Liverpool’s waterfront convention centre was draped in red banners and homemade placards on Saturday as Jeremy Corbyn strode on to the stage to open the founding conference of Your Party. He called for unity, public ownership and an end to war, leading delegates in a familiar chant for a free Palestine. But the most conspicuous absence was the woman who launched the project with him: Zarah Sultana was sitting in a nearby café with activists who had been refused entry.

The tableau captured the central story of Your Party’s first big set-piece. Billed by organisers as a fresh start after months of bitter rows, the Liverpool gathering instead laid bare how far the fledgling party still is from resolving its internal battles over leadership, culture and who is welcome inside its ranks.

Around 2,500 members made the trip, many of them former Labour activists who quit over Keir Starmer’s stance on Gaza or years of factional conflict. They arrived in the hope that a formal launch would begin to turn a noisy online movement into a functioning organisation capable of challenging Labour from the left and stemming the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Instead, the opening day was dominated by disputes over expulsions, constitution and control – the very themes that have dogged the project since its inception. Policy debates on the cost of living, immigration or next year’s local elections struggled to break through the noise.

At the heart of the latest row was a decision to block several would-be delegates from entering the conference, including people alleged to be members of the Socialist Workers party and other hard-left groups. Your Party rules bar members of other national political parties; officials argued they were simply enforcing those rules to prevent organised factions from dominating the new organisation.

Sultana took a different view. She spent the morning outside the venue meeting excluded activists and later accused the leadership of a ‘witch-hunt’, arguing that a party of the socialist left should not be turning away people on the basis of their previous affiliations. Her allies insist the ban reflects a deeper problem with what she has called a ‘toxic culture’ of bullying and smears imported from Labour’s internal wars.

The row was muddied further when Corbyn initially told journalists that the Socialist Workers party was formally registered with the Electoral Commission, something that would straightforwardly bar dual membership. In fact, the SWP is not currently on the register. Corbyn’s supporters maintain that it remains a political party in any meaningful sense and that dual membership would open the door to exactly the kind of factional organising many members say they joined Your Party to escape.

For Sultana’s camp, the handling of the expulsions is another example of heavy-handed behaviour by a small circle of long-time Corbyn aides and organisers around his former chief of staff, Karie Murphy. Relations between that group and Sultana’s supporters are described by insiders as almost non-existent, with both sides accusing the other of briefing against them in the press and attempting to control the party’s infrastructure.

Those tensions are sharpened by an unresolved battle over the party’s leadership model. Corbyn told reporters in Liverpool that he favours a traditional arrangement with a single, elected leader and made clear he would probably stand if members endorse that option when they vote on the constitution on Sunday. Sultana, by contrast, has spent weeks championing a model of collective leadership centred on ‘lay members’ – grassroots activists rather than MPs or councillors – and warning against parties dominated by ‘sole personalities’.

In public, both insist they will accept whatever structure members choose and do not rule out standing against one another in a leadership contest if a single-leader system is agreed. But the dispute has unsettled many activists who thought they were signing up to a clear joint project when hundreds of thousands initially registered their interest after the pair announced plans for a new party in July.

One delegate, a former Labour councillor from the north-west, said the lack of clarity over who would lead the party and how decisions would be made was beginning to sap enthusiasm. ‘We’ve spent all day arguing about who can be in the room and what the rulebook says, when people back home want to know what we’re doing about their rent and their energy bills,’ she said, adding that the large glass of wine in front of her ‘is rapidly turning into a bottle’.

The Liverpool gathering comes after a bruising few months in which disputes over money, data and personnel have spilled into public view. Sultana set up an online membership and fundraising portal in the summer that pulled in about £800,000 and a large database of supporters. Corbyn’s allies, who had already commissioned separate membership software at a cost of about £13,000, complained that she had created a parallel structure outside agreed party control.

The stand-off escalated into legal threats, claims that staff were sent into offices in the middle of the night to change passwords and, eventually, talk from the party of pursuing ‘rogue’ founders through the courts to secure the funds. By the time delegates arrived in Liverpool, Sultana was insisting that £600,000 had now been transferred into the party’s accounts, with the remainder to follow once liabilities were settled. The damage to trust on both sides has been harder to quantify, but senior figures acknowledge privately that it has been enormous.

That sense of drift has already had parliamentary consequences. At its high-water mark, the project could claim the support of Corbyn and five other MPs who had been elected as independents on Gaza-focused platforms in the 2024 general election. Two of them, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, have since walked away, citing what Hussain called ‘persistent infighting’ and an exclusionary atmosphere on questions from religion to LGBT+ rights.

Their departure underlines the broader challenge faced by Your Party: melding Corbynite activists, who tend to be socially liberal and focused on economic transformation, with some of the more socially conservative voters and community leaders who backed pro-Gaza independents. Conversations with delegates in Liverpool suggested that many of those present are more comfortable with the former tradition than the latter, even as the leadership insists it wants to represent both.

Sultana herself has always framed the project in ambitious terms. In interviews this autumn she has spoken of a ten-to-forty-year effort to ‘replace Labour’ as the main party of the left and ultimately to ‘run government’ rather than simply protest from the margins. Corbyn has been more cautious, but both he and Sultana argue that Labour’s shift to the centre and its stance on Gaza have left millions of voters politically homeless.

For now, though, the new party’s basic architecture remains incomplete. Even its name is provisional: ‘Your Party’ appears on the Electoral Commission register, with Corbyn listed as leader, but delegates have yet to vote on whether to stick with that identity or adopt a new brand. Sunday’s agenda includes decisions on the leadership structure, the name and the constitution, as well as initial discussions on how far to contest next year’s local elections in their own right or work with Greens and left independents.

Some in Liverpool insisted the turmoil was an inevitable part of trying to turn a fast-growing social movement – party membership is estimated at around 50,000 – into a formal organisation. ‘When you start something at speed there are bound to be mistakes,’ one young activist from Birmingham said. ‘The important thing is whether we can come out of this weekend with a clear structure and start talking to people about their real lives again.’

Others were less forgiving. A veteran trade unionist described the first day as ‘a missed opportunity’, comparing the scenes in Liverpool with the more orderly growth of the Greens under their new leader, Zack Polanski. ‘Voters are going to look at this and wonder if we’re serious,’ he said. ‘We can’t just be another left project that spends its time fighting itself.’

Both Corbyn and Sultana insist that the party can still move beyond that stereotype. Corbyn’s speech on Saturday was peppered with appeals for unity and reminders of the cause that still binds most of the delegates in the room: opposition to austerity, poverty and war. Sultana is expected to address the conference on Sunday, in what some hope could be a moment to draw a line under the boycott and signal a willingness to compromise.

Yet the events of the opening day suggest that, for all the talk of a new beginning, many of the hardest questions about power, control and political culture inside Your Party remain unanswered. Whether Liverpool marks the messy birth of a durable new force or the beginning of another long left-wing implosion may depend less on Sunday’s votes than on whether its protagonists can find a way to share the same stage – and not just the same city.