Your Party will never speak for the working class

Over the past 40 years, the British working classes have paid the heaviest price for our deindustrialised, declining economy. They have seen their living standards fall and their communities fracture. Most important of all, they have all but lost hope.

This crisis is no longer just economic, it’s also political. The working classes have no voice. Trade unions are white-collar rather than blue-collar, while the Labour Party has long since become the home of middle-class professionals. The working class has now been displaced politically just as forcefully as it has been undercut economically.

So perhaps there is a need for a new left-wing party to represent the interests of a deindustrialised, devalued, deskilled and disrespected working class? Enter stage left Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and Your Party. After repeated false starts, a lengthy (and unresolved) dispute over money and internal warring, the new political party, formed by Corbyn and Sultana in September, had its inaugural conference in Liverpool last weekend.

Both Corbyn and Sultana said that this would be the new party of the British working class. But the evidence for this claim has not been compelling. So far, the only agreed priorities are the advancement of the trans movement and attacking Israel. Although Your Party’s website does mention other issues such as the NHS and the national housing crisis, its ‘solutions’ have all the substance of a vague mist.

Tensions were high before the Your Party conference and, with it, the self-styled return of British socialism – understandably, perhaps, considering what was at stake (at least in the heads of Corbyn and Sultana, and their acolytes). Late on the Friday evening before the conference, messages from Your Party started appearing all over social media – some of the delegates had been told their invite to the conference had been rescinded because they were members of ‘another political party’, mostly the Socialist Workers Party. Little wonder the conference, fuelled by the long-simmering beef between Corbyn and Sultana, started in a fractious, self-recriminating mood.

The atmosphere didn’t improve as the weekend went on. In fact, delegates spent more time attacking each other than they did other parties. Even the war in Gaza was getting less attention than the animosity between Your Party’s dominant factions – apart from one incident, where a delegate from the Revolutionary Communist Group accused a clearly exasperated Corbyn of not being the right type of anti-Zionist.

It was in this naval-gazing context that the trans lobby took control of the narrative. Speaker after speaker seemed more interested in their pronouns, their mental-health diagnoses or their challenges as ‘neurodivergent’ citizens than in policies to advance the interests of the working class.

In fact, there was barely a word about the working class – the people whose lives are getting shorter and increasingly precarious by the day. They were not among the delegates, they were not on the podium, they were not on the platform and they were definitely not the target of the policies.

The Labour Party has, for many years, been the party of the middle-class liberal. The Greens, particularly under Zack Polanski, have nothing to offer the working class in the way of hope, community and identity. The Tories and Lib Dems are unashamedly uninterested in the working class. Reform UK has made noise and has support in the deindustrialised communities – but it is an unknown quantity when it comes to addressing class inequality in Britain.

Your Party has done nothing to address the class imbalance among British political parties. I have a plea to Your Party politicos and members: go and join your fellow hobbyists in the Greens. That is where you belong. Stop pretending that you know about or are interested in the plight of the working class. You are not wanted, welcome or needed among our ranks.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.