At the heart of Your Party is a power struggle. For the past five months, its co-founders, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, have battled it out: there have been briefings, counter-briefings, threats of legal action and unauthorised membership launches. Sultana even boycotted the first day of the organisation’s inaugural conference.
Understandably, this clash of personalities has dominated coverage of the nascent left-wing coalition. And, with elections for the party’s new central executive committee (CEC) taking place in January, the tussle is likely to rumble on. Elected by members, the CEC’s main roles – including a chair, deputy chair and spokesperson – cannot be held by sitting MPs.
But on the BBC’s Sunday show, Sultana told Laura Kuenssberg that she plans to put herself forward to become Your Party’s parliamentary spokesperson when the time comes. She did not look fazed by the idea that she may have to take on Corbyn to do so. Her plan also seems at odds with Your Party’s current leadership structure, which has no provision for the election of an official parliamentary spokesperson.
But this very public split between two former Labour MPs has opened up a wider question for this fledgling socialist movement. What kind of party does Your Party want to be? Does it want to build a left-wing alliance with a broad, mass appeal, or does it want to focus on playing to its activist base?
Following Your Party’s inaugural conference, which took place in Liverpool on 29 and 30 November, Sultana was widely seen as the weekend’s victor. During the conference, the members voted for the policies Sultana had actively campaigned for: to allow dual membership of other political parties, and to adopt a “collective leadership” model (although Sultana had previously called for the party to be co-led by herself and Corbyn).
In this, she was backed by the “Zaristas”, as one Your Party observer has dubbed the groups who make up Sultana’s faction: the Democratic Socialists of Your Party (DSYP) – a collective whose events Sultana has spoken at on several occasions – as well as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other members of the Socialist Unity Platform.
They see Your Party as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine what it means to be ‘on the left’ in the popular imagination”, Max Shanly, a prominent member of the DSYP, who formerly worked for Momentum founder Jon Lansman, told me. The party should aim to “crystallise… what socialism actually means”, he added.
The DSYP has been critical of Corbyn and his allies. It has agitated for a break from “Labourism”, backed collective leadership and, more recently, opposed Your Party’s adoption of the one-member-one-vote system on the basis that the version being put forward would institutionalise “a form of atomised democracy that treats its members as passive voters rather than actively engaged participants”.
Dual membership was an unexpected focus of the conference weekend. This was owing to the expulsion of members of the SWP shortly before the conference started, due to the still-active rule that Your Party members could not hold joint membership of another political group. Sultana and others accused Your Party officials of conducting a “purge” or a “witch hunt” (an accusation they have denied).
To their critics, the Zaristas are pursuing a minoritarian form of left-wing politics while enforcing ideological purity, and are therefore more interested in appealing to engaged activists than potential voters. As Shanly told me, they view decisions to allow dual membership as an “overwhelming victory” for the left within Your Party.
Other factions of Your Party want it to be a mass movement, inspired by the successful campaigning of Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani in New York City. They push back on the idea that the party’s founding conference was a triumph for Sultana. Of the organisation’s founding documents, voted on by members at the conference, a Your Party source said: “The results demonstrate the mass-politics wing is where the membership is at.” They suggested that a victory for the collective-leadership model had more to do with frustration at the personality-driven drama of the party’s founding than it did with an endorsement of either Corbyn or Sultana.
And the question of dual membership is not yet settled. Though Your Party members voted to allow it, the exact nature of this arrangement is yet to be decided by the CEC – once it has been elected in January – after which it will be voted on by members. So there is a chance that SWP members could remain barred.
Your Party sources also point to the popularity of the organisation’s political statement, which the DSYP called on members to oppose. More than 92 per cent of members voted for the document. It was a strong signal, one insider said, of members’ desire for Your Party to become a “mass socialist” movement, as opposed to an “umbrella” for “ultra-left groups”.
This is the battle facing Your Party: its leaders are caught between building a mass movement able to take on the Greens and damage Labour from the left, and maintaining a smaller, more radical force based on ideological unity. Now that single leadership is off the table, January’s elections will not only provoke a head-to-head between Sultana and Corbyn, but a battle for the heart of Your Party itself.
[Further reading: Bring back the spirit of the 2010 student fees protests]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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