The chant of “Bella ciao” echoed around a Liverpool conference hall on Sunday afternoon as hundreds of delegates rose to their feet, fists in the air, to close the first gathering of Britain’s newest left‑wing party. Moments earlier, Jeremy Corbyn had confirmed what had begun as an almost jokey working title: members had voted for the organisation to be called, simply, Your Party.
Behind the easy symbolism of the name, however, the two‑day event exposed the faultlines running through the project Corbyn has launched with his closest political ally, former Labour MP Zarah Sultana. Delegates not only endorsed “Your Party” in a contested naming ballot, they also narrowly opted for a collective leadership model over a single figurehead and backed rules allowing members to hold membership of other political groups. Those decisions were a clear victory for Sultana’s camp and a setback for Corbyn’s preference for a more conventional structure, capping weeks of acrimony over money, expulsions and control that has already driven two allied MPs out.
The apparently whimsical title was itself no foregone conclusion. In a membership ballot, “Your Party” took just over 37% of the vote, beating “For the Many” and “Popular Alliance”, which finished level on just over 25% each, with “Our Party” trailing. Corbyn told delegates they now had “a party, a constitution and, above all, a name”, attempting to draw a line under early confusion about whether the phrase printed on banners and placards was only a placeholder. The name now carries the legitimacy of a vote but also highlights a tension at the heart of the project: how far power will really rest with “your” members.
On that question, Sultana emerged from Liverpool significantly strengthened. In the most closely watched ballot of the weekend, members voted by 51.6% to 48.4% to adopt a collective leadership instead of a single leader. Under the new constitution, a member‑elected executive committee will set strategy, with a chair, deputy chair and spokesperson as principal public faces, rather than a leader in the traditional British mould. Sultana has long argued for “maximum member democracy” and a party “led by its members, not MPs”. Corbyn had openly signalled unease, warning that voters might find a multi‑person leadership harder to understand, but accepted the result from the stage.
A second key vote saw 69.2% of delegates back the principle of dual membership, allowing people to belong to Your Party and other political organisations, subject to those groups being approved as compatible with its values. The decision was tightly bound up with a damaging row over the exclusion of delegates linked to other far‑left parties, notably the Socialist Workers party. Those expulsions prompted Sultana to boycott the first day of the conference in protest at what she called a “witch‑hunt”, only entering the hall on Sunday before delivering a combative speech accusing unnamed officials of “unacceptable” bans and censorship imposed from the top.
Her address underlined how far Your Party intends to position itself at the radical end of the political spectrum. Sultana insisted the new organisation must never become “Labour 2.0”, castigated Keir Starmer’s government as “weak and pathetic”, and accused it of protecting “the parasites who own Britain”. She urged members to define the party as explicitly anti‑Zionist, demanded that Britain sever all ties with Israel, which she described as a genocidal apartheid state, and said Starmer and senior ministers should one day face war crimes proceedings in The Hague over Gaza. She also renewed her long‑standing call for the abolition of the monarchy, deriding Prince Andrew as a “parasite”, drawing loud cheers from sections of the hall and sharp intakes of breath from others.
Corbyn’s own speech, delivered earlier in the day, struck a more emollient tone. Acknowledging that “mistakes” and “frustrations” had marked the frantic months spent building the party’s infrastructure, he urged unity and insisted there was “no handbook” for creating a political party from scratch. He set out familiar themes from his Labour leadership: a challenge to what he termed failed economic orthodoxy, a promise to oppose austerity, and a warning that Your Party must be organised and visible in the fight against racism and the far right. Without directly addressing the leadership vote he had just lost, he appeared to accept the new arrangements as the expression of members’ will.
Outside the hall, pro‑Palestinian protesters gathered with flags and banners, underscoring how central Gaza and foreign policy have become to the party’s identity. Inside, the mood swung between celebration at the formal birth of a new force and anger at the internal rows that have dogged it since before registration with the Electoral Commission on 30 September, when Corbyn was initially listed as leader. Membership has already reached around 50,000, with organisers predicting more once separate lists are merged, but the atmosphere remains fragile.
Much of the bitterness has centred on money and control. Before Your Party had a bank account, levies and donations – estimated at around £850,000 – were routed through a company, MOU Operations Ltd, with Sultana as sole director. Corbyn‑aligned MPs accused her of dragging her feet over transferring the funds to the party, saying staff salaries and conference bills were at risk; Sultana’s allies insisted they were bound by legal advice. The row culminated in Adnan Hussain, the Blackburn MP and company secretary for the party’s corporate vehicle, quitting on 14 November. He denounced “persistent infighting and a struggle for power” and said the environment had felt “toxic, exclusionary and deeply disheartening”, alleging veiled prejudice against Muslim colleagues. A second MP, Iqbal Mohamed, left a week later, citing similar concerns.
Those departures have sharpened questions about who really wields influence. Corbyn publicly thanked his former Labour chief of staff, Karie Murphy, now a key organiser for Your Party, but the muted applause she received reflected her status as a divisive figure, particularly among activists wary of centralised control. The new constitution requires the leadership model to be reviewed after two years, leaving open the possibility that pressures of electoral politics could yet nudge the party back towards a single, more familiar frontman or woman.
Beyond the drama on the Liverpool conference floor, Your Party enters a crowded field. On Labour’s left flank, the Green party under Zack Polanski has been climbing in the polls and, in at least one survey, has come within a few points of Labour. Corbyn and Sultana must now turn a weekend of internal rule‑making into a coherent electoral strategy, deciding which seats to target beyond Corbyn’s own Islington North and Sultana’s Coventry base, and how to distinguish themselves from both Labour and the Greens while navigating their own ideological breadth.
As delegates drifted out into the cold Merseyside evening, the new party had a name, a rulebook and a promise of grassroots control. Whether a collective leadership, a split founding team and an already chequered internal culture can be welded into a disciplined national force will be the test that lies beyond the sing‑along and slogans.