South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester assemblies demand sweeping changes to draft documents
By Socialist Alternative reporters
Your Party’s Regional Assemblies were announced in September as an “unprecedented exercise in democracy”. To say that the process since then has not lived up to this description would, unfortunately, be an understatement.
Less than one month before the national launch conference, several important regional assemblies, including those for East London, Glasgow, Newcastle and Birmingham have yet to have dates confirmed. A last-minute, under-prepared and under-financed organisational effort from Your Party HQ has seen assemblies scraped together, with little notice to members and in significantly scaled-down venues.
Hard-working regional organisers have been asked to do the impossible and secure venues at inadequate notice and without the funding necessary. In Merseyside, a location (St Helens) has been announced for 8 November (five days from now) but with “venue TBC”. In West Yorkshire, regional organisers secured a venue in Bradford at great difficulty two weeks in advance, but had to wait until the day before their assembly for Your Party HQ to email members in the region announcing it. When it finally went out, this email also incorrectly announced the location as Chelmsford, rather than Bradford!
Greater Manchester was served up a Sunday morning meeting at a few days’ notice, resulting in a turnout of barely more than 100 people. In Leicester, the biggest city in the East Midlands and home to one of Your Party’s MPs, members were emailed at a couple of days’ notice informing them that their regional assembly would take place… in the South-Eastern town of Milton Keynes! One car-load of activists who did manage to attend came away convinced that they were the only Leicester residents to have been present.
Instead of empowering the thousands of dedicated and often experienced working-class organisers who have, without any assistance from Your Party HQ, built an impressive network of branches across the country, an ever-narrower group of individuals has kept the process both firmly under wraps and firmly under their control. Many of these individuals appear to be former staffers for Corbyn during his time as Leader of the Opposition. Even Zarah Sultana, Your Party’s co-founder, has been kept in the dark. This approach of deliberately excluding the membership risks strangling the project, and the poor turnout at regional assemblies is a warning that this risk is real.
What’s more, the plans emanating from Your Party HQ for these supposedly very democratic gatherings have been decidedly lacking in… democracy. The only meaningful discussion proposed is confined to 10-person ‘break-out groups’ without any facility for groups or regional assemblies as a whole to discuss the questions at hand collectively, let alone submit or vote on proposals, motions or amendments to the four draft documents which assemblies are gathering to debate.
A clear message
However, it is a fact that several assemblies have now taken place, each bringing together between dozens and hundreds of the most committed Your Party activists. Last weekend (1-2 November) saw the most significant cluster of these events take place so far, in very important locations including South London, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.
Despite the severe limitations of these gatherings, committed party activists including members of Socialist Alternative – revolutionary socialists organised in Your Party – have sought to participate fully and constructively. And their voices must be heard. These voices, indeed, have sent a clear message – the members demand a change in course! This weekend, rank-and-file activists made this point loud and clear.
In West Yorkshire and South London, Socialist Alternative members in attendance, with the clear support of many attendees, argued for their assemblies to be able to take consultative votes on crucial questions related to the draft documents. In South London, 15 members of local Your Party organising committees endorsed a suggestion to change the assembly’s agenda to vote on proposals, including in opposition to the continued stewardship of Your Party’s launch process by the Independent Alliance of MPs. In West Yorkshire, there was a clamour for the one-year organising plan draft document to be “thrown in the bin” and for this to be voted on as a recommendation by the regional assembly.
In both cases, those presiding over the assemblies refused to allow these proposals, which were clearly echoed in the meetings, to be voted on democratically.
In South Yorkshire and Manchester however, similar efforts were more successful. These assemblies voted by an overwhelming majority to propose sweeping changes to the draft documents. In both cases, the proposals which were endorsed included the elimination of reserved spaces on the party’s proposed Central Executive Committee for Members of Parliament and the enshrining of meaningful democratic and financial powers for local branches in the party’s constitution.
Greater Manchester voted to ensure that all party officials and representatives take no more than a workers’ wage, and South Yorkshire clearly opposed the selection of conference delegates via ‘sortition’, instead advocating the election of delegates by all-member meetings in local branches. These demands have been widely supported by the left wing of Your Party, including by Zarah Sultana and the Platform for Democracy, as well as local YP activists. They point squarely in the direction needed.
Your Party’s leaders must put their money where their mouth is, listen to the voice of members and act in consequence. It is now crucial that these democratically-endorsed proposals are duly circulated throughout Your Party’s membership and voted on at national conference. All facilitators at upcoming Regional Assemblies should be instructed to allow for democratic discussion and voting on these and similar proposals.
It is only thanks to the pressure and determination of working-class rank-and-file groups and activists in Your Party that the show has been kept on the road amid the shambolic crises which have plagued the top of this process. Disgracefully, Zarah Sultana (whose concerns are being echoed by members, meetings and assemblies throughout the country) is not meaningfully involved in the leadership or stewardship of the process. Her proposal, which is endorsed by many including Socialist Alternative, to allow for a co-leadership structure for Your Party is quite simply ignored in Your Party’s HQ’s draft documents.
All of this and more must change! It is clear that Your Party HQ and the Independent Alliance of MPs who have stewarded this process (with Zarah excluded) so poorly in recent months cannot be allowed to continue their stewardship for one moment longer than is necessary. A fully democratic, representative and accountable leadership which is committed to the necessary vision of a democratic, working-class socialist party to change society fundamentally must be elected at the November national conference. This approach is evidently both widely supported by the party’s ranks and staunchly opposed by HQ.
Given the urgency of the situation facing working people in Britain, there is no time for complacency or resignation. We are utterly determined to make use of this historic opportunity to turn the political tide in favour of our class. That means remaining fully committed to building YP. It also means opposing misleadership and arguing resolutely, and in an organised way, for it to be a mass democratic socialist party rooted in struggle and in working-class communities.
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