Your Party’s grassroots are losing patience

There is no point affiliating with a party that cannot even define itself

Students involved in Your Party’s emerging youth scene often talk as though they’re part of a national movement. In reality, what exists is a patchwork of university groups and young, unofficial organisations who are only now discovering each other. Some clubs use the Your Party name freely, while others have deliberately branded themselves more tentatively, as broad “Left Societies”. Several such societies had no idea the others existed until a large group chat recently pulled many of them together. But it is not yet clear whether the whole network amounts to anything more than, as one student described it, “a glorified WhatsApp group”.

The landscape looks fractured because it is. This is less due to ideological splits than a lack of structure to the entire project. Students are attempting to create a youth wing with no mandate, no framework and no route into a party that still hasn’t defined its own internal architecture. Across campuses, young members are hosting discussions, exchanging ideas and loosely attempting to coordinate. Yet none of this is connected to the party’s national machinery, because the machinery simply doesn’t exist. Attempts to reach the tiny HQ facilitating committee routinely go nowhere; with its members described as “essentially impossible to reach.” Confusion stems not from political disagreement but from this vacuum. Student groups are improvising independently, each unsure where they stand within the party.

As well as this scattered youth effort, there is the equally confused and under-resourced world of local proto-branches. One local member described the reality of trying to function without the basics: “On a boring level it’s really annoying; trying to set up a bank account, for example, requires a constitution and name but we don’t have any of those practicals.” They summarised it bluntly: “We’re in a limbo.” With no central organisation to refer back to, the entire process has become, “bureaucratically and administratively… a bit of a pain.”

Even where branches do exist, they can be uneasy spaces. A member in Your Party Birmingham described strenuous internal cultural tensions. He mentioned ongoing questions about what role – if any – social conservatism should occupy in the movement, with several younger and queer members leaving the branch as a result, citing recurring issues with transphobia. Older members tend to emphasise sticking together “for the sake of the movement”, while younger activists refuse to compromise on views they see as fundamentally incompatible with their politics. The divide is generational: those who feel unity must be prioritised versus those who believe certain lines cannot be crossed.

These two spheres – youth circles and local branches – both struggle with ambiguity, but different versions of it. Branches feel stuck, unable to move forward because nothing exists on paper; while students remain unanchored, unsure whether, and how, they should slot into the party’s eventual structure.

For some students, this lack of clarity is encouraging. The absence of hierarchy feels like an opportunity, a chance to shape a movement before any formal leadership defines it. There is a sense among many that the point is not clarity but possibility – that things may be “bad right now” but that this “doesn’t mean it’s going to be bad forever.” For ex-Labour and Green members, especially, the lack of entrenched practice feels liberating.

But these same conditions also produce drift. Work is duplicated. Communications are lost. No one knows who answers to whom. Cambridge’s Left Society made its position clear early on, when asked about joining a unified youth network: “That’s not happening.” It is a simple logic: there is no point affiliating with a party that cannot even define itself. Versions of this decision repeat across the country.

Meanwhile, the absence of structure has allowed tensions at the national scale to replicate at the youth level. One student described how the “the vast majority of the youth… particularly those organising the youth movement… lean towards Sultana.” It isn’t formal allegiance, but an interesting signal of where young people feel the movement’s momentum sits. Sultana’s appearance at the wing’s unofficial launch rally only deepened that impression.

All these tensions played out at Your Party’s recent conference in Liverpool. Students describe a warm atmosphere but almost no organisational substance. The gap between rhetoric and reality was stark, with plenty of enthusiasm, but no actual mechanism for youth involvement. In this space, informal moments took on disproportionate weight. Erik Uden, a youth representative from Germany’s Die Linke, described a brief private exchange with Jeremy Corbyn in which he expressed personal support for creating a youth movement – a fleeting interaction that felt meaningful only because so little else exists around it.

Asked about these claims, a Your Party spokesperson commented: “Building this kind of democratic party doesn’t happen overnight. But with a constitution and election strategy agreed by members, elections for our executive coming up and local branch formation in the works, we’re making good progress. In time, we will establish youth and student sections, too, as we offer young people an alternative to debt and decline with the mainstream parties.”

The risks are obvious. Without a defined relationship to the main party, the youth scene could dissipate long before it develops anything coherent enough to survive – and local branches risk grinding to a halt under the weight of administrative tasks they have no tools to complete. The cultural fractures emerging in places like Birmingham are unlikely to be resolved by structure alone, but the absence of that structure has made them sharper, more volatile and more personal.

For now, Your Party’s youth wing occupies a revealing but precarious position: fragmented, uncertain and structurally adrift. The branches aren’t in a much stronger position. If students are struggling to work out where they stand in the party, branches are struggling to function at all – without even the most basic governance, because nothing exists above them to give shape or permission. Both groups are trapped in different echoes of the same void.

Their problems aren’t quirks but symptoms: expressions of the party’s wider contradictions. Your Party wants to build a movement rooted in bottom-up democracy, but has not built the structures that popular democracy requires. What is happening in the youth wing and what is happening in the branches are not separate stories but one shared consequence: a party whose ambition currently outpaces its systems.

[Further reading: Inside the battle to lead Your Party]