by Oscar Parry, Enfield and Lea Valley Socialist Party
‘Your Party’ is hosting 15-20 regional ‘deliberative’ assemblies to discuss the draft founding documents that have been uploaded to the Your Party website (yourparty.uk).
A few hundred Your Party members attended the five-hour North London Regional assembly on 25 October, including 14 Socialist Party members. We set up stalls outside, selling the Socialist paper, handing out Socialist Party leaflets, and inviting people to Socialism 2025.
There was no introductory plenary-type political discussion, and the event was structured around ‘small group’ discussions of 10 people. A volunteer ‘facilitator’ who had received some online training before the meeting ran each group. The groups were assigned tiny sections of the documents and asked to answer predefined questions about them. At the end of the meeting, a few ‘facilitators’ were picked to give feedback to the whole assembly on what had been discussed.
Criticism of the format of the meeting seemed to be widespread. One of the facilitators even started their group discussion expressing their view that the process was flawed! It was unclear how the written and verbal submissions from the groups will be used to implement changes to the draft documents. The assembly set-up meant it could take no democratic decisions.
Through the course of discussions, many groups decided to set their own agendas and discuss the documents as a whole. A number of the facilitators feeding back at the end similarly spoke generally about what their group had discussed.
Socialist Party members argued the importance of aiming to secure trade union involvement as quickly as possible with elected delegates at local, regional and national level. This would be central to putting ‘the working class at the heart’ of Your Party. These ideas tended to get general support, but there was a tendency for those present to also support a ‘one member one vote’ type system, which would not recognise the collective voice of workers organised in the trade unions. Where there was the opportunity to discuss how such a system would actually disadvantage members by limiting what they could vote on to questions determined by the leadership, attendees recognised the limitations.
However, the idea of a ‘sortition’ system to the founding conference, picking members at random, was widely criticised as an ineffective way of having members’ views expressed. Many of those present could see, including through the course of the discussions themselves, the value of a meeting of delegates as opposed to an online vote of all members to determine policy. Discussion in person allows for people’s minds to be changed, and policy to be hammered out in course of debate. The idea of local branches electing delegates, and putting motions to conference, seemed to get support. So too did the idea of Your Party groups bringing together trade unions and community campaigns to draw up a no-cuts People’s Budget – community organising that can direct how Your Party councillors elected next May become our voice.
A majority of attendees seemed to reject the idea in the draft constitution that states “Members may not hold membership in any other national political party, except if specified by the Central Executive Committee”. This would mean excluding organised socialist groups like the Socialist Party. Attendees could present their personal opinions on this on post-it notes at the end!
Criticisms of how Your Party has been organised so far, not only the public disagreement between Corbyn and Sultana, but also that the proposed roadmap to conference was extremely limited in allowing members to have a democratic voice, were quite widely expressed. There was, however, a determination to press ahead.
The need for membership control over the leadership was seen as vital. There seemed to be support for the right to recall of any member of the central executive committee. Term limits were proposed, so too the demand that elected representatives should take the average wage of a skilled worker, and some argued that there should be no seats reserved for MPs.
The founding process and Your Party documents does not lay the foundations for its development as a mass party of the working class. Socialist Party members will engage in the process, emphasising the central role the trade unions should play, under the direction of the members democratically. And fighting for Your Party to adopt a socialist political programme, including by putting up an electoral stand in defiance of Starmer’s austerity in May’s local elections.