Join us this Saturday 06/12 @ 7PM:
Your Party: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
A review of founding conference and look ahead to CEC elections
🚩 Who we are
👎 What went wrong
👍 What went right
📣 Open forum
🔭 What next
🗓️ Sat 6 Dec 2025
🕖 7:00 PM
www.tickettailor.com/events/democ...
Organising Strategy (5/5)
Despite this caveat, the overall political importance of securing trans liberation within the OS document outweighs these concerns at this stage. Supporting this document helps lay foundations for a more democratic, socialist, and inclusive party.
Organising Strategy (4/5)
We note serious concerns about Motion 121. It risks recreating the bureaucratic union affiliation model that has historically undermined socialist organising. We support a rank-and-file, member-driven approach to TU work—not top-down affiliations.
Organising Strategy (3/5)
The document also enables branches to support targeted grassroots candidates, which could open avenues for DSYP-aligned local campaigns.
Organising Strategy (2/5)
The motions included on this question offer both symbolic and practical protections, helping to keep reactionary elements out of the party and showing solidarity with our trans comrades in a moment of real danger.
Organising Strategy (1/5)
Given the current political climate in YP and the wider left—especially the influence of transphobic forces in UK politics—it is essential that Your Party clearly defends and enshrines trans rights.
Standing Orders (3/3)
We are also concerned that the proposed regional structures for policy development sideline local branches, undermining member-led grassroots deliberation.
For these reasons, we recommend rejecting the Standing Orders.
Standing Orders (2/3)
Democracy must be deliberative, rooted in discussion, persuasion, and collective decision-making—not just digital polling.
Standing Orders (1/3)
These Standing Orders enshrine online OMOV as the primary method of decision-making. We believe this system fundamentally disenfranchises members, atomises participation, and—as this weekend has shown—is wide open to manipulation.
The final votes from @thisisyourparty.bsky.social Founding Conference are live. We're recommend voting as follows:
STANDING ORDERS: *REJECT*
ORGANISING STRATEGY: *APPROVE* (with caveats)
🧵 Find out why...
Follow our live blog for updates direct from conference floor:
dsyp.org/conference
Roundup of Day 1 at Conference Day 1 of Your Party's founding conference was marred by controversy with proceedings only offering a thin veneer of democracy. We were provided with an online voting system which rigidly applied pre-determined questions by Your Party unelected clique. During a seven-hour conference, member-submitted motions were debated for a total of 10 minutes, speakers were cut off, the livestream was interrupted when speakers raised points critical of the bureaucracy, and the draconian standing orders were followed selectively. Notably our point of order asking why our motion on a Workers Wage was not on the agenda was submitted within the rules, yet we received no feedback until our organisers challenged senior party figures at the end of the day. We think that Your Party officials needs to follow their own rules and give a formal response to conference on our point of order and to allow conference to allocate time to debate this critical motion. The controversies continued with senior figures in the SWP being expelled from the party, including one who claims he wasn't even a member of Your Party. We also saw reports on social media of members being expelled from conference with sham justifications. We have serious disagreements with and criticisms of the SWP. especially their history of abuse and cover ups, but this doesn't negate the basic democratic demand that all members be entitled to due process. We should collectively push back to demand Your Party allows dual membership. The choice between an outright ban or a whitelist is no choice at all.
Our round up of day 1 of conference
Solidarity with Erin.
Our solidarity must be with the ENTIRE working class - trans liberation now.
Joint Statement: No to 'Dual Carding' Expulsions. We understand that multiple leading members of the SWP have been expelled from Your Party on the basis of 'dual carding'. We absolutely oppose this anti-democratic and cynical move. This is a targeted factional attack by the bureaucracy, using an unclear rule with no mandate whatsoever. The hope and opportunity of Your Party is that it can be a party of the whole left, on a scale w have not seen in a generation. Achieving that will take a commitment to pluralism and open debate. Hundreds of members of socialist organisations are committed to building the grassroots of the party. Factional attempts to exclude the revolutionary left by the stroke of pen can't be tolerated in a democratic, socialist party.
The dual carding ban could also be used against hundreds of committed members who have decided to also hold Green Party memberships for now, and deter current members of the Greens from participating in Your Party. The founding conference is currently set to vote on whether to have a total ban on dual memberships with national political parties, or a whitelist of some permitted groups. Both options would open the door to more bureaucratic explusions. Regional assemblies have been ignored. Amendments to have no ban on dual carding have been ruled out of order. This weekend's founding conference must be able to vote on an amendment to completely remove the ban on dual membership. Signed: Democratic Bloc, Democratic Socialists of Your Party, Ecosocialist Horizon, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Organising for Popular Power, rs21, Trans Liberation Group.
Our Joint Statement on 'Dual Carding' Expulsions with Ecosocialist Horizon, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Organising for Popular Power, rs21, Trans Liberation Group and Democratic Bloc
This must be resisted. Reverse the expulsion. Publish the procedures. Establish a democratic disciplinary system under the control of the members, not a self-appointed clique. If Your Party is to become anything more than a label or an echo of past hopes, the fight against bureaucratic rule must begin now.
And let us be clear: it was Marxist organisations—small, disciplined, often isolated—that kept socialist politics alive in the vacuum created by Corbyn’s defeat. While Corbyn hesitated, equivocated, and delayed any attempt to rally the movement he once led, it was these groups that maintained campaigns, arguments, and organising capacity. To punish them now is not only unjust; it is an act of political ingratitude and strategic stupidity.
To remove comrades without process, oversight, or political argument is to strike at the foundations of any workers’ party worthy of the name. The absurdity is obvious: Jeremy Corbyn himself has spoken at SWP events in recent years. What passes today as grounds for expulsion was commonplace practice for the very figure around whom this project was built. If the SWP current can be expelled now without cause, any militant or dissenting voice can be expelled tomorrow. Bureaucracy advances by habit; it stops only when the membership stops it.
The leadership of Your Party has crossed a political Rubicon. By expelling a senior member of a political organisation that is participating in the Party on the eve of the founding conference, their autocratic habits threaten to waste the potential that still remains in this project. A party that begins with a purge announces that it prefers command from above to the self-activity of its own members. This act is not discipline. It is a clumsy factional blow. At the very moment when the left most needs open debate and the free contest of socialist currents, the leadership reaches instinctively for the methods of the Labour right: silence the opposition first, invent the rationale later—if at all.
Our Statement on Socialist Expulsions:
🏳️⚧️📜 TLG MOTION AGAINST ORGANISED SECTIONS 📜🏳️⚧️
This is the other motion that managed to get through the YP selection process!
🚨 Be aware!
If you have endorsed any motions, then you will need to endorse them again.
The party website has deleted all endorsements - and some of the standing orders motions were on over a hundred endorsements already (!).
Roadmap Amendment 2 Clause 4 Option A Dual Membership with aligned allied parties Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the Party's values, to include those with whom the Party cooperates electorally. The approved list shall be subject to ongoing CEC review and annual ratification by National Conference. Option B No Dual Members Members may not hold membership in any other national political party.
Your Party needs to be a big tent, multi-tendency, socialist party.
We need an Option C: members of other parties can join as long as their party doesn't run against us in elections.
Read more on our proposal for collective leadership here:
👀
Democracy is when people govern themselves, and that's always going to lead to disagreements, but that is a strength, not a weakness.
When we experience difficulty, we should remember it's because we're doing the work of building something new and, hopefully, revolutionary.
Power concentrated in the hands of too few people is a recipe for the development of an unaccountable party elite, detached from the everyday demands of ordinary membership.
We should instead look to build up as many leaders and organisers as possible from among our ranks.
As for why it's important, the leadership of a democratic & socialist party must be collective, recallable, and based on the equality of all members of the leadership body - with all members of the CEC equal and none more equal than any other.
The CEC would elect from among themselves a steering committee of 5 equal members, plus the two Co-Chairs, to handle all the necessary organisational tasks.
All members of the CEC will have a term limit of two years, and would be barred from standing again for another two years.
The two Co-Chairs would act as public spokespeople for the party, but would have the same power as any other member of the CEC.
The "official" leader, the one we would put down for legal purposes, would be chosen at random from among the CEC, and would hold no additional power.
