19 September 2025

Was Your Party doomed to fail?

It takes time to create new political institutions – especially on the left

Illustration by Roy Scott / Ikon Images

“What do you get if you put two members of the Fourth International on a desert island?” “Three parties!” The old joke about the ability of the far left to “split, split and split again” came to mind when watching the travails of “Your Party” this week. The party founded in fits and starts by former Labour MPs Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn has been apparently split into two factions able only to communicate by press release and social media. We can laugh at the chaos, but it would be wrong to ignore what this tells us about broader politics in Britain.

We are in an extraordinary moment of political fragmentation in the UK. Patrick Flynn of focaldata has published a fascinating report that shows that British politics currently has five viable political parties: Reform UK, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, Labour and the Greens. In a first past the post system that means that 21 per cent is a plurality in some seats. That’s without adding in the reality that in Wales and Scotland the nationalist parties – Plaid Cymru and the SNP – add a viable sixth. This is a crowded field for a new party to enter.

There’s no doubt there is discontent on the centre-left of British politics. The 34 per cent of the electorate who supported Labour in last year’s election has slumped to around 20 per cent. There are plenty of voters still up for change who are looking for a home. Even in July last year 2.5 million of them voted Green and Independent, delivering only 10 MPs because of the vagaries of first past the post.

In contrast to the New Labour era when breaking the whip went unpunished, this Labour government has taken a heavy-handed approach to parliamentary discipline – suspending the whip for the first time since the 1950s. This has created a floating pool of suspended Labour MPs of whom only one – Sultana – has chosen to break with the Labour Party. This reluctance to cut ties is based on the most profound value of labourism that “Unity is Strength” with the corollary that defectors are the lowest form of political life – from Ramsay McDonald to the Gang of Four.

It is also, for those with memories, based on what has happened to left breakaways from Labour. The Independent Labour Party shrivelled after disaffiliating from the Labour Party and the Scottish Labour Party – the nationalist leaning breakaway led by Jim Sillars – was infiltrated and taken over by the International Marxist Group.

The hardest thing, though, is that it takes time to create new political institutions. Rules and membership structures have to be hammered out and they have to accommodate strong personalities while also having robust defences against malign actors. And you need a name that says what you stand for. The placeholder name “Your Party” told you everything you needed to know about this new movement. It hadn’t resolved the core question of brand identity which meant that the most powerful brand on the left – Jeremy Corbyn – dominates it. Back to being “My Party” rather than “The Left” party.

All the while, there’s a new political entrepreneur on the left of British politics – Zach Polanski. His left populism took the Green Party by storm and is set to storm London in the borough elections next May. The advantages that the Greens have are obvious – a clear brand and a plain-speaking leader focusing on brutal and pointed criticism of the Labour government. A less obvious one is that they are more than 50 years old and have been through three names (PEOPLE, Ecology, and Green) and have had peaks and troughs on the way to their current strength in local government.

For those disaffected with the direction of the current Labour government there are vehicles aplenty. The Lib Dems if you are centrist, the Greens if you want to send a signal that Labour needs to correct leftwards and the nationalists if you want to throw your hands up in despair with whole show.

In politics, like comedy, timing is everything. “Their Party” waited too long to launch and has been supplanted by alternatives that actually exist.