Jeremy Corbyn has used the eve of his new party’s founding conference to call for the creation of a “mass, socialist party” rooted in local community organising and committed to redistribution, sustainability and peace.
In an article for the left-wing magazine Tribune published on Friday, the former Labour leader and now independent MP for Islington North sets out the clearest statement yet of the aims and culture he wants for Your Party, the fledgling political movement he fronts.
“This is our chance to do something historic: to build a mass, socialist party based on democracy, community power, and international solidarity,” Corbyn writes, ahead of a two-day gathering in Liverpool at which members are due to decide the party’s permanent name, constitution, leadership structure and electoral strategy.
Corbyn argues that Your Party must “belong to the grassroots”, contrasting it with what he describes as “top-down political parties that are designed to ignore their members and disempower the communities they claim to represent”. Policies such as privatisation, austerity and rising rents, he says, are “what we get when highly centralised political parties answer to nobody but themselves (and those who lobby them)”.
The 76-year-old MP uses his Islington North “People’s Forums” — regular open meetings convened since his re-election as an independent at the 2024 general election — as a template for how the new party should operate nationally. He says he wants every branch or representative to hold a community forum or assembly once a month so that “community organising is not just a buzzword, but in the party’s DNA”.
“Your Party should not only be accountable to the community. It must be part and parcel of the community,” he writes, describing how local renters’ unions, disability campaigners, anti-poverty groups and climate activists have helped shape his parliamentary priorities.
Corbyn outlines a broad left-wing programme, including rent controls and a “massive” council-house-building programme, public ownership of water, energy, rail and mail, the abolition of the two-child benefit cap and tuition fees, the reversal of disability benefit cuts, better protections for the self-employed, and an end to the “hostile environment” for migrants and refugees. He also calls for major investment in renewable energy and “green, unionised jobs”.
These demands, he argues, are “not abstract principles” but “the living demands of millions of people all over the country” — from low-paid workers on strike and tenants spending half their income on rent to trans people seeking healthcare, indebted young people facing the climate crisis, migrants and refugees and disabled people.
The article appears as around 2,500 lottery-selected members and supporters begin arriving in Liverpool for a conference that organisers say will mark the formal launch of the party, registered with the Electoral Commission under the interim name Your Party in September. The group claims about 50,000 paid-up members and has invited them to choose a permanent name from a shortlist including Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance and For The Many, with the result due to be announced at the event.
Delegates are also expected to decide whether the party should have a single leader or some form of collective leadership. Although Corbyn is currently listed as leader for registration purposes, he signals in the piece that he will accept whatever role members choose for him, saying he is “excited to move forward, in whatever capacity members vote for me to serve”.
The intervention comes after weeks of negative headlines about internal disputes and financial rows that have overshadowed preparations for the conference. The op-ed does not refer to those issues, instead stressing unity of purpose, but will be read in the context of a highly public rift between Corbyn’s allies and co-founder Zarah Sultana, the former Labour MP for Coventry South.
Sultana, who quit Labour in July to help launch the project, has accused senior figures around Corbyn of forming a “sexist boys’ club” and sidelining her. Supporters of Corbyn, in turn, criticised an unsanctioned membership portal set up by Sultana’s team, which raised hundreds of thousands of pounds and is understood to be the subject of data-protection complaints and legal correspondence.
Two of the Independent Alliance MPs who initially backed the new party, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, have since walked away, citing “persistent infighting” and what one described as a “toxic, exclusionary” culture. Other alliance MPs, including Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan, remain associated with the project.
Corbyn’s article situates Your Party within a wider landscape of grassroots campaigns, from trade unions and tenants’ groups to disability justice organisations, anti-racist networks, climate activists and the growing movement for Palestine. Fragmented, he says, “there is only so much these movements can achieve. Think of what we could do together.”
The former Labour leader, who was barred from standing again for the party he once led and retained his Islington seat as an independent in 2024, presents the new formation as a vehicle for those “denied a political alternative” under the current Labour government.
“When people come together at a local forum, rally or demonstration, they realise that they aren’t alone in their desire for a better society. That’s what the old parties are afraid of,” he writes. “We are a mass movement for real change — and we are never, ever going away.”
The Liverpool conference, running from Saturday to Sunday, will test whether that ambition can be translated into coherent structures and a united strategy, as the party decides how far and how fast to challenge Labour and other parties at the ballot box, starting with next year’s local elections.