The UK’s "Your Party" immediately split into factions and permitted dual membership.
Details. In the months leading up to the founding conference, a range of internal factions emerged around Corbyn’s new project. Blocs and factions aligned around specific issues – such as environmental policy, trans-rights, and various “socialist” currents – each presenting its own programme for influence inside the broader movement.
► During the founding conference, a dispute erupted over dual membership. Trotskyist groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) attempted to use the party’s popularity to gain a foothold through entryism. The SWP was initially expelled under Your Party’s ban on dual membership.
► Zarah Sultana condemned the expulsions as a “witch hunt” and boycotted the first day of the founding conference, while Corbyn called for unity. The conference subsequently voted to reverse the dual-membership ban and adopt a collective leadership model – formally recognising multiple blocs and entrenching factionalism.
Context. “Your Party” was announced in July 2025, following record-low voter turnout in the 2024 election and mounting disillusionment with both Labour and the Conservatives, as interest in alternative parties began to grow. Corbyn and Sultana – both ex-Labour MPs – presented it as a grassroots, “fully” democratic and explicitly socialist project.
► Through the experience of party building and the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks learned that factions divide the party, let opportunists thrive, and prevent it from acting decisively on behalf of the workers. In 1921, they banned factions while retaining Marxist debate, to maintain a disciplined, scientifically grounded line. Your Party, founded by petty-bourgeois reformists without any theoretical basis, naturally gave rise to entrenched and acceptable factionalism.
► As Lenin aptly stated, “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”