Your Party, the left-wing upstart co-founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana last summer, has announced the results of its first leadership election.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest from the outfit – and who could blame you? – it would be fair to ask whether it was Corbyn or Sultana who won.
Oh, the blissful ignorance. That’s not how things work in this world.
No – neither of them will be leading Your Party. But one of them sort of will more than the other.
Let’s try and get our heads around this together.
The story starts on July 3 last year, when Zarah Sultana officially announced she was bidding farewell to Labour and setting up an alternative party with her former leader Jeremy Corbyn (reportedly to his surprise).
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From the start, Your Party promised a new way of doing things – so new, in fact, that even the party name wasn’t going to be the party name until they’d checked if everyone was happy with it.
So we entered a monthslong hinterland, in which we knew only three things for certain: there was a new party; it was left-wing; and Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were somehow involved with it.
Over that period, we were reassured everything would be settled at the end of November, when the inaugural party conference was held in Liverpool.
And so it was. On the banks of the Mersey, we learned the official name of Your Party was Your Party. We also learned about its the unusual leadership structure.
Corbyn favoured a more traditional model with a single leader. Sultana wanted a version that felt more in-tune with the movement’s mega-democratic ideals – leadership by committee.
In one of the more ecstatic moments of the conference, delegates formally backed Sultana’s favoured outcome.
They also, for good measure, voted to ensure neither co-founder would be able to stand in the committee’s top roles. The logic seemed to be that this would preserve the party’s grassroots integrity.
Which brings us to today’s results. These simply decided the makeup of Your Party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) without establishing who does what job.
Before we go ahead, it’s worth noting two things.
First, there are 24 spots on the CEC divided into 12 sections. Four spots are taken up by ‘public office holders’, then the rest are geographical: two spots each for North West, North East, Yorkshire & the Humber, East of England, West Midlands, East Midlands, South East, South West, and London; then only one each for Wales and Scotland and none for Northern Ireland.
Still with me?
Second, Corbyn and Sultana each had a faction that committee candidates could represent. Corbyn called his ‘The Many’, while Sultana called hers ‘Grassroots Left’. Candidates could also run independently.
On to the results. Happily for the co-founders, both were voted onto the committee in the ‘public office holders’ section.
But slightly more happily for Corbyn, his faction won more seats overall – The Many got 14, compared to seven for the Grassroots Left. Three were voted in as independents.
Is Jeremy Corbyn the new leader of Your Party? No. But with all those supportive committee members, he’s likely to be backed as leader of the group of MPs in Parliament. So that’s nice, at least.
Plus, he will wield influence over the future of the movement as the leader of the largest faction on the committee that will communally decide policy positions.
It’s really that simple.
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