“Your” Party is dead, but what comes next?

“Your” Party is dead, but Scotland still needs a party to fight the far-right, argues Owen Maitland in a piece that raises profound questions about the nature of the British Left.

I’ll admit that when Your Party was first announced, I was sceptical. As a longstanding advocate for independence, I had my doubts a UK-wide socialist party would work in Scotland – the wider British left have often shown themselves incapable of understanding our distinct social and political landscape. But the numbers spoke for themselves. Even those of us who were sceptics were faced with a pretty stark choice: either sit out what looked to be a generational opportunity for building a mass socialist party, or get stuck in. I felt it was my responsibility to get stuck in.

Nine months later, having just resigned along with my twelve comrades from the party’s interim Scottish exec (ISEC), it’s abundantly clear that YP cannot be the mass socialist party Scotland needs. It would be pointless to have any discussion about what the Scottish left does next without understanding exactly how and why YP crashed and burned so spectacularly, and what this tells us about how Britain-wide parties treat Scotland.

It’s fair to say, for the most part, the people who came together to build YP in Scotland were savvy enough not to have blind faith in the project’s unofficial leaders in London. Even after the embarrassing fiasco over membership portals, folk were undeterred – if this really was our party, then we would build it ourselves, with or without London’s help. Even without access to resources or finances, branches flourished, building strong local networks of dedicated members all across the country. But this growing movement in Scotland was on an inevitable collision course with a party headquarters down south that, predictably, didn’t seem all that interested in Scottish autonomy, despite constantly publicly proclaiming they were.

This all seemed to change with the YPS founding conference. Despite a few bumps in the road, Dundee was, broadly speaking, a success. YP in Scotland voted to support Scottish independence; to allow dual membership; to stand in the Holyrood elections; and, most strikingly, voted to become an organisationally independent sister party to the broader UK outfit. The conference organising group, composed of delegates from the existing proto-branches, was appointed by conference to see out the implementation of these votes as the Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC).

Jeremy Corbyn stood on stage before the party’s Scottish members and declared full-throated support for the Scottish party. In retrospect, his comments call to mind the words of Brendan Behan:

“Trust not the alien vicar 
Nor his creed without reason or faith 
For the foundation stones of his temple 
Were the bollocks of Henry the Eighth.”

The positive experience of the conference papered over many members’ doubts about party HQ’s commitment to Scottish autonomy and an entrenched and undemocratic leadership cabal down south. Soon, we thought, we’ll have an elected CEC that will surely support our conference’s democratically agreed decisions. We were wrong on all counts.

ISEC contacted HQ on February 18 with clear timelines and processes for deciding where to stand in the election and selecting candidates, as well as proposals for electing a proper SEC. That email was ignored, as were all subsequent attempts to contact HQ for the next month. Calls, texts and emails, which were answered (relatively) quickly before conference were now being stonewalled. This went on for weeks, all while our lone Scottish rep on the CEC, Niall Christie, was similarly ignored in his attempts to get Scottish issues on the CEC agenda.

This left us at a loss – with the deadline for candidate nominations fast approaching, it was becoming obvious that we wouldn’t be able to stand. We were losing members in droves. Keen not to keep anybody in the dark, we organised informal regional meetings across the country to gauge members’ views. The response was overwhelming: they no longer wanted to stand, and they were furious with London.

Finally, just two weeks away from candidate nomination deadline for Holyrood, one senior staffer sent a single member of ISEC a threadbare proposal for standing with no plan for democratic selection processes and suggested we wouldn’t be able to mention Scottish independence during any election campaign, despite the party having voted to support it. This member of ISEC was told not to share this proposal with anybody else.

Scotland was not discussed at the following CEC meeting. Then, without consulting ISEC or Scotland’s sole CEC rep, HQ decided to rerun the vote on standing in the election online, with a deadline just three days away from the final day for candidate nominations. It was clear they were looking for a pre-determined outcome. The deadline came and went. There would be no Your Party candidates on the ballot for Holyrood, despite 70% of the party’s Scottish members having backed the decision to stand less than two months before.

Our resignation as the interim exec came the day after an all-Scotland online assembly, which drew nearly 200 attendees despite everything that had happened. It was clear to all by that point the party in Scotland had run out of road – dead in the water. The question was what to do next. There are hundreds of still-active members across the country clamouring for a coherent new left party to take the challenge to Reform and the far-right. There are many thousands more who showed an initial interest in Your Party before dropping off the map.

Given all this, the fact I’m sitting here writing about bureaucracy and process in a dying party with a rapidly declining membership feels ridiculous. We’re in a position now where Reform will, in all likelihood, soon be the second biggest party in Holyrood – the first time the far-right will ever have had a serious foothold in our national political life. But the need to constantly fight bureaucratic blocks meant there was never a chance to discuss the politics we all knew was desperately needed for this to work.

A little under a year ago, I wrote a piece for Heckle arguing the case for a new party of the left in Scotland. In it, I wrote: “There is no party utilising the potential that a radical vision for independence has to politically engage working-class communities … Seizing this vast gap in Scottish politics is perhaps the best chance we have of taking on the far-right and winning.”

As far as I can see, this is still true.

After May 7, we are likely to see a tired and stale SNP returned for a record fifth term in office. They may well be propped up again by compliant Green MSPs, happy to wave through cuts and help the SNP sell off our resources for a seat at the cabinet table.

It is clearer now more than ever that we need a left alternative, a genuinely socialist party that can re-energise the working class voters who came out in their thousands in 2014, who’d never been near a polling booth before and haven’t since. It was the offer of genuine transformative change to the state that, only when that is on offer will we see a break from the apathy and contempt felt towards the political class.

The hundreds of people across the country that worked to build Your Party can be the basis of that new party; we can, and must, build out from there. As we said in our resignation statement, we’ve missed the best time to act – the next best time is now.