Supporters of the Your Party project to create a new mass party on the left have been waiting for some good news for a long time. And when you know how desperately Britain and the world need change, it’s hard to wait patiently. But a timetable has finally arrived:
- September – membership, assemblies debate draft founding documents
- October – party name vote, updating of documents to include member feedback
- November – conference and members’ vote
Your Party: membership, assemblies, party name, conference, and one-member-one-vote
Before the end of this month, Your Party says there’ll be a “membership portal”. There’ll also be “draft versions of our four core founding documents for your input” (these are “Political Statement, Constitution, Rules, and Organisational Strategy”). On top of that, it will start to set up “regional deliberative meetings where thousands of members unite to debate our founding documents face to face”.
SEPTEMBER: This month, we’ll open our membership portal and publish draft versions of our four core founding documents for your input.
Your Party will begin to host regional deliberative meetings where thousands of members unite to debate our founding documents face to face.
— Your Party (@thisisyourparty) September 16, 2025
Then, in October, the assemblies will continue, and Your Party says it will “revise our draft documents to incorporate your feedback”. There’ll also be “an online vote to name Your Party”, and:
members will be able to comment, suggest changes, and track how each document develops.
In November, meanwhile, the founding conference will take place, with “thousands of in-person delegates chosen by lottery”. The purpose of the lottery is “to ensure a fair balance of gender, region, and background”. All members will then vote on the final documents “through an online, secure, one-member-one-vote system”.
NOVEMBER: We’ll host our founding conference for thousands of in-person delegates chosen by lottery.
These delegates will propose amendments to the founding documents before the final decision is put to all members through an online, secure, one-member-one-vote system.
— Your Party (@thisisyourparty) September 16, 2025
Debate, participate and focus
There absolutely should be space for debate about how all of this is going. Some critics argue that the whole process could and should be even more democratic and participatory – that members should, for example, have the power of recall “on all facilitators, including elected officials & all staff”. And interim co-leader Zarah Sultana herself has insisted that:
It’s really important that we have a conference arrangements committee that is gender-balanced – it’s not just led by MPs, it’s regionally and racially diverse.
However, we should also remember that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’. The British left has all too often divided itself into tiny, competing groups that each claim to have the perfect set of principles but rarely get anything meaningful done. With this in mind, even if Your Party just brings British left-wingers together in the biggest and most representative gathering ever, that in itself will be an impressive achievement.
Making Your Party the best it can be will require as many people as possible to show up, with a well-informed, passionate, and constructively critical perspective. But it will also require us to keep the main focus where it needs to be – on defeating the billionaire class and its increasingly powerful far-right footsoldiers. Because that is the most important struggle of all, and that’s where we need to invest the majority of our precious time and energy.
Featured image via the Canary
