Here’s what I learned from a weekend at Your Party’s first conference

In a year stuffed with wild political news where all the attention was gobbled up by Labour and Reform, Your Party has flown under the radar a bit.

I don’t think that’s fair. All four months of the party’s existence have been packed with backstabbing and twists that would make an EastEnders writer jealous.

The drama – most notably the tension between co-founders Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana – culminated this weekend in Your Party’s first ever conference, held at the ACC in Liverpool.

There’s no denying it was quite an impressive event – it is not easy to pull together an event in major venue with professional branding and a turnout of hundreds so soon after founding.

But equally impressive was the ability of supporters to split into venom-spitting factions, bitterly opposing each other on seemingly minor matters of policy.

Here’s what went down at the King’s Dock.

Vegan scouse

This was the same venue where Labour held its conference a couple of months ago, though the vibes couldn’t have been more different.

Where the main exhibition hall for Labour was packed with stalls representing trade unions, charities, lobby firms and other organisations, the room was strikingly empty for Your Party.

There were a couple of food stalls, one of which sold a vegan version of local delicacy scouse for £9, but it mainly acted as an enormous echo chamber for the speeches happening in the stage area next door.

That was where almost all the official action was taking place.

Plenty of shouting

To a large extent, the ambitious purpose of this weekend’s conference was to figure out what this party is, and what it’s for.

Those vital decisions were made by allowing random members – the ones invited along were picked via lottery – to get up on stage and make arguments for and against proposals.

It’s maybe not surprising that passions ran high – speakers yelled directly into the microphone, pointing their fingers and deliberately winding up the chairwoman.

On the second day, it led her to tell off the rowdy audience: ‘You know what, as a child I used to visit my father in the notorious Evin prison. I am not scared of you, you do not scare me.’

The live feed was regularly cut while furious members demanded their right to speak. This sort of thing didn’t happen at Labour.

Doing the splits

While all the official drama was playing out in the stage area, the real political intrigue was happening outside the building.

Various stalls were set up near the entrance, where left-wing groups braced the stinging Merseyside chill to hand out pamphlets featuring headlines like: ‘Is Jeremy Corbyn really an anti-Zionist?’

(Spoiler: they reckon he isn’t.)

Sultana – who boycotted the first day in a dispute over a supposed ban on members of certain other socialist groups – was never seen interacting with Corbyn throughout the conference weekend.

By lunchtime on Sunday, we were hearing the Sultana supporters who split from the Corbyn supporters had themselves split in two amid a row over the party constitution.

Safe to say, all this didn’t do much to combat the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ cliche about leftwing movements.

Big decisions

The first four months of the party have largely been a preamble to this conference – until now, its backers haven’t even been able to say with certain what its name is.

No longer! In the minutes before his closing speech, Jeremy Corbyn dramatically revealed the results of a four-way vote.

‘Your Party,’ he announced to an ecstatic crowd, ‘is the name of Your Party.’

Yes, the members had chosen to make official the ever-so-slightly confusing moniker given to the party in its earliest days.

Progressive Alliance gained just over 25% of the vote, while For The Many got around 23% and Our Party pulled up the rear with 14%.

We also learned that Corbyn would not be the leader of the new party… and neither would Sultana.

Instead, Your Party will use a brand-new collective leadership model – an option that succeeded with just 51.6% versus 49.4% of members who wanted a single figure at the top.

Despite these basic issues now being sorted, there’s a very long way to go for a party that prides itself on taking a radical fresh approach to politics.

To succeed, Your Party will need to figure out a way to make that approach work, while also navigating the angry splits… and the rise of left-wing rivals like Zack Polanski’s Green Party… and the inevitable day-to-day problems that pop up.

The Liverpool conference ended with a rendition of John Lennon’s classic Imagine sung from the stage. It was hard to tell if its plea for an end to conflict was targeted more at the world or the people in the room.

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