Your Party’s Over

The test of a new political party is not how loudly it launches, but whether it can hold serious people together once the excitement fades. By that measure, Your Party has already failed. In less than a year it has gone from hype to feuding, expulsions, resignations and outright regional collapse. This is not a movement gathering strength. It is an organisation coming apart.

The resignations alone tell the story. In November, Adnan Hussain quit, condemning “persistent infighting”, “a struggle for power” and a “toxic” internal culture. Within days, Iqbal Mohamed followed, citing “false allegations and smears”. These were not unimportant figures. They were MPs attached to the project at the highest level and they walked because the atmosphere had already become poisonous.

The losses did not stop there. In December, Jamie Driscoll chose to join the Greens instead. At its founding conference, Your Party turned what should have been a show of momentum into a public display of breakdown, with Zarah Sultana boycotting the first day over internal disputes. Even after members opted for a collective leadership model rather than a direct Corbyn-Sultana contest, the underlying conflict remained. The struggle had not ended; it had simply moved inside the machinery of the party.

By February, the balance of forces was clearer. Corbyn-backed candidates won 14 of the 24 seats on the Central Executive Committee, while Sultana’s side took seven. Corbyn became parliamentary leader. Sultana was not formally pushed out, but politically she was no longer a co-equal founder setting the direction. She had become the public face of the losing faction inside a party she helped launch.

That matters, because her conduct has repeatedly reinforced the impression of unreliability. She has too often looked less like a disciplined organiser than a political freelancer, acting first and leaving others to deal with the consequences. Her role in the chaotic launch created immediate friction with Corbyn’s side. She then launched an unauthorised membership portal, emailing roughly 800,000 people and urging them to pay to join. The reported fallout was serious enough that the Information Commissioner’s Office advised Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project to consider reporting the matter to the police or fraud authorities. Whatever the ultimate legal position, the political damage was obvious. It deepened the sense of impulsiveness, poor judgement and unilateralism in a party that could not survive any of those things.

The clearest verdict has now come from Scotland. The entire 12-member interim Scottish executive committee has resigned, along with Niall Christie, the sole Scottish representative on the UK-wide Central Executive Committee. Their charge was devastating: attempts to prepare Holyrood candidates and build democratic Scottish structures had been blocked, decisions were being imposed without Scottish input and the organisation north of the border had haemorrhaged members to the point of collapse. Your Party disputes parts of that account. But when an entire national leadership walks out at once and says the party is effectively over, the argument is already lost in political terms.

Even its electoral strategy now carries the smell of retreat. For the English local elections, Your Party has chosen not to stand broadly under its own banner, but to back a limited slate, most of them under independent or local labels rather than the party name. In isolation, that might be defended as tactical flexibility. In context, it looks more like a lack of confidence in the coherence, authority and pulling power of the party itself.

What has collapsed here is not merely a leadership arrangement or a branding exercise, but the fantasy that another formation within British parliamentary politics can somehow escape the habits of centralism, managerialism and factional decay that define that world. A British party that cannot hold its MPs, cannot contain its factions, cannot keep its regional leadership and increasingly cannot trust its own name is not being built for power. It is falling apart in public.