Rory’s story of the year - finally, a new left party?
It’s one week before Christmas Day, you’ve tuned in to watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian - all the classics on the TV in the run up to the festive break. “The only people we hate more than the Romans are the Judean People’s Front!” says the People’s Front of Judea. You bolt upright as you realise you’re not watching the Life of Brian, you’ve just tuned into news coverage of Your Party conference!
The analogy for the Left’s search for purity and never-ending splits appears to be evergreen, after a year in which ruminations of a Left-wing alternative would emerge led to MP for Coventry, Zarah Sultana, supposedly jumping the gun on sleepy Uncle Jez no less than on three separate occasions between founding statements, mailing lists and membership portals. The whole, glacial process which panned out over the summer was a psychodrama of splits that potentially alienated many from their initial enthusiasm and helped aid the swelling of the Green Party of England and Wales’ membership to 180,000 under ‘eco-populist’ Zack Polanski.
However, by all accounts (inside) the founding conference was a great success and we now have an explicitly socialist party with a collective model of leadership (choosing Sultana’s preference over Corbyn’s favour of a single leader), while the name chosen from a crowd-sourced shortlist was Corbyn’s preference of Your Party.
But, what does the party’s chances look like in Scotland? The Scottish party, appears to lack the same ‘big names’ which have helped generate momentum elsewhere, apart from former SSP MSP Frances Curran whose call for the party to be explicitly pro-independence (a position which Sultana appeared to endorse at a rally in Glasgow in October) was met with great rapture from the crowd. That said, the relative lack of ‘big names’ might actually work in their favour somewhat in distinguishing themselves from the infighting down south.
Indeed, flicking through the channels after your Life of Brian mistake you come across an episode of Father Ted, “I hear you’re a [socialist] now father!” My god, its still just live updates on Your Party with three Green councillors in Glasgow defecting and another Green candidate for Holyrood joining them.
Thus, the challenge is for the party to not look like an exit-boat for disgruntled Green members - some defections from the left of Scottish Labour and the SNP would help build some credibility in terms of experience but might present challenges in saying “we’re different” given the barely distinguishable economic agendas of the three parties, but indeed, there is a gap in the parliament for an explicitly socialist party to make gains in May 2026.
If Your Party are to make gains at the election, they need a slick communications strategy matched with a big on-the-ground organising effort of listening to voters - the Mamdani play. As for policy, here’s what I would shape that agenda around:
A green industrial strategy centred on public ownership of key assets like energy, which can then generate jobs and local supply chains as well as skills development for non-university career paths (which must be supported by the building of more affordable housing to support jobs outside the central belt); this also requires an ending of outsourcing to private consultancies.
Decentralisation of power and resources to councils and communities: this is really a key part of an industrial strategy which for me, should hinge around municipal ownership of energy as a means of bringing down bills and creating more locally-generated revenue to spend on public services.
Lastly, but linked, scrapping council tax: council tax is unfair, unjust and wildly out of date, it only makes sense to include its abolition in a package of measures designed to reduce ordinary people’s bills; a land and property tax would be much fairer and would help fix broader structural problems across Scotland.
The prospect of a boring election with a certain outcome could perhaps be offset by insurgent, organised forces on both the Left and the Right. Polls are predicting Reform could lead the formal opposition in Holyrood, despite having barely any leadership beyond defected Tories (mostly) in Scotland. I am unconvinced they will win as many seats as polls suggest without the charisma of Farage on the campaign trail, but they will for sure leapfrog the Tories and Lib Dems without so much as firing a shot.
And so the gauntlet laid down for Your Party Scotland is to get active, knock doors and convince voters/non-voters that they can stand up for the disaffected and make a break with the economic vision that is hollowing out communities, centralising power and doing nothing to support job creation or housebuilding.