YOUR PARTY’S FOUNDING CONFERENCE IS A REFORMIST MAGICIAN’S TRICK

Ian Spark

ISL

It would seem the leadership of Your Party have been avidly attending lessons at their nearest magic school. They have released the founding conference documents and have proven themselves to be masters of the any card trick.

One can almost see them now at a stall at the conference shouting “Comrades! Comrades! Come one! Come all! Witness the magic of party democracy! Pick an option in the conference documents, any option!” And wouldn’t you know as if by magic the leadership correctly predict the exact option the membership chooses.

Putting levity aside though, much like how the any card trick relies upon the magician manipulating the audience into choosing the card they want, the leadership of Your Party aim to do the same at the founding conference. This time not with cards but with the very structures of the party itself.

The conference documents are a Constitution, Standing Orders, Political Statement and Organisational Strategy Year 1 Plan. We will discuss each of these and their faults.

 

Constitution and Standing Orders

Starting with the Constitution and the Standing Orders as they complement each other.

The foundational structure of the party as laid out in these documents strongly favours the leadership.

Large sections of them are presented without any option with notable parts being:

• Your Party leadership will not be elected until the end of March 2026 and then will serve a single term until late 2027. Then being elected not at conference but via an online poll between January and March 2026.
• Late 2027 being decided as the date of the next national conference.
• Only the Leader and the members of the CEC being elected by the membership, the CEC will choose/elect all other national roles. Yet none of these roles specify in detail what they will involve and what their powers will be. The CEC will also have 4 publicly elected representatives (MPs, local councillors etc.) given seats on it. With no justification given why they warrant special treatment over other members.
• Membership rules such as the following are not presented as a choice “Members may not hold membership in any other national political party, except if specified by the CEC.” And “Members may not affiliate with or participate in organisations undermining Party values.”. These parts of the documents and others give the leadership wide license to witch-hunt any person or group they deem a threat.
• Large parts of these documents seek to dictate how local parties should operate and what they should focus their time on.

Some parts are presented as options, with the choice being accept or reject, such as:

• Whether presenters of motions at conference should being given only 3 minutes to speak. Whether other contributors should only be given 2 minutes. And whether any speaker other than the presenters of a motion should need to be seconded to speak.
• There is the proposal for a motion policy committee whose terms include ensuring motions with are “not ambiguous. not vague. not trivial. not requiring no consequential action by the party;” these are extremely vaguely worded and gives this committee wide license to reject motions.
• The bar for recall votes for party officers at each level being set at 40% of relevant members. No option given to alter the %.

Other parts are presented with multiple options. These involved things like:

• Whether ‘First Past The Post’, ‘Single Transferable Vote ‘or an ‘Open List System’ should be used to elect certain positions.
• How the motions compositing committee, which will arbitrarily decide if similar motions should be composited or not, should be elected. And with no information given about how they will decide the compositing of motions or whether that can be challenged – as in a trade union.

No mention is made in these documents about how party funds will be spent or what %, if any, of membership contributions local branches will get.

 

Political Statement

There is nothing in any of the documents about the need to dismantle capitalism and replace it with socialism. A line of the document talks about redistributing power and wealth. The only mention of capitalism is a short line opposing neoliberal capitalism. It is the old parliamentary social democratic model.

The one-page political statement is extremely vague and reformist, it is not a programme for the working class to social transform the state to answer the brutality of capitalism and the British state.

 

Organisational Strategy Year 1 Plan

This document, amongst other things, mentions the party’s leadership being responsible for things like overseeing the creation of branches, which at present would only be able to be formed if they meet an arbitrary % of local members present at a founding meeting, that % is to be determined at the founding conference. Branches will be formed only with the permission of the leadership or another person they appoint to do so.

The independent alliance of MPs, who will lead the party between the founding conference and the leadership election at the end of March, will oversee the selection of candidates for the 2026 local elections. With only vague allusions to local members having some kind of input.

The party’s leadership will also oversee the process of organising the next national conference, which again will not be held till late 2027. At said conference a bunch of more permanent leadership structure options will be presented. The party’s leadership will create these. Giving them great power to tilt that conference in their favour as well.

 

Summary

An article in the previous Socialist Voice described how the founding conference was set up in a way to atomise members and make collective resistance to the leaderships’ proposed plans exceedingly difficult. The leadership with their massive social media followings and such, will have immense power to persuade the randomly selected members at conference to vote for the options they want.

Rumours also swirl that formal amendments will be permitted only by those selected to attend the founding conference, and only if they reach some yet undefined amount of support on the online membership portal. There is also a rumour the wider membership will get some kind of online vote during the conference.

The regional assemblies are purely consultative, with the leadership deciding which suggestions made in them get included as options to be voted at conference. The leadership also have not committed to the notes gathered at said regional assemblies being publicly available. Which if they are not released will make it difficult for members to know how much support certain suggestions got, how many times they were made etc. and whether the leadership are wilfully ignoring popular suggestions.

The leadership can claim all they want that conference can amend any part of the documents. But how exactly are 13,000 randomly selected people, over two days half one-day half another, going to cohere together and have the time and space to democratically decide on what to amend and how?

Combine all of this with the provisions laid out in these documents and the result is clear. The leadership intend the founding conference to merely give a veneer of democratic support to their continued undemocratic leadership.

If left unchallenged they will get their preferred options passed which will give them overarching powers to shape the party over the next 2 years. With the only mechanism members having to challenge them being reaching a 40% recall vote threshold, in a process not even laid out yet.

This is not democracy this is oligarchy masquerading as democracy. This is the leadership using their mastery of the any card trick to ensure power remains in their hands, and to ensure the membership only ever see the options the leadership allow and not any other way forward. However, all is not lost.

Members of Your Party unite and fight for genuine grassroots democracy!

Grassroot members unite against this attempted reformist plan, build a programme for socialism with nationalisation, under working class control, of all the main parts of the economy and for the building of a socialist workers state!