After months of head scratching, fraught debate and an all-out war between its co-founders, ‘Your Party’ has finally unveiled its new name – and it’s Your Party.
Closing its inaugural conference in Liverpool, Jeremy Corbyn announced the results of a members vote, telling supporters: ‘Your Party is the name of your party.’
Members of the fledgling hard-Left movement chose between Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance and For The Many, with just 37 per cent voting to stick with the original name.
Meanwhile the party looks set for more chaos and infighting after members voted to block Mr Corbyn and Zarah Sultana from running to be leader today.
Divided members voted by 52 per cent to 48 per cent for a ‘collective leadership’ option which means the former Labour leader and his warring co-founder can’t stand until 2027.
The move will be seen as a blow to Mr Corbyn – after he backed a ‘sole leader’ model and said he would stand to be head of the party – and a victory for Ms Sultana.
It comes after the ex-Labour MP boycotted the opening day of Your Party’s inaugural conference in Liverpool over claims of a ‘witch hunt’ against her allies by ‘nameless, faceless bureaucrats’.
Ms Sultana used her headline conference speech to continue the feud today as she blasted the ‘expulsions, the bans, the censorship’ carried out by those ‘at the top’.
Jeremy Corbyn’s new political party descended into all-out war on Saturday night as co-founder Zarah Sultana boycotted its first day
Zarah Sultana claimed there was a ‘witch-hunt’ by ‘nameless, faceless bureaucrats’ inside the new party as she fumed that some of her allies were banned from the conference
She acknowledged Your Party’s founding had been ‘messy’ and there had been ‘hiccups’, adding: ‘Some of that is my fault, and for that, I am sorry.’
The Birmingham MP said she had ‘an enormous amount of admiration and respect’ for Mr Corbyn who ‘gave us hope when he became leader of the Labour Party’, before adding: ‘But now we are building something new.’
In a speech that went down well with delegates, she demanded that Your Party be an ‘anti-Zionist’ movement and led a chant of ‘from the river to the sea’ that is regarded by many as an anti-Semitic call for Israel’s elimination.
Ms Sultana also labelled Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor a ‘parasite’ and called for the abolition of the monarchy, adding: ‘We shouldn’t just abolish Andrew’s titles. We should abolish the monarchy itself.’
Ms Sultana also confirmed she will be running for a position within the committee of ‘ordinary members’ that will lead the party, suggesting there could still be a contest between her and Mr Corbyn when the ballot opens in January.
And after a row erupted over expulsions of members of the Socialist Worker’s Party from the conference in Liverpool, members also voted to allow dual membership of Your Party and other Trotskyist groups in a move likely to prompt further chaos.
Meanwhile voting showed that Your Party’s entire ‘verified’ membership is just 21,035, with less than 9,000 people voting on the leadership model. This is nowhere near the 50,000 figure claimed by Mr Corbyn and far below the 800,000 people the party boasted of having registered their interest.
Your Party’s foundation has been dogged by toxic in-fighting and chaos, with a dispute between Mr Corbyn and Ms Sultana resulting in a botched membership launch and threats of legal action over the transfer of an £800,000 pot of members’ fees.
A party spokesman said: ‘It was Your Party all along. Our permanent name reflects what our party and our conference is all about: a radically democratic movement seeking a radical transfer of wealth and power from the few to the many.
‘This weekend was a festival of democracy, breaking with the Westminster mould of top-down politics. That’s what we’ll be offering to voters across the country: a genuinely new kind of politics.’
