Waiting for politics?

Behind the clouds of smoke from the internal workings and rows of the Corbyn-Sultana Your Party a grim fact looms: YP as such, or even the “proto-branches” of YP, have done almost no politics.

Whatever our criticisms of Zack Polanski, he has done politics. It has been only on the level of social-media output and electioneering, not on the level of street or workplace intervention, or solid political education, but it has been politics of a sort. Nothing like that from YP. That is why GP has so outstripped YP.

YP was publicly launched in July 2025, seven months ago. Its operational core, the people who ran the YP conference on 29-30 November and are organising its Central Executive elections now, the people “behind” Jeremy Corbyn, have operated publicly as a proto-party (Collective) since March 2024.

When a new political formation is started, of course there will be anomalies. They have to be resolved “on the hoof”, in the flow of activity and discussion. The initiating group must campaign politically to show what new it offers at the same time as it forms structures to clarify, consolidate, or correct the “new”.

Plenty has happened in the world since March 2024, or even since July 2025. Politics is not just, or even mainly, elections. What are the political responses of YP? What Jeremy Corbyn has said in his own name? (Often poor politically, in our view, even compared with Corbyn’s imperfect pre-2024 politics). What Zarah Sultana has said (sometimes poor in different ways)? Or just zero?

Why the paralysis? Maybe because since July 2025 there have been rival claims to be the “initiating group”, the Corbyn group’s and Sultana’s. Maybe because Corbyn is reluctant and unsure.

The only answer was to improvise while proceeding rapidly to set up structures to establish majority and minority at least provisionally. Instead, we have had months of internal-focused wrangling.

Where people have joined YP (rather than the Green Party, say, or the Labour left), it must be because believe YP will eventually become active on Corbyn’s line, or Sultana’s. Or because they envisage a minority in YP close to their own views, and democratic structures through which that minority can make progress. But it all has to be hopeful waiting.

This has allowed clouds of political activists to swirl around YP which are outright right-wing (like Piers Corbyn) while at the same time leftists are excluded (SWP people from the November conference, SP people and initially others from the Executive elections). A young student activist told me yesterday that “all my friends who liked YP are now not interested”.

On our observation, also, few local “proto-branches” show much external political initiative, even in YP’s “heartland” of Islington.

The world won’t wait forever. We say to people who looked to YP as a new political start: being YP is not really doing politics. Do politics with Workers’ Liberty in YP or elsewhere, but do politics, not just waiting.