For Your Party not just to survive but to thrive, we need to ensure the greatest internal democracy and the empowering branches to be properly organised. 

Many Your Party members are concerned that the existing unelected leadership of YP appears lukewarm about launching a new left party. This is why we are backing the Grassroots Left slate. A strong CEC led by grassroots activists would enable the party to carve out a space for itself as a campaigning organisation embedded in trade unions, community groups, organisations of the oppressed, and campaigns such as those around Palestine or the NHS.

It would quickly ensure that branches could contact all residents in their area who have signed up nationally and provide financial resources to become effective and visible on the ground. 

We have criticisms of how the Grassroots Left slate was put together and of the serious lack of anything meaningful on addressing environmental disaster in its platform. 

There is no socialism on a dead planet, and for socialists to be issuing political statements in 2026 that barely mention the need to organise around the ecological crisis is a glaring omission. This weakness, however, isn’t limited to GRL. YP’s founding documents barely mentioned it until members fought to make the issue more prominent.

Since then, we are pleased to see that the GRL statement has been amended to include a position on backing “rapid and just decarbonisation to tackle the climate crisis and meet all human needs within planetary limits” [link https://grassrootsleft.org/platform/]. 

ACR has published a contribution to the future manifesto discussions which links the climate crisis to the social crisis to put forward a way of linking these struggles.. We cannot have “climate issues” siloed off into a separate box. Fighting around the environment means understanding the general crisis of late-stage capitalism. In this context, we were happy that when several ACR members raised these issues at a hustings organised by GRL on 23 January, many of the candidates responded positively in their summations. 

We recognise that there are a number of other people standing for the CEC not on any slate who are credible candidates and would make excellent leaders of Your Party, particularly those involved in workers’ struggles or with a history of socialist organising. 

Why slates?

There are lots of misguided posts on social media and comments in online hustings from candidates who are standing independently of any slate. One argument suggests that people standing on a slate will only act in the interests of their own supporters if elected. If this were to end up being the case that would be a function of that candidate’s appalling politics – not because they were standing on a slate. 

It’s true that is the way that the elections have been set up in Your Party, i.e no process in place until after the national conference and various undemocratic practices from the centre since then have fed these ideas. We also think the fact that what became the GRL combined the process of agreeing a political platform with selecting its candidates without any more public statement or open primaries has not helped. 

But some of the anti-slate rhetoric comes from people who defend sortition as more democratic than delegate democracy – an approach with which we profoundly disagree. In some cases this probably reflects the hollowing out of the labour movement in Britain over the last 50 years and more. The fact that many younger people in particular have no direct experience of strong vibrant and radical trade unions in their workplaces and beyond is also a probable influence. 

The impact of post-modern ideas promoted by people like Varoufakis – and imported directly into Your Party’s arrangements for the Liverpool conference – have undoubtedly impacted people, many of whom are in other ways critical of the leadership. A fixation on sortition and excessive use of digital ‘democracy’ can appear good ideas initially but there are serious problems in these ‘post political’ procedures.  These are issues on which GRL has no common position but which we believe will need to be further explored and debated in order to go forward to build vibrant branches and a genuine mass and engaged membership over the months ahead. 

A party of the left

At our recent ACR Council meeting, members were clear that we totally oppose blocking long standing socialists like Dave Nellist on technical interpretations of the rules imposed prior to the founding conference. These moves come from the same stable that saw members of the SWP being barred from membership on the eve of the founding conference and these further exclusions from the CEC elections clearly contradict the spirit of the decision in Liverpool to allow ‘dual membership.

For Your Party to succeed it must become a party of the socialist left, not an ideologically narrow Labour Mark 2. A political alliance of revolutionaries and left reformists on an agreed manifesto and campaigning priorities would be a real step forward. One way we can think of the role of Your Party is the degree to which it can assemble the forces and decide on actions that advance the struggle of the working class and link these to the overall fight for socialism. 

The incoming CEC should ensure the greatest possible integration of socialist groups and organisations and proper coordination of activity to make Your Party more powerful than the sum of its parts. That also means calling on everyone to genuinely work to build Your Party in a collaborative and comradely manner, neither hiding their own political positions where these differ nor seeing the larger pond as merely a place to recruit. 

The political space for Your Party

Your Party has had a troubled start and been dogged by public falling out at the top of the organisation since October 2025. The rampant egos, conflicting priorities and lack of political weight or institutional cohesion to ground all this in collective frameworks that can handle these disputes reflects the weakness of the left in Britain. We have to be clear we are dealing with decades of setbacks and defeats by a vicious ruling class that has done everything in its power to marginalise the left, including in the Labour Party. 

We are also building a socialist working class party in a period in which – due to the anti union laws and the supine attitude of most union leaderships – the workers movement is not exactly flying high. With the exception of the (largely public sector) wage strikes in 2023 after inflation peaked at 10% we are fighting to build a socialist party in a period defined by a deepening polycrisis which is mainly defined by the growth and power of reactionary forces and ideas. 

These defeats also have impacts in the movements of the oppressed and with the partial exception of the Palestine Solidarity movement in many campaign groups, be they around the environment or housing, are much weaker than they need to be to face the challenges we face collectively. 

There are marked differences between the nations in terms of their political culture and traditions which mean that we think there needs to be real autonomy in deciding how YP members living in Scotland and in Cymru/Wales choose to organise. 

The concern of many in those places is summed up in the slogan for a meeting that this is scarcely considered by many on the left in England is well summed up in this question: Your Party in Scotland and Wales: an afterthought? (Find out more for registering for this 3 February meeting on zoom here.)

Most people living in England, including many on the left, have little idea which matters are decided by Holyrood in Edinburgh or the Sennedd in Cardiff rather than at  Westminster. 

In Scotland, support for independence is largely hegemonic on the radical left and significant amongst people who have traditionally voted for Labour – and of course SNP supporters. While support for independence in Cymru/Wales is less developed than in Scotland it has grown significantly in the last decade or so. Further the question of language, of Cymraeg/Welsh is a more significant political question than in Scotland. 

For a Red -Green Alliance

It is clear that the growth of the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW)  due to their new left orientation under Zack Polanski’s leadership has shifted the political terrain as well. This has been further fed by the difficulties within YP itself.  YP could struggle electorally in many places at first until it has established itself. 

ACR is not dewy-eyed about GPEW. We have campaigned against Green-led councils implementing cuts at local government in places like Brighton and Bristol just as we do against all councils of whatever political stripe doing so. Green Parties in other countries from Ireland to Germany have moved to the right when they have scented power.

We think it is important to learn from these negative lessons – in the same way as we think the experiences of Syriza in Greece or Podemos in the Spanish State raise sanguine points for the left in Britain working to build an alternative to the left of social democracy.

That is why we don’t agree with the tendency of some in YP, including within GRL, to dismiss the GPEW in a sectarian manner. There are clearly people with very similar politics to those attracted to YP who are in the Green Party – especially amongst those who have joined to support Polanski. Calling yourself a socialist and working class party does not automatically inoculate YP from political mistakes.

On racism, on Palestine, on trans rights and on many other issues we can work collaboratively with Green activists – and indeed with some on the Labour left. In the current situation, with the rise of Reform and Starmer’s adaption to the right wing drift, not to follow this united front approach only benefits those who want to further defeat the working class. 

Working with the Greens in particular is not only a task at the level of campaigning. Its clear that they will be the trailblazers for the whole left in the Gorton and Denton bye-election. We support developments which we know are happening in a number of localities for non-agressions pacts between independent socialists backed by YP members and greens. A red-green electoral alliance is a bigger challenge to the right than us competing against each other. 

Your Party can come out of the gate after the CEC elections swinging, empowering branches to organise around immediate concerns from housing to climate to fighting the far right. With its 66,000 members, Your Party could be a powerful force to help build the forces of socialism but it must quickly move on for constant internal debates and squabbles to show that it is worthy of support.

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