Following the dramatic collapse of Momentum and the World Transform, both member-led grass roots movements driven by charismatic Jeremy Corbyn, the idea of a new socialist party took root.
Whilst in August 2025, 700000 supporters had signed up online to the project; when Your Party was finally launched on 29/30th November it is estimated that its membership had settled to around 60000.
Whilst the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) led by Zack Polanki, an equally charismatic Leader, and membership has surged from 50000 to 20000 in the last 5 months, lessons about getting carried away should perhaps be learnt.
But more importanly, what the GPEW has failed to do ever since the ‘Green surge’ of 2015 is to undertake the necessary internal reforms it desperately needs to become a XX1st century Party with aspiration to be a party of governement, bearing in mind the phenomenal impact of social media in the world of politics.
Fundamental to lessons learnt fom Momentum and indeed all movements made up of activists individuals such as Occupy, Stop Oil, Exctinction Rebellion and indeed the recent pro-Palestinian protest and as stated by Jeremy Corbyn’s right-hand man Jon Lansman: “one member one vote is an illusion of demoracy”. In the course of setting up of Your Party, Lansman made the convincing argument that what we have seen in the past decade is the atomisation of movements exarcerbated by the manipulation of factions through social media tools.
Successive Leaders, from Caroline Lucas to Zack Polanski have boasted about the democratic credentials of the Party because of ‘one member one vote’ as indeed stipulated in the Constitution.
Clause 10 reads:
CONFERENCES
The Party shall hold an Annual Conference each Autumn and will usually hold an additional Conference each spring; Conference shall be the supreme forum of the Party. The procedure of the Conference shall be governed by Standing Orders. All paid up members of the Green Party shall be eligible to attend and vote at Conference.
In practical terms, and as evidenced in our two blog posts covering the Autumn 2025 Conference in Bournemouth, this means that 1600 self-appointed members out of 50000 – half with less than 2 months membership – approved key reports, major policy reviews, and voted for new policies and organisational changes with no accountability to anyone but themselves.
Conference is not a delegates event, nor do attendees have to be known to their elected Local Party officers. They are free wheeling individuals with enormous power.
The thought of 2000 new recruits from former Socialist Working Party activists migrating from Your Party and registering to take part in our Conference is the stuff of nightmares !
No less than 124 motion – a record – have been submitted for the coming 2026 Spring Conference. The Executive has decided that will be a one day and online-only event because of cost. It has been reported that due to the surge in members, the Party’s income has been boosted by £5 million.
It would be nothing short of a miracle if more than 2000 members actually registered at take part in the Spring event, but under ‘one member one vote’ therefore, those self-appointees will exercise their right to vote as they wish. Many may simply not bother to turn up for the Plenary sessions, thus leaving no more than 200 to 300 members in the Hall to vote.
This being said, any paid-up member who is keen to take part in the Conference agenda process can do so by accessing the members’ site here. Your interest and vote could make a difference in the prioritisation of motions of your choice.
So how did Your Party activists go about drafting their Constitution and what did they come up with ?
The process took months of deliberations and mobilising at local level. Hundreds of long standing activists and new recruits drawn from 10 different organisations started the hard slog of drafting their document using a mixture of face-to-face meetings, zooms and digital tools. A glimpse of the process can be seen here:
In marked contrast to this exercise in bottom-up participation and democracy, the GPEW’s constitution has remained largely unchanged since first approved in 1990. Part of the reasons for this is a mixture of systematic disruption from Common Interests activists with a vested interest in the status quo and a painfully gradualist mind-set on the part of long standing members of the Standing Orders Committee, the guardian of the constitution.
We have been unabled to verify whether that document was put to a ballot of members or just approved by a show of hand by a few hundred self-appointed conference attendees.
And in spite of the setting up a Party Structure Working group in 2015 by the former Green Party Regional Council, the GPEW has failed to transform itself from being a mere Association of well-meaning and committed ‘volunteers’ into a legally sustainable and democractic political party of governement.
The Green Party has never claimed to be a socialist party in the Fabian or Marxian definition of socialism, but the implementation of its key environmental and economic policies would require such tranformation of capitalism as to potentially move society through a transition to socialism and where ending the use of all fossil fuels globally would be a top priority.
As a result of such a mamoth task undertaken by members of Your Party’s project over- and in spite of all the media brouhaha over the alleged dispute between Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana – members of the new party on the block are about to adopt their constitution.
Your Party’s launch at Liverpool Arena
And central to Your Party’s proposed structure is how Local Party Organisations (LPO) are directly linked to their national Conferences via delegates duly elected and mandated from their LPOs
This is is sharp contrast to the GPEW where Local Parties are legally autonomous agents and with no explicit constitutional role in the decisions making process taking place at Conferences.
As a result, and with the added power of What’s app, Instagram and other social media platforms – private and public – the Party has become so dysfuntional that it has left itself vulnerable to the risk of mass entrism. Its governance has also been wholly captured by an estimated 400 Critical Social Justice (CSJ) activists who have little interest or commitment to ecological concerns. However they have become experts in the manipulation of the Party’s arcance policy decision making process and have become masters in the use of the disciplinary procedures to eliminate opposition to their post-modernist/ identity politics ideology.
Organised from seven Common Interest groups – formely known as Liberation Groups, renamed Special Interest Groups – and guided by their Critical Social Justice mentors ( the new old guard ) – green identinarians undertook their ‘march’ towards the capture of the GPEW as early as 2016 with the use of their own private digital means of communication.
Drawing from their own rich, multi-facetted experience of community, socialist politics and campaigning for two to three decades, in addition to having learnt salutary lessons from the perils of ‘one member one vote’ in a digital world, Your Party may never become the mass socialist party it aims to become. Nor is it likely to be an equal and fair ally to the Greens. However, it is less likely to become an authoritarian party where ‘one member one vote’ continues to serve such useful purpose to a determined faction in the pursuit of its own identinarian agenda.
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