AAt a preliminary meeting to set the course for what would become your party, participants quickly agreed on one thing: Given the clichés about leftists breaking apart forever, they should avoid descending into factionalism at all costs.
Six months later and the Liverpool venue hosting this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference has been warned to expect potential disruption, including an invasion of the stage by disgruntled members representing a particular wing. Additional security guards have been hired.
How did an idea with so much potential appeal and reach – a movement led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana that had hundreds of thousands of people signing up in support of it even before the idea existed – become so quickly and widely mired in power struggles and infighting?
The slightly simpler answer, which people on all sides at least privately agree on, lies in the growing tension between Corbyn, who has been portrayed as indecisive and sometimes vague about another political venture at the age of 76, and the combative former Labor MP Sultana, who has angered colleagues by taking big decisions unilaterally.
Insiders say the groundwork for the split is so widespread that, Sultana has communicated with her alleged associates mainly through lawyers over the past three months, come July 3, or “Terrible Thursday” as some call it. This was when the Coventry South MP announced she was resigning from Labor and would jointly lead a new unit with Corbyn.
The news came that day after a meeting of the initial organization in which co-leadership was discussed. However, there was a problem: Corbyn and his allies firmly believed that no decision had been taken.
Sultana’s surprise at her failure was communicated to the media, while there was deep disagreement in an internal WhatsApp group. It took until the following afternoon for Corbyn to respond publicly, in a tweet clearly stating that discussions were “ongoing”.
This highlights the contradictory and often incompatible personalities of the party’s protagonists, where Sultana either assumed that Corbyn’s lack of concrete answer on co-leadership was a tacit yes or simply decided to include him in it.
Even Corbyn’s allies say the former Labor leader may be difficult to get hold of, as he abhors open conflict and has a tendency, as one person involved in the project said, “to disappear for 24 hours without his phone to his allotment”.
“Jeremy can be touchy,” said one colleague. Another source involved in the project was more blunt: “That’s always been the problem – he won’t say anything. You have this whole industry of Jeremy-whisperers trying to explain what he means.”
A source close to Corbyn rejected the idea that he was worried about leading the party and said that was a decision for members to make. The idea that he disappeared into his allotment was “complete nonsense”, he added.
Corbyn said, “A lot of people have said a lot of things about me. I will continue to represent my community in Parliament and speak out against inequality, poverty and war.”
The first pressure on Corbyn to lead a new left-wing party came ahead of last year’s general election, in which he stood as an independent candidate in his Islington North seat. These proposals were rejected. There are some who still consider him a bit reluctant, but when he was Labor leader his chief of staff Kerry Murphy and his wife Laura Alvarez urged him to do so.
After the election, Corbyn suddenly found himself one of five left-leaning independent candidates, along with Shawkat Adam, Adnan Hussein, Ayub Khan and Iqbal Mohammed, to win urban, formerly Labor seats on Gaza-centric platforms. Two months later they jointly formed the Independent Alliance.
By this point, discussion had begun about the possibility of starting a new Corbyn-centred, not necessarily Corbyn-led, political movement.
While a platform of specific policies would have to await agreement on a leader or leaders, those in your party argue that they would have a distinct voice from not only Labor but also the Greens, with a focus on community organisation, internationalism, nationalization and redistribution.
But problems arose from the very beginning. “The first meeting was very chaotic,” one source recalled. “It started late because they were waiting for Jeremy to arrive and then the agenda kept changing.”
Progress was made over the coming months, including the outline of the party’s philosophy, but also disagreements: for example, an attempt to create a powerful role of general secretary, which was seen as a means of allowing Murphy to take charge.
Into this somewhat difficult mix comes Sultana, whose influential presence on social media reflects an MP who is eager to get things done, but prone to picking fights with people who might be allies.
One observer said, “Zarrah has made her mark by being combative and clearly has a place in it.” “But his diplomacy has been astonishingly poor. There has been a complete failure to formulate an alternative plan or to win over people.”
An aide of Sultana said that she wanted to work collaboratively but was kept out of the decision-making process and remained solely focused on the party and its mission.
If the split created on 3 July was bad, it was even worse when Sultana unilaterally launched a membership portal, collecting reams of data and nearly £800,000 in donations and levies.
The Guardian was told that your party had spent £13,000 on a software system for this process and Sultana planned to use it for her membership campaign. But sources claimed she was foiled when Corbyn’s allies became aware of her plans and sent a staffer to the organisation’s offices at 3am to change the passwords.
Sultana applies the pressure using her own software, angering Corbyn. He accused Sultana of creating a “false membership system” that collected money and data without authorization, and said that your party had referred Sultana to the Office of the Information Commissioner. In response, Sultana said she was consulting defamation lawyers over the baseless claims of a “sexist boys’ club”.
Since then, tensions have grown deeper, if not less dramatic. Much of the recent disagreement has centered on how money from a holding company set up before your party came into existence can be passed to the party, with claims of delay and failure to understand the basics of company law.
Perhaps more damaging was the departure of two independent MPs, Hussein and Mohammed. East of what he called “constant infighting” and a “toxic, exclusionary and extremely disappointing” culture, he lashed out at xenophobia based on issues such as transgender rights.
For now, Adam and Khan remain in place, but their departure highlights the difficulties of building a party that includes Sultana and Corbyn, as well as the often more socially conservative electoral base of other independents.
“At one point we had six MPs and four different factions,” a source said. Another observer attributed this to “burning bridges” by the Sultana. “That doesn’t mean independent MPs are innocent, but if you’re going to build something big you need to work with a lot of people.”
As members travel to Liverpool to decide on everything from the leadership structure to the name – Your Party was only an interim option – opinions differ on what might happen next.
“I think this is a great achievement,” said one participant, noting how the divisions in your party have been reflected by an increase in membership and attention for the Greens under their new leader, Zac Polanski.
Some omens are inauspicious. Sultana’s decision to hold a self-organised pre-conference rally in Liverpool on Friday evening, billed as an official AAP party event, angered others in the party.
And although Your Party members are also banned from being members of other parties, Sultana is supported by the Socialist Unity Platform, a lobby organization that includes groups including the Communist Party of Great Britain. This is where possible disruptions are predicted.
Others see the conference as an opportunity to move forward, especially if members opt for collective leadership rather than individual leadership, thus preventing a protracted and possibly brutal contest between Corbyn and Sultana.
One insider said, “One of the reasons we go to a conference so quickly is because we can’t decide anything amongst ourselves, so it has to go to the membership.” “Then, perhaps, a committee can proceed like normal human beings.”
Despite the drama, there appears to be an appetite for a left-wing challenger to Labor that is not the Greens, shown by the massive sign-up and plans by almost 3,000 people to head to Liverpool for an event in just a matter of weeks.
“This is a long-term project,” said one person who is involved, at least for now. “Who knows where we’ll be in a few years? There are likely to be areas of the country where the Greens can’t go, and we can collaborate.
“By then we’d be saying: ‘Do you remember that exact mental period at the beginning?’ But this conference has to provide some stability and some structure. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to be.”
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