In 2018, Jeremy Corbyn seemed like a prime-minister-in-waiting. Addressing the Labour Party conference at Liverpool’s ACC arena that September, he attacked Britain’s then-leader Theresa May for stalling in negotiations over the country’s exit from the European Union — urging her resignation in a speech delivered just days before his own alternative talks with EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier.
In place of May’s Conservative Party, Corbyn offered a Labour government capable of delivering a “socialism for the twenty-first century.” It was a vision based on the “commonsense” nationalization of Britain’s rail, water, and energy companies; a raft of measures to “rebuild and transform” communities left behind by austerity and neoliberalism; and a pro-peace foreign policy that would deliver the British recognition of a Palestinian state. He gleefully quoted a senior Conservative politician who lamented that Corbyn’s ideas had caught “the mood of our time.”
This past weekend, a woman who had watched that conference speech as a hopeful Labour delegate told me, upon exiting a different event at the same venue, that “if I didn’t get out, I was going to smash my head through the wall.” She was attending the founding conference of Your Party (YP) — the new outfit headed by Corbyn, fellow ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana, and several independents who had won on pro-Palestine platforms in the 2024 general election, out-organizing Labour in formerly safe seats.
That the Your Party conference even happened was a testament to the determination of organizers. Throughout much of the summer and fall, it felt as if the party was over before it got started. It had been unilaterally launched by Sultana this July, as she looked increasingly sure to be expelled from Labour for declaring solidarity with activist group Palestine Action (absurdly labeled “terrorist” by the government). What followed, over several months, was an astonishing lesson in…
Auteur: John Tranter
