Your Party conference has concluded with a confirmation that its current placeholder name will be permanently adopted after a vote of members. It was the name preferred by Jeremy Corbyn but this marks one of the former Labour leader’s few victories of this conference. Instead the final day was notable for Zarah Sultana’s successes in shaping the party’s constitution.
After constitutional votes which confirmed the party would allow dual membership with other organisations and a collective model of leadership, Sultana declared that the party now “belongs to its members not to MPs not to donors not to nameless faceless unelected bureaucrats”. On Sunday the constitution was ratified with an overwhelming margin of 90 percent support. She said it was not a win for her but a win for the members. However the conclusion of this conference demonstrates that she is in the ascendancy, swaying the members on the major questions of party organisation.
Despite previously supporting a co-leadership model with her and Corbyn in joint control of the party, on Tuesday Sultana threw her weight behind the collective model which will bar MPs from the top roles on the Central Executive Committee. Sultana was rapturously received by members in the hall when she spoke on Sunday afternoon. She called for the abolition of the monarchy and a full severing of British diplomatic relations with Israel.
Her reference to those “bureaucrats” seemed to be a thinly veiled attack on figures around Jeremy Corbyn including his advisor Karie Murphy and the former Unite general secretary. By contrast Corbyn specifically praised Murphy in his closing speech. Sultana described herself as a “first time speaker” in reference to the events of Saturday, in which she boycotted the conference hall in protest at a so-called “witch hunt”.
Despite reports that they were not on speaking terms, Sultana told the New Statesman that she had spoken with Corbyn during the conference. Asked about the topic of their conversation she said: “We have both been very inspired by how many people have taken part in our democracy, both online and in person here. I’ve been spending time with delegates across the two days that I’ve been here and we’re both very hopeful for what the future brings. This is a historic moment. This is the largest socialist party in Britain since the 1940s and it is our task to make sure it is the largest party in modern British history.”
On the subject of allowing members of the Socialist Workers Party to participate the future of Your Party she said there was room “for all socialists” in the organisation. The atmosphere on this second day was charged following contradictory claims about a “witch hunt” on Saturday. Stewards were assiduously checking IDs at the entrance to the conference area and some attendees were asked to leave. Councillor James Giles, who was denied entry yesterday, managed to enter the hall along with Sultana despite being disbarred. A Your Party official said he had not been granted permission to attend.
Sultana said in her speech: “before we move forward, we have to confront what took place yesterday. The expulsions, the bans, the censorship on conference floor is unacceptable.” In a remark calculated to sting Mr Corbyn and his entourage she said those events were “straight out of the Labour right’s handbook”.
While Corbyn made sure to attend Sultana’s speech and applaud much of what she said – including those calls for the abolition of the monarchy and radical redistribution of wealth – there were signs of the behind the scenes breakdown in personal relations between the pair.
In a moment of almost obligatory courtesy, the Coventry South MP said she had “an enormous amount of admiration and respect for” for Corbyn and his leadership of Labour but tempered this with a stinging reminder that “now we are building some thing new”. She praised the success of Zohran Mamdani in New York – where “in the very heart of Empire, a new politics emerges” – and likened his rise with her own background as a socialist and a Muslim derided by right-wing media outlets.
Sultana’s fiery remarks went down well here in Liverpool where she appears to have triumphed in every major debate about Your Party’s future except its name (“It’s not called Your Party,” she was protesting on X as recently as July when the original placeholder name was revealed).
But there were signs of the wider trouble this weekend’s events might cause with the party’s originally intended electoral coalition. Adnan Hussein, the independent MP who was until November involved in Your Party before resigning, suggested Sultana’s speech was “a gift to Reform”. Following Sunday’s events her said on X: “All hopes of a mass, all-encompassing movement burnt to the ground, just to create another fringe, factional, echo chamber, of which this country already has many.”
See you again next year, perhaps.
[Further reading: Your Party votes for collective leadership]
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