The Your Party Conference Was for the Few, Not the Many

The launch of a new party was meant to reenergize the British left. But Your Party’s founding conference showed a Left that had forgotten the outward-facing mass politics of the Corbyn-era Labour Party.

In 2018, Jeremy Corbyn seemed like a prime-minister-in-waiting. Addressing the Labour Party conference at Liverpool’s ACC arena that September, he attacked Britain’s then-leader Theresa May for stalling in negotiations over the country’s exit from the European Union — urging her resignation in a speech delivered just days before his own alternative talks with EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier.

In place of May’s Conservative Party, Corbyn offered a Labour government capable of delivering a “socialism for the twenty-first century.” It was a vision based on the “commonsense” nationalization