organising could shift the terrain of British politics.

Yes, the system is rigged. Yes, the media is against us. Yes, the Labour Party leadership will attack us. But the system is also fragile. The legitimacy of both major parties has collapsed to historic lows. The Liberal Democrats have failed to fill that vacuum. The idea that neoliberalism is the only option is dead — killed by reality. The idea that wars of Western imperialism are necessary has been exposed by the genocide in Gaza. The ground has shifted. The question now is: who will inherit that rupture?

So with the founding conference over and the founding documents all but agreed, the work begins now. Your Party must grow from 50,000 to 500,000. It must build branches in every community. It must organise in every workplace. It must become the political force that embodies the movements on the streets. It must prove that socialism is not a historical artifact but a living necessity. It must prove that we — the working class, the oppressed, those with everything to gain and nothing to lose — can organise ourselves into power.

The billionaires will deploy every weapon against us. The media will misrepresent us. The Labour establishment will smear us. The state may attempt to marginalise us. But we have something they do not have: millions of people with nothing left to lose, tired of being robbed, tired of being lied to, ready to fight.

Your Party offers what Labour abandoned: a socialist future built on collective power, not billionaire rule.

One thing is just as clear after the conference as it was before: Your Party must succeed, because as the Polish-German Marxist, revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg put it, the alternative is barbarism.

Claudia Webbe was previously the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.