In early July 2025, Zarah Sultana announced that she was leaving the Labour Party and launching a new left formation in partnership with Jeremy Corbyn, naming herself and Corbyn as coleaders. However, Corbyn’s team had not formally agreed to any elements of the rollout, or even to her coleader status, and had no idea that she would make the announcement.

Tensions over decision-making protocols and internal structures simmered throughout the summer. Matters came to a head last week, when Sultana emailed supporters announcing a membership portal. She insisted the move was part of the agreed-upon “road map” for building the party and pointed to more than 20,000 sign-ups within hours. Corbyn’s camp, however, denounced it as premature and unauthorized, urging supporters to cancel any payments. Sultana, for her part, said she had been sidelined by what she called a “sexist boys’ club.”

Instead of pursuing this outward focus, the message from Your Party since its launch has been clear: the public comes second. We, on the Left, have to spend a few months focusing on ourselves, engaging in a long and drawn-out process that makes our own activist base feel better about itself, and then, perhaps, we will take the fight to Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage and the immensely powerful interests conspiring to make life worse for millions of working people across Britain.

This brings us to another glaring absence from the early stages of Your Party: the trade union movement. Socialist ideals of democracy, as we have said, are premised on the mass participation of workers. This is a difficult thing to achieve, no doubt, in an era of retreat for the Left. But the nascent Your Party project stands out from precursors by its distance from the organized workers’ movement. Would it really be too much to expect a historic left split from the Labour Party to have come with a number of affiliated unions? What about a process that involved the many unions — many led by socialists — that are not affiliated with the party? Even if you could argue that it is too early for affiliation, how many prominent trade unionists are associated with Your Party from the start? Unfortunately, these questions seem like an afterthought.