The Your Party conference is the funniest thing I’ve seen in years

You used to have to pay a penny to visit Bedlam. The curious would rock up in droves to gawp at the half-mad unfortunates who stalked the halls of London’s most forbidding mental asylum. Now, thanks to the cranks at Your Party, loony-watching is completely free. All you need to do is log on to social media, look for the Your Party hashtag, and, boom, you will see the most unholy parade of the unhinged. Bearded ‘women’, ‘lesbians’ with knackers, self-described ‘mad comrades’, nonbinary oddballs, and nerds whose only experience of ‘fighting’ is in Dungeons & Dragons. Honestly, it is glorious.

Yes, this was the inaugural conference of Your Party, a care-in-the-community scheme masquerading as a political party. Founded by dusty old leftie and former besties with Hamas, Jeremy Corbyn, and that perma-teenager who’d give Veruca Salt a run for her money in the moaning stakes, Zarah Sultana, Your Party is the shitshow that keeps on giving. It’s been torn asunder of late by such philosophical sticklers as ‘Can you have a dick and be a woman?’ and ‘Should we just cut ties with Israel or call for its complete destruction like insane anti-Semites?’. The conference was a chance for this freaky gaggle of Stalinist screwballs and cockless keffiyeh-sporters to put on a united front – they failed beautifully.

It took place in Liverpool on Saturday and Sunday. No wonder woke comrades were so tetchy, having to forswear a weekend of brunching in Hackney to go north. It got off to the rockiest of starts. Sultana boycotted the first day in protest at what she called a ‘witch hunt’. The night before, Your Party had expelled a bunch of people who were found to be members of other parties, including the Socialist Workers Party, which is notoriously like a fly around shite every time a ‘radical’ organisation emerges. Sultana and her hangers-on accused the leadership of carrying out ‘a purge’, which is a bit rich from the loopy faction that says there’s ‘no space’ in Your Party for those bitches who think people with penises are men, not women.

The conference proceedings were hilarious. Socialists? Social inadequates, more like. One by one, the kind of people you dread being cornered by at a soiree took to the stage to say the dumbest things imaginable. ‘My name is Joseph, I use she/they pronouns’, said a lanky bloke with a voice deeper than mine. A big lad in Su Pollard glasses announced himself as ‘Eryn from Glasgow’. It didn’t take digital sleuths long to discover that he (it’s a man!) was once suspended from the Scottish Greens and reported to the cops for dodgy social-media posts. He also once said ‘trans’ rapist Isla Bryson is a woman. So I guess we know who the possessive adjective in Your Party refers to – faux-lefty lowlifes who are happy to flatter the delusional identities of evil men who rape women.

‘I’m a nonbinary person’, said one comrade to noisy applause. I’m old enough to remember when you had to pull off a strike or topple a minister to win applause from radicals – now you just need to make a spectacle of your depthless ignorance on basic biology. She – it was a woman, for heaven’s sake – then announced herself as a ‘disabled comrade’, a ‘neurodivergent comrade’ and a ‘mad comrade’. ‘As a mad comrade’ is hands down my favourite political line of 2025. It’s Your Party summed up – the mentally challenged posing as Marxists. You really would have ended up in Bedlam in the 1700s if you’d been a dude called Joseph going around calling yourself ‘she’ – now you get a spot at the Your Party podium.

The post-truth lunacy of ‘trans’ was the cause célèbre of the conference. We eagerly await the YP manifesto: ‘Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your cocks!’ Blokes in dresses and their bourgeois allies condemned the ‘social conservatism’ of Your Party’s Muslim men who dare to dissent from the trans ideology. Can we clear something up – it is not ‘social conservatism’ to oppose the mutilation of young lesbians or the throwing open of women’s spaces to every whackjob fella in a boob tube. It’s common sense. Common decency, in fact. How telling – and depressing – that the great ideological divide in Your Party is between blue-haired poshos who think women should STFU and let men into their spaces and conservative Muslims who likely think women should stay home and cook and clean. The true factional clash in this hellscape of a party is over how best to treat women like shit.

To be fair, Your Party doesn’t only wang on about trans – it froths and fumes about Israel, too. The party’s obsession with the Jewish nation feels genuinely unhinged, like a delirious species of bigotry dolled up as a progressive position. YP’s factions are locked into a fight to the death over who can hate Israel with the most passion and venom. Some members are even calling Jeremy Corbyn – Jeremy Corbyn! – ‘a Zionist’, presumably because he only wants to demonise, isolate and boycott the Jewish State rather than lay waste to it, as the ‘true anti-Zionists’ in Your Party dream of doing, the fascist pricks.

Sultana seems as keen to appeal to the anti-Zionist nutjobs as she does to the anti-biology nutjobs. In her conference speech, she said YP must ‘stand with the Palestinian people until every inch of their land is free, from the river to the sea’. Every inch. Every inch of the Jewish homeland must be given to the Arabs. Every last centimetre of the Jewish nation must be replaced with something else. This is eliminationist rhetoric, no? She wants to eliminate the State of Israel. Apparently not one inch of planet Earth – not one measly, poxy inch – is allowed to be Jewish-ruled territory. We can laugh at Your Party – we should, in fact. But let’s not overlook how profoundly sinister it is that in 21st-century Britain there exists a political party with factions devoted to the dismantling of the world’s only Jewish nation. Your Party is a catastrophe for Britain’s Jews, a majority of whom feel a deep affinity with the Jewish State.

Your Party talks about standing up for ‘working people’ against ‘billionaires’. But never in the history of the United Kingdom has there existed a party as out of touch with the working classes as these sex-denying, Israel-hating freaks are. As they madly hold forth on the rights of lesbians with penises and the importance of annihilating the Jewish State, working Brits are thinking about sovereignty, democracy, the economy. Your Party brings to mind James Connolly’s warning about leftist lunacy 120 years ago, when he said socialism is always ‘hampered’ by the ‘presence in its ranks of faddists and cranks’ who couldn’t give a toss about working people but just want to ‘ventil[ate] their theories on such questions as sex, religion, vaccination, vegetarianism, etc’. Exactly. That YP conference was a catfight among middle-class faddists and cranks who have nothing to say to working people. A fun watch, though. Keep it up, comrades.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.