ACFM - ACFM Microdose: What’s Going On With Your Party?

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

After last week’s episode on Parties, this time ACFM exposes the predicament facing Your Party, the new leftwing faction led by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. What expectations do leftwing voters have for Your Party? Does the Corbyn faction distrust the membership? Is Zarah a politician or a poster? And does ‘Yorp’ stand a chance […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friend's Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And on today's special microdose, we are talking about your party. So, guys, why do we want to talk about your party at this moment in time? Well, one reason for talking about this now is we just did a main episode about the whole concept of the party,

although that in itself was partly inspired by current events. and it's obviously been a massive preoccupation for people on the British left in this autumn of 2025, this process that might or might not be leading up to the successful launch of a new socialist party happening at exactly the same time that an eco-socialist has become leader of the Green Party and started attracting lots of support. And at the same time as it looks like the right-wing control of the Labour Party is sort of breaking down in terms of moral legitimacy, if not in terms yet of institutional control.

And it raises all kinds of issues about things that we talked about on the main episode about the party in very immediate concrete terms to do with like, well, what is a political party? What do we want it to do? Like what do we wanted to be? Like how, what do we need it for, etc? And we're all likely to have different levels of relationship to this new, this thing that's happening that are going to be worth thinking about, not just because we're interested in this specific phenomenon of this new left party, but because these issues around how you organise a sense of collective identity, how you organise a sense of collective agency, have much bigger implications for all of us. So, I mean, that's why I think it's important

to talk about, even though it's quite a localised and issue that might have stopped being relevant six months later. And what do you think, Nadia? Yeah, I mean, I think that question about agency and the site for organising is really important and one that we wanted to pick up on by looking at all, you know, all of the details of what this thing is and what's happened that on, you know, your party, this organisation. So I think it's, well, it's interesting to like reflect on, you know, where perhaps like we are with this. I'm not as close to this in any way as I was for, you know, I would say first time round. I mean, maybe we shouldn't be relating them this way. But, you know, and we'll talk about this.

a little bit, I'm sure, but, you know, when Jeremy Corbyn first came up and momentum was formed, etc., when I was very, very close to the whole process. But I do think that it, you know, understanding, like, again, going back to the refrain that we always talk about in the ACFM, about knowing, you know, situating ourselves in history. And I think we talked about this a little bit on the party's main trip episode about where the sites for, like you said, Jeremy, organizing and activity and age. agency are. And we've had this, you know, spell of a few years where it didn't feel like the political party was that site at all. And now this might be changing, you know, again, because again,

the terrain is changing due to all sorts of different factors, which I'm sure we're going to discuss. So it's interesting to look at, you know, the forensics of how and why we understand your party to be set up and who are the key actors there. but also like to understand like the affect around it, like what are the expectations that people have and what do people expect this kind of institution to do? And perhaps what are some of its shortcomings? But, you know, of course we're going to be interested in it because, you know, acid communism slash acid carbonism or whatever was part of the inspiration for this podcast in the first place. You know, us meeting each other came out of the world transformed and momentum, etc. So we're definitely.

interested in where certain characters and certain political tendencies from that era find themselves, you know, not when we started this project back in 2016, 17, 18, but now in 2025. And understanding all of those different tensions, like we said, but also like what we think is going to happen if we can even predict something like that. And what is the role of an initiative like your party in collecting people to and also being some kind of a force for change. But also, as I said, like, what are some of the shortcomings and why perhaps some of those organizational mechanisms have not done what, you know,

we would have liked them to do? So those are some of the reasons why it's interesting for me to unpack this, you know, phenomenon, organization tendency, whatever we're going to call it, your party at this moment in time. All right, great. Well, then I think in order for us to be able to get into all that, I think Keir should give us a rundown of exactly what has happened in the past few months that has led to this point.

There's been rumours that there's a new left party about to be formed. Going back, I think probably 18 months, perhaps two years is an idea that there should have been a new left party going back to when Jeremy Corby, who was previously the leader of the Labour Party, when he was

expelled from the Labour Party for nothing. as part of a nefarious plot by the Labour right to evict everybody to the left of Genghis Khan, which they semi-successed at doing. And at that point, there just seemed to be a huge political space, or definitely a huge electoral space on the left in the UK. Then in July, I think it was, Zara Sultana, who was a Labour MP for Coventry, one of the Coventry constituencies,

announced that she was leaving a Labour Party to form a new party with Jeremy Corbyn and so she announced that they would be co-leading the foundation of this organisation. Now, that announcement was deeply disputed and Jeremy Corbyn didn't tweet to say, yes, that is what's happening. And it seems as though Zara Sultanah had basically decided

to push the matter because there was a lot of dithering about the party and decided to, make that announcement off her own, and that caused quite a bit of bad blood, I think. There's an organisation called Collective, who are formed around Jeremy Corbyn. They include people who were around Jeremy Corby when he was a leader of the Labour Party, so they call it a lotto, leader of the opposition. People such as Carrie Murphy, for instance, who's a figure who's featured prominently in the gossip around this. but like quite a wide range of people got drawn together around this into an organising committee.

We don't know who they are because it's all secrets and that's been a really big problem. It's all secret and so we've had to basically gossip has been the currency of the last few months where people are trying to work out what's going on. Nobody's making many announcements. It's all going on behind closed doors and you know you're basically doing criminalology to try to work out what's going on really has been a really big problem. So that means that gossip is the currency of the time and the media. through which that gossip is primarily dispersed is social media with all of the problems that

that brings and we'll get onto later. So anyway, quite a big, broad organizing committee was drawn, including people from social movements. Lots of people from the left were invited onto it. You know, you have to be invited. There's no way you could democratically be elected onto it. You get invited onto it. And that organizing committee made a decision a couple of months ago I can't quite remember what the decision is. I think they voted that there should be co-leaders of your party, at least up until the foundation of the founding conference. Jeremy Corbyn and the people around him didn't like that,

so they dissolved the organising committee and formed a new one. So you can see there's been all sorts of tension, and the gossip comes out about, oh, such and such has said this about this, such and such. A lot of bad feeling and like a collapse of trust, I think you put it that way. Nonetheless, there was a, you know, there was a, there seemed to be a process in train towards a founding conference. Now, I've missed out the most important thing. When Zara Sultan announced there was this party was going to be formed, a huge amount of people signed up.

We think 800,000 people signed up to register their interest in this new party. And it was that number that really, really did open people's eyes and think, oh, hang on a minute, something could happen here. There was a couple of polls. One poll said that they, that your part. could be standing at something like 12% in the polls, which is, you know, really significant, etc. Your party in the Greens together at one point, there was one poll that showed them on 30%. You know, people's eyes that, oh, something really could happen here.

And so there was a process where they were going to announce the membership. There were going to be a series of regional assemblies leading up to a conference. And the conference was going to be peopleed by, organized by sortition, which is like, like a jury. You get, if you're eligible, you go into a, into a lottery system and your name gets drawn and then you can go to the, to the conference. The idea of that would be that if there really were 800,000 or even if there were 500,000 people, you could not fit those people into a conference. You couldn't, that would be chaotic. There are no official branches because there is no official membership, so there's no way you could have a delegate system. So it was

They're incredibly difficult process they're trying to do. Then, on the, a couple of weeks ago, perhaps three weeks ago, Zara Sultana announced and opened a membership portal. You know, I saw that membership portal open. I said, oh, that's great. 20,000 people signed up in the first hour. I was just, in fact, I think I was going to do a podcast interview. But right, I'll join that.

As soon as I come off this podcast interview, I had my 55 pounds for a year membership all lined up. By the time I'd come off that podcast interview an hour and a half later, it all collapsed, basically. The collector of the people around Jeremy Corbyn had denounced the announcement of this membership portal saying it's fraud and saying people should not sign up to it. There was a huge back and forth, Zara Saltona threatened legal action, etc. And absolute what's known colloquially in English as a shit show of unholy proportions. They cause incredible confusion. and there's been no membership figures announced since that point.

So 20,000 in the first hour, you would think that would head to some really, really large number, basically. My best guess is, I think it's probably about 50,000 membership now. I actually did join a week and a half later, but whereas I was just about to join with incredible enthusiasm, I joined with real resentment and bitterness to both Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultan and the people around both of them. And I think that may well be quite a common sort of affect.

You start in this, not with this wave of enthusiasm, which is going to roll across the country and get 800 or 3,000 people signed up. Instead, much smaller numbers have signed up. Nonetheless, there was a political festival called The World Transforms, at which me and Jeremy did a very good ACFM workshop, actually. Nadia couldn't join us this year. And at that, Zara Sultan and Jeremy Corbyn,

in a rally before, they sort of did a big public making up, they held hands and hands across the ocean, that sort of thing. They've announced these assemblies. The first assembly took place in Norwich on Sunday, as we record this on the 23rd of October. There are more assemblies around the country, and that is leading up to a conference in Liverpool on November, the 29th 30 of something around then. Have I missed bits of the story? I'm sure. sure we can fill it in as we go through because we need to examine lots of this basically about what's going. No, not really. I'd just say if people want the detailed accounts, there are basically two articles that everyone on the British left is referring to in all these

discussions. There was a relatively short article by Andrew Murray in the Morning Star on their website. There's a very long article on a website called Prometheus by Archie Woodrow. and to the best of my knowledge I mean I know a few of the people involved and those are both completely accurate accounts so I think Archie's been on podcasts and stuff so you might find an interview with Archie Woodrow if you want an audio version of a more detailed account

but yeah I don't think you've missed out anything in detail if people want more detail other sources are available I was just going to say that what we're going to try and be even-handed and not go on one side of the other of this dispute but we need to sort of set out the sort of basic parameters of what's gone on and then we can perhaps row back a bit and think about it in a little bit wider terms rather that we can move away from the political gossip which as I say has been the currency of the moment and when you when politics is done through political gossip you basically miss the bigger

picture I think and that's what we might try and provide today well I'd like to get into a bit more than is, well, like, what's been happening, not just at the level of these specific people relating to each other offline or online and everybody else standing around watching. But in terms of how the kind of broader currents of feeling have been flowing around, the kind of amorphous thing, yeah, you might call the British left. I mean, really, it's the Anglo-Wales left, because people in Scotland mostly don't care, I think. And we are really talking about a set of relationships, which I would say are sort of, you know, 30% at most face-to-face, like people talking to each other, and they are 70% like social media, including WhatsApp groups, people chat,

chatting about all this stuff from the moment. It first started to emerge. And my account would be, indeed, there was a lot of anticipation, I would say a degree of impatience, really for several years, because really, from the moment, Jeremy Corbyn left, formerly left the Labour Party. Even, I would say before Jeremy left the party actually for me for quite a long time before he formally left the Labour Party from the moment it became clear that Jeremy did not have any intention of trying to lead his supporters in a kind of assault against the right-wing bureaucrats who were expelling him within the Labour Party. You know, people, lots of people started to say, well, if he's not going to do that, then what he ought to do is organise the people who are leaving the

party supporting him and people who've already left in order to create a kind of a potent collectivity, as I would call them, out of these people who are kind of being driven out of the party. So there's been a lot of anticipation of quite a long time. People are getting quite impatient. And then what happened, I mean, actually what happened was Zara Sultana, who had had the whip withdrawn with a bunch of other Labour MPs for opposing party policy, policy technically, although it was widely assumed it was really because of her militancy over Palestine. Had Heather Borgman, she, you know,

she made this announcement that actually it was going to happen and she was going to be, she announced she was leaving Labour on the same day, in the same Twitter post, that she announced she would be co-leading a new party with Jeremy. So she kind of did these things at all of the same time. People got very excited and the fact that 800,000 people signed up to this email list was very exciting. But obviously there was also a considerable amount of trepidation.

because everybody knew that, well, 800,000 people on an email list doesn't necessarily mean 800,000 people are going to join a thing. I mean, anyone can join the email list. A lot of those people will have been in Brooklyn, DSA, and not eligible to join a British political party, etc., etc. So we didn't, but there was all this excitement. And then the spectacle of the kind of spat between Jeremy and Zara, the kind of evident disagreement really over who really was in charge of this project,

who was really going to lead it, you know, how, you know, how it was all going to work. This caused an awful lot of anxiety. People have been really, really unhappy about it. And, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, I would, you know, and that's that, that, and that, and I think the situation right now is that broadly speaking, although there has been an attempted reconciliation, I think my sense is, especially my senses after the World Transform Festival a couple of weeks ago, broadly speaking, well, people are still quite disappointed by the whole process. There's a feeling that it looks like the process of founding the party is not proceeding in its democratic ways.

People would have hoped that mostly what is happening is that the group of people involved in the networks, Keir was describing, who mostly want this to be a sort of vehicle for Jeremy Corbyn's leaders, rather than a vehicle for mass participatory democracy. Those people seem to be really controlling the situation. And at the same time, although all this is happening, the Green Party with Zach Palantica's leader, has doubled its membership, like in the past few weeks. So what's definitely clearly happened

is that quite a large number of other people, about 70,000 people, many of whom probably signed up for that email list a few months ago for your party, have decided just to join the Green Party. and also nobody knows how many people have joined your party. The membership has been open for weeks now. The general consensus is that the membership figures must be quite disappointing or they would have announced them.

Because they were announcing how many people had signed up for the email list every 30 minutes, basically, while that was happening. Do you have a bit of context for that, though, is that when the membership was opened, a process was opened by Zara Sultanah, that data and the money went one way and when they when they reopened it when the collective the other side reopened membership for your party that data and money went to a different place under the control of different people and that's part of the dispute and so apparently that data

has not even been merged yet and so that's what that's part of the reason why they're saying they can't announce membership figures that's true that's true but the issue that really emerges for me like out of this whole context really is there is a real tension between the different things that people want from a political party in this context. And the way I would put this is there are two quite different things that people want. Some people want both of these things and some people really only want one of these things. And the two things are, on the one hand, an opportunity to get involved in a really democratic process. There's a load of other people who broadly share your worldview to build solidarity,

to build a kind of democratic community of agency and go out into the wider community to try to win people over to a socialist program and build a participatory mass movement. And then the other thing that people want is they want there to be a guy on the TV who says stuff they agree with a lot. And that sounds dismissive,

but I think I don't mean it to be dismissive. I mean, that is a really important thing that people want. It's a very important part of contemporary mass policies. In fact, it's always been, important part of mass policy. I keep hearing people talk about this. Like, this is only a thing that's happened now in the age of social media or TV. I mean, it's not. I mean, democratic politics, you know, in Republican Rome was mostly about like some guy from the ruling class, like,

persuading like the plagues, the people of the city that he represented their interest and getting them to vote for him. So that is not a new thing, the idea that part of what people want is a guy who says stuff they agree with. Can I add a third? So I think there might be a third thing that people want actually, which is kind of related to your second and, you know, possibly related to the first, but it's a bit of a Venn diagram thing here, which is that I think there's a constituency of people that want someone who's going to get things done in the same cadence of, you know, take back control or whatever. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's in any way racist, but I think one of the things that people observe is that there is a democratic deficit

under late capitalism, and whether they're necessarily conscious of it in this form or not, I definitely think there is a sizable number of people who think, and these might be the people who are controlling your party. Again, I don't know, it seems to be quite opaque, but who think that actually democracy and action at this moment in a political history are in tension. And actually, if you want to oppose, you know, all of the, or you want to take a contradictory position and contradictory actions and put yourself in conflict with late capitalism, what you actually need is more of a dictator, right? So I'm not saying that people think they want a dictator in the UK, not consciously or, you know, on that level. But what I'm trying to allude to here is there's also this yearning for action, which is not style.

by late capitalism. And, you know, there's also this sense, I would say, is that by opening all of these, you know, democratic structures and doing things, you know, and participatory democracy, that might be great for the affect. It might be great to make people feel they belong and less atomized, but is it really going to make people's lives better, or is it going to create any meaningful policy which can be enacted, which is going to kind of stop this, you know, train running down to to even more, you know, crises after crises after crises. Like what is, what is the thing? What is the actor, which is going to put, you know, a stop to some of the processes which are bringing about, you know, climate change and ever more kind of distraction, not of the planet, but also of society.

So I'd say that that tendency also exists as well and might be coming into tension with this idea of, you know, open participatory, long-ended processes. Yeah, you're right. I mean, they're all democratic desires. They're different manifestations of a kind of democratic desire. To respond to Nadia's point, I mean, we should provide a little even more context, which people from the UK probably know, but listeners from outside the UK by not be as fully aware, it's that there's a wider context here, which is there's an incredible anti-systemic feeling in the UK and most other places as well, basically. And that primary representation of that is a shift to the far right

over the last sort of 18 months. So reform, who are a far right party, currently on 30% in the polls, but because of first past the post, because of the political system, that would give them like an incredible number of seats, probably a controlling number of seats. The last 15 years have just been incredibly,

I've just had incredible political volatility, basically. Like, it's just incredible. You know, with Jeremy Corbyn being leader of the Labour Party, you know, achieving 40% in a lot, election, and polling even higher than that after 2017, you know, figures that any political party in the UK could only imagine these days. The Labour Party got elected on something like 33% of the vote under Kirstama in the last election. They're incredibly, like, pretty much unprecedentedly and popular, like really catastrophic government so far. So that's the sort of

wider context. There is a huge anti-systemic feeling. The Labour Party is just, you know, we are the system sort of thing. But I would say, Nadia, in response, I don't think that we want a man of action. I don't think that's the attraction of Jeremy Corby. He is not a man of action, I'm afraid. No, I don't, I didn't say that. I didn't say it's the attraction of Jeremy. I didn't say it's the attraction of Jeremy, but I might think that some people around Jeremy might be thinking that in order to be able to enact any kind of meaningful, different policy or opposition, then it needs to be organised in a particular way. I'm not saying I'm sympathetic to that, but that is my analysis. Yeah, yeah. I think the identification with Jeremy Corbyn has always been that he's a moral

figure, basically. He represents a moral figure, morally upstanding, who will say things that people agree with, basically, rather than an astute analyst. Integrity. Integrity. Integrity. I think Jeremy Corbyn is integrity, which is attractive. I think this is important, and I think also this connects up, actually, with some of the Kremlinology around the pre-formation of your party. Because, indeed, I mean, if you were to do a kind of proper analysis of the whole phenomenon of Corbinism from 2050, you would have to say, I mean, we have said on the show before, I think, that of course, like any mass phenomenon, it has various components and there are various

groups of people with various kinds of relationships to the overall project. And, you know, there was a constituency of people that we all sort of belong to who understood Corby's leadership of the Labour Party basically as a political opportunity to build a sort of social majority for some radical reform programme and probably, and to try to occupy the Labour Party is an institutional vehicle for that. You know, Corby himself, well, exactly the relationship of Corbyn himself as an individual to that was always complicated. Like at the most extreme, it was interdental, and there were a lot of people who didn't even think he was really the best person for the job. On the other hand, there were a lot of people who felt that, well, only he could really sort of do the job

of rallying the broad left, partly because he was a figure who was very widely trusted, like across different sections of the left and the peace movement, etc. because he was this very moral figure because he was his very, and he is, you know, he's a very decent guy who, you know, is famously not very ambitious or egotistical. And then, but there were also people who really, their conception of things wasn't really at the level of, you know, even it's Jeremy's moral personality is going to open up a possibility for a broad coalition. It was simpler than that, really. It was, like, this guy says the stuff I agree with and I think that I've been thinking for years. I haven't heard a professional, a main. a politician on the Teddy say for decades, and I like him, and I trust him because he seems like a guy you can trust who's not full of shit. And that latter constituency, who were very much really sort of personally identified with Corbyn, I would say they made up a large portion

of the number of people who joined the Labour Party, but they didn't join momentum, and they didn't go to meetings, they might have gone to some rallies, and they were always a really important, you know, part of the overall mass of people who went in, who went, who joined the Labor. And more importantly, they were an even bigger part of the massive people who voted Labor in 2017 and didn't even join the Labour Party. So they are a really important constituency. And I would, but I would say, I would say there certainly is a group around of people very close to Corbyn. There are a group of some of his closest advisors and some of the most influential people, both when he was leader of the Labour Party

and people who now seem to have become very influential in determining outcomes around how new party is going to be organised. And I think the most logical, they will never come out and say this explicitly because it would be really objectionable to most people on the left to say this. But I think the most logical understanding of their behaviour and the things they've been for and against

in terms of political strategy for the past 10 years is they really think that is the central element of the whole project. The central element of the whole project is the idea that if you put Jeremy Corby on the telly a lot, there's a whole bunch of people who will like him and will sort of flock to support him, and we'll go to hear him speak of rallies, and that is the nature of the mass movement that you want. And everything else that some people want, like they want participatory democracy. They want even Jeremy to be accountable to a mass membership.

They want, you know, they want to community organizing in their communities. They want capacity building, like at the level of political branches, all that stuff is sort of bullshit, really. Like, it might be nice to have sometimes, but it's not really very important. The important thing is Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy, and making Jeremy the centre of everything and giving that fairly large constituency of people

whose main relationship to politics is the fact of them liking Jeremy Corbyn an opportunity to express that through joining a thing, giving it some money, and having it stand in elections. In a way, that is obviously a manifestation of what Palo Gabaldo of the phenomenon of the hyperleader in the modern sphere of, you know, digital platform-enabled party politics. I think it's important to understand, as I've already said, it's not at all new. It's arguably the default form that popular politics has taken for thousands of years,

actually. I want to reserve a complete judgment, mostly because I've not been very involved at all, you know, unlike last time, you know, Corbyn was the centre of a thing. I don't even know if I'm going to call it a party or a movement. However, having seen, you know, having read up, you know, some of the accounts that you guys mentioned at the beginning on, you know, kind of what's been going on and the very good rundown that Kia gave us, like knowing that information and contrasting that reality with the kind of language in the emails and the communication,

it's hard to think that that's not true effectively. Like I'm holding, you know, I'm holding back on. saying that is definitely the thinking behind it, what you've just articulated, Jeremy, but it sounds like it is, you know, that basically the two bits don't match up. Like that, the participatory democracy is not actually like the end point of this project, although it says that it is. And I think that is the problem that I'm having is that it effectively sounds like, for those of us who do know some things about the ins and outs of what is happening,

as, you know, Keir gave that rundown, it does make you quite cynical. And that's unfortunate and it might have, you know, quite a knock-on effect for the future if people think that this thing around Jeremy Corbyn is not what it says it is. I mean, it's interesting because actually the publicity around your party coming out of official your party accounts, which has not been much, it's been quite slender, but that really has lent very hard on the idea that that, you know, we've got, we're using regional assemblies to feed into the constitution. We're forming a party out of nothing where, you know, we're using sortition and these innovative methods, etc. This is going to be the most democratic party ever.

So they're really leaning heavily on that, even if there's, you know, among some people, there's a little bit of, there is some cynicism about, well, perhaps actually sortition is the thing you need in order to keep a, a demobilized mass, basically, who are manipitable by the views of the hyperleader. That's one of the things that Paolo Cabardo sort of talks about when he, in his books about this, is that perhaps what's new or what's different between these, because we have seen these growth of very large parties, very suddenly around the world, quite often kind of populist parties on the left, right and center. And part of what distinguishes that for mass parties of the 20th century, is that you don't, you have sort of a hyperleader, then you have a mobilisable

mass, but you don't have the sort of cardra, the interlinking layers, the cadre and the branches, etc., who feed into it in a sort of democratic manner. So you don't have the ability to have a democratic party, basically. No, and that tension, the tension around what should be the role of the activists in the party. I mean, that is not at all specific to this. situation. I mean, it's something that's been an issue in the history of the Labor Party for the past hundred years. It's something that's always an issue because you have this complicated situation whereby, on the one hand, you think spontaneously, like any socialist, any Democrats should say, yes, like the party leadership and the professional politicians,

the elected politicians must be directly accountable to the membership. That's democracy. But then you get into this situation where the party leaders, the professional politicians, the people who've been elected to public office, they start saying to themselves, well, the thing is, the kind of people who are members of the party, they're not really typical of the public. They're not even typical of the section of the public

who vote for us. And really it's those people we should be representing. And then they start constructing these justifications for really just carving out the members, not really saying to the members, well, you shouldn't really have any saying it for anything because the relationship that matters is the relationship between the leadership,

the legislative, the elected legislators and the voters. And the party membership should really just help those people get elected or shut up and go away. And they think they have a democratic argument for saying that. And sometimes you can say, sometimes they might be right. Sometimes it might be true that the internal culture of the activist in the party has become so divergent from the culture of even the voter base that it becomes toxic for the party. And this isn't just a problem on the left. I mean, this is what, this is what's happened repeatedly to the conservative.

party in the 21st century, they've tended to elect leaders who reflect the prejudices and concerns of their members. And they're very divergent, even from most Tory voters. And they end up alienating loads of their voters. So it's a very complicated dynamic, and it's not unique, it's not specific to the moment of social media platforms at all, actually. I think it's a, it's a problematic that's built into the whole nature of representative politics, actually. Like, the only way to get away from this is to move completely away from the whole notion of a sort of representative political system towards some more permanently participatory system, which of course is something that radical socialist, anarchists,

even some sort of radical Democrats coming from a more liberal tradition, have wanted to do like for 120 years. But as long as you're within a basically representative political system, you've got this problem that isn't going to go away. Yeah, and you have this issue of like the mass and where people see themselves in relation to that. And I think that's an interesting question to think about whether if these assemblies could be successful in allowing people, which is maybe one of the things that people are looking for, I mean, I feel like something that we're all looking for, this kind of form of collectivity and solidarity where people are able to see themselves as part of something bigger so that they're able to identify and perhaps. perhaps join and get involved. Because if we're talking about participatory democracy on a kind of ground level, people have to have some kind of identification there, even to get to the point of some kind of agency, right? And I feel like we're living in an age of diversification

of identity and thought, you know. And so I think that's interesting, like how, as late capitalism develops, like how it affects the terrain for that kind of even low level organising. Just to go back to the example of the Conservative Party have been like taken over by its members and going to the extremes, etc., etc. Because we could point to the Labour Party, the current leadership of the Labour Party, is the opposite of that. That is where a political media elite, incredibly small, very isolated, have basically seized control of a political party and they are enacting the policies that seem common sense to this tiny, tiny political media elite. Yes, totally, yeah. And as it turns out, they do not.

speak for the wider voters. Everybody utterly hates them, and their policies are completely at odds with the wider population. Yeah, totally. I mean, we'll get into all the Labour Party stuff in our next microdose after this one, so we don't want to dwell on it too much. Yeah, you're totally right. And of course, I mean, the epistemological crisis from which the entire British political class, including, but not limited to, the Labour right, have still not recovered was the discovery in 2017 that their long-held belief that what it meant to represent the public was to persist in the assertion that no form of meaningful sort of social democratic reform would ever be possible again that just wasn't true that it wasn't true that if you the what

the activists in the party wanted which was basically a platform saying look we're going to start reversing the whole fact to right program was really unpopular and the fact that that turned the fact that out to be really popular was a complete shock to them and they really and it just they I mean they just became insane really and I'll still insane on that basis I mean right now at the time of recording we're recording on 23rd of October 2025 and it's this there's a lot of ambivalence around you know the actual process of the formation of the party because the general consensus I think for reasons we'll get into in more detail in a minute is that people are not happy with the way in which the foundation process is going forward

and they feel that it isn't democratic and it isn't being rolled out in a way which is actually going to facilitate participatory democracy. But as you said, the most recent publicity encouraging people to join has been like incredible. It's this fantastic animation by Andy Redwood,

I think is the name of the guy who made it, which you can find if you search for your party, at least on Twitter, but I'm presumably on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok as well. It's fantastic. It's a beautiful sort of animation which basically tries to express visually the idea that this is going to be a completely collaborative process. And it's like it's a visual expression of the whole idea of democracy as manifesting the inherent and beautiful complexity of the collective.

Like it's just fantastic. Like if that was the only thing going on, I'd probably just join on principle, like just on the basis of that really fantastic bit of film. But it's true sort of acid, acid communism. Acid Corbynism. But the reality on the ground, of course, is that people generally feel that the process is not going forward in a way which actually reflect those ideals. Perhaps one place to go would be to look a little bit more into this idea of a hyper-leader

and then a mobilisable mask. Because I know, Jeremy, you've been saying that that political identification with a leader has always been part of politics. It absolutely has. But perhaps one of the things that has changed is the reliance on digital platforms as the main medium through which this takes place. It's that it's that that allows, you know, this really, really rapid mobilisation without any intermediate layers. And we should like just think a little bit more about the central role that these social media platforms have played. Not just in sort of like, you know, pulling these masks together, but also it is the medium through which the parties.

has been discussed primarily at the moment. Like the role that social media platforms play, that like their algorithms are set up to be antagonistic, to spread outrage, etc, etc., etc. Increasingly, you know, they're owned by far-right oligarchs who are putting the thumb on the scale all the time to try to push, you know, to try to eliminate certain voices and accelerate other voices.

It's one of the really big problems that we face, the effects of social media, because there's no out to it. You know, there doesn't seem to be an out to that. It has to be a part of politics, you know. And I think part of the attraction of the idea that we could form mass democratic mechanisms and then do things such as, you know, go out into the community and do community organizing and build up social infrastructure and these sorts of things would be a way in which you would do this thing

where you move from one of these, what Gabaldo, Paula Gabaldo, called a movement party or a network party, you know, formed to some of the same. degree through political identification and to some degree via the social media platform, a way to then shift that, go around the outside of that and try to build some at LSEP, which doesn't rely on so much on social media. Is that possible? I just don't know. We don't know if that is actually possible to do or to what extent that's possible to do. No, we don't know. And I think it's worth observing here that to some extent the tensions between these different groupings and factions within the new party, they have, I think, actually been, they're partly

manifestations of different implicit assumptions about how you can use or should use like new and old means of organisation and collective expression, etc, to do some sort of political organisation. Because, I mean, I would say, I mean, maybe this is just me, maybe this just is in my sort of little bubble, my personal world, like the general impression, And the initial stages of the process was that Azar al-Saltana, the young woman of color, kind of dynamic voice for a socialist anti-imperialism in the public sphere, was really desperately trying to get the notoriously slow, indecisive Jeremy Corbyn to actually do a thing and do the thing that people wanted is to launch this mass party.

And that the idea of them campaigning together was very inspiring. I think it's not at all an accident. this was all happening, like a few months after Bernie and AOC had done their very well publicised like tour of rallies in the States. And the imagery was very, very similar. It was very similar. It's like a young woman who isn't white touring with the kind of boomer left hero of the left in that country. And it seemed like, I mean, I think, you know, Bernie is quite clearly trying to position AOC as his natural successor because he knows he can't really, you know, do another the presidential run, et cetera. And it's a very good way of doing politics. And everybody sort of

assumed, I definitely did. Of course, that's the strategy that Jeremy is borrowing, and it's a good strategy. And that's what we should, and that should be what's happened. And then it all sort of fell apart. And it was all, it was quite disconcerting when this all started to fall apart. And you know, like actually that wasn't what was happening. And Jeremy really wasn't into anointing Zara as his successor, but wanted to be the actual leader of this thing. But then I started thinking to myself, well, is Zara really like an equivalent figure to AOC? Because, I mean, really, if you start asking yourself, like, well, where has Zara come from? Like, what is her actual public role? And I started to think, well, really, she's been an MP, like, since 2019.

She, before that, she wasn't even like a local counsellor. She wasn't a union leader. She came out of student politics in the Labour youth wing, like, very young. And mostly what she's done is she got a massive, what she's famous for, really, on the British left, is she a huge following on TikTok and Instagram, partly because she got a load of profile in women's magazines when she first got elected, because she was very young. It was novel to have such a very young woman MP elected, and she's quite photogenic.

And she has used that platform, certainly, to take position, which everyone is really glad she's to have someone in public taking, especially around issues like Palestine. But for the most part, that position taking, well, what has it involved? It's mostly what it's involved is posting. It's mostly what it's involved is posting. her massive social media platform. And there is a certain sense in which Zara Sultan's main role

as a political figure in British public life has been as a poster, as a social media poster, a very successful one, one who gets lots of follows and likes, when who everyone is happy to be there. And you can understand why, from that point of view, people who are coming really out of the left wing of the British Labour movement, the trade union movement, like Jeremy Corbyn, like Carrie Murphy, his sort of the key figure who is widely blamed. by people on the broader left for being responsible for this kind of centralising and top-down tendency around Jeremy, both when he was leader of the opposition and now. You can see why people like that who've been active in the British Labour movement for decades would not really have that much time for this. Because particularly in the trade union movement in Britain, there is a real historical culture of seniority.

the idea that you earn authority on the basis of having been around for a long time and having learned a load of stuff and having done a load of stuff. That's true both at the level of the workplace, actually. It's a classic labour union, trade union principle that people get paid more as they get older. That's the basic principle of seniority. And that was always seen as an important thing to win for trade unionists on the basis that, well, the alternative was people being rewarded for, you know, for being favourites of the boss. And that wasn't the thing that you wanted.

seniority is not a bad principle it's not a bad rule of thumb to have in any organisation the idea that the people with the most experience are probably the people who know most what's going on it's not always true and of course a culture of seniority can shade into sort of gerontocracy

but I also think that the general feeling in the country now which is completely justified which is something Keir has obviously helps us understand a lot with his work on generational politics and political generations not generational politics really has you know the

general feeling that part of the problem with this country and the United States is that we have become this gerontocracy in which everything is done for and in the interests of retired people who own their homes and have pensions and against everybody else's interest. That feeling it can shade a bit too far into a complete ignorance and dismissal of that historical culture of seniority and maybe taking a bit too seriously the idea that well because someone's got a massive following on TikTok that makes them an important person and a political leader. So there's this real, there is this tension between those, those ideas of just what constitutes authority and legitimacy. I mean, to be clear, like my position is, yeah, it is, it may be actually a bit silly and regrettable that you become a big star these days because you get loads of followers on TikTok, but that is where we are.

Pessimism of the intellect tells me that is where we are. And whether she's, whether we think she's earned it the old way or not, like Zara Solisana is a leading figure on the British left. And that is why it really would have been better if everybody had just sort of accepted that and gone along with it, whatever the limitations of it. But I think it's also important to understand that there are reasons other than just sort of greed for power that might make some of the people around Corbyn who are mostly we're talking about people in their 60s who have been active on a daily basis since their teens. They might be looking at someone in the early 30s who's got a big Instagram following and saying, well, no, no, no. not really. You're not really, like, as important. Could I use this opportunity just to renounce my work on critical generations? I think this idea of seniority is actually something to be embraced, I think, because I am a year older than Jeremy, so I'm the senior podcaster here.

Quite so. And I would like a little bit more respect, please. A little bit of genuflecting from my younger, less experienced colleagues. I defer to you, Comrade. Well, you can both, you can both defer to me, even though that I am, I'm conservative. during myself Generation X, even though I'm quite, I'm just on the cusp of millennial, I suppose. But seriously, like, what we've just talked about is actually really

interesting and really important. And I think, again, this would bring us back to, you know, like, if, I wouldn't say if, you know, ACFM ruled the universe, but we are talking about democracy here, so let me phrase it a different way. So I think there, I think one of our ideal situations

would be a kind of a happy medium where we understand, that what, you know, older comrades or comrades who have given so much time, you know, in the movement, like you're saying, Jeremy, like since their teens or et cetera, people, what these people have is institutional memory, right? And that institutional memory either might live within organizations or networks, or it might exist within their own heads and ways of doing things, right? And that that is valuable, because we come back to this over and over and over again, and this fact that there's a lot of very young, enthusiastic people who have, you know,

are heavily involved in all sorts of stuff, of which I definitely have a lot to learn from, and we have a lot to learn from. But there is very much in this era of the last 15 years, we've seen several times the reinvention of the wheel, reinvention of the wheel, in the way that as we've discussed several times before, there is an importance of understanding what came before us and why it was done and why it should or not be done differently.

And I think, you know, this is something that I wanted to mention at the top of the show is that, one of the important concepts to think about here is trust and why there isn't necessarily trust between these two sets of stakeholders. I don't want to use that word. I'd quite like to find a different one, but constituencies rather, right? You've got to use it. You've been using it. You can't avoid it. I hate it, but it's the best word for it. Thank you, Jeremy. I needed that permission. Right. So, so, you know, there are these two groups of people. There's, of course, many more, okay? It's not, it's not just that homogeneous.

But there is this suspicion between a culture of doing things, you know, between very young activists and those that are, you know, with a trade union background, etc., that perhaps Jeremy has surrounded himself by. And I think it's that culture clash in a way that in many senses, like stops there being able to be a, I don't want to say culture of trust, but rather like an operational trust in being able to, like, move. forward through these kind of muddied waters and create functional institutions for us to be able to not just create participatory democracy, but be able to affect state, you know, have some kind of relationship with state power, I think. So this is why a discussion around what is happening around your party now is really interesting. Like it forces us to unpack all of these different phenomenon and tendencies. I mean, just to push back a little bit on that, it's not really a pushback, because I sort of agree with you, but just to push in the other direction for a

moment. We might argue this, right, the Carrie Murphys of this world, perhaps they've learned a lesson, they've learned, like, strong lessons, but like they're in a different context, they're in a different arena, and those lessons don't apply anymore. And to be specific, I mean, people who come to political consciousness inside the Labour Party in, like, incredible factional fights against the Labour right. And the Labour right, like, are not just normal political actors. They are the most factional, the most immoral actors, perhaps in world politics. I don't know, slightly a big claim, but I think I could probably stand that up. And so it's this backroom maneuvering, this obsession with secrecy, the obsession with control to prevent other factions from

having an influence, etc. And the obsession with disenfranchising the membership, almost just, I mean, you, they literally think, they literally think, they will explicitly say this that if you haven't basically got your membership to do something they didn't actually want to do, you failed. You're not doing your job. Yeah, it's like that fear of the membership and distrust of the membership, basically. They hate it. It's not, they hate the membership.

They don't want to grow the party. They do not want to grow the party. This is the Labour right we're talking about. And they've always been, this isn't just common. They were like this, like, when I first started to meet these people at the beginning of the 90s, and they really take the, we'll talk about this more next time. Yeah, yeah, let's hold back from that. But I'm just saying that, like, perhaps, like, that's one of the fears from the other side is that, like, these people have learned their politics in an incredibly hostile environment.

Now they're enacting those politics in an environment that doesn't have to be so hostile in which you could actually build up trust from the membership. You know what I mean? And that, it's almost like you do learn lessons when you've been involved when you're a veteran, a physical veteran, but you might learn the wrong lessons and it might not be, you know, it's a bit like that, that one of the, one of the, one of the nicest. sort of analogies of the role of a political veteran in new movements is taken from somebody I can't remember. Now, Isabel Stengers has this metaphor of a movement or a party being a boat on the river. And she says, look, the role of the veteran should not be driving. You shouldn't be driving the boat. Instead, you should be at the front of the boat saying, look, I've never been in this river before, but I've been in rivers before. So I know when there's an eddy over there,

it's probably a rock. So let's steer this way. But like, basically, you're not in charge of the boat because, you know, somebody else needs to be, basically, if you know. And that's a great metaphor. Good old Isabelle Pengers. We should bring her in more. Yeah. It's a great metaphor. And I agree with you, Kia. I don't think that contradicts what I said at all. I think it's just rather that you're, that we're coming at this from different angles of analysis, right? Because this is the state of play. Like, this is the

situation we're in. And the, my question is, like, what is going to create that trust for us to be able to build their institutions. What is going to allow people to put a little bit of their guard down? And I think under the current conditions and what's happened to the country over the last 15 years, it's really difficult. Basically, this is an incredible difficult task that they got faced with. Everybody got faced with this prospect of like 800,000 people signing up and then creating a party almost out of nothing. I don't think it was completely out of nothing, but basically there's no structures there, there's no branches. So, you know, there's nothing to hang it around apart from the attraction of these two Zara Sultan and Jeremy Corbyn

and this sort of pent-up desire for some vehicle for political action. You know, that's incredibly hard thing to do. And so it probably worth thinking about whether there's any precedence for this. I was having to think about that. And I was thinking, well, there have been something that looks a little bit similar so that if the Spanish party Podemos was formed with a very small group of people who worked in a politics department in Maddox. and they had this idea

and they had a very clear idea of populism basically. In fact, very influenced by Ernest LeClau and Chantelle Mouf and their ideas of populism. I tried to put them into practice. But what they did, they grew that party incredibly quickly and they did it by forming, they called it circles, basically.

So the context for that was on the back of the huge movement, the 15M movement in Spain in which huge numbers of the population. I can't remember what the proportion was, but like an incredibly large number of population had been, I've been on demonstrations or they'd gone to one of these occupations of the squares, or they'd be deliberated,

etc. for days and days on end. So there was this participative feeling in the country, but they managed to grow this party very, very quickly. And at the same time or just after, there was the formation of what there was known as the Citizens' Assembly. So these were to contest municipal elections. And they formed incredibly quickly. And actually, you know, they formed in a couple of months. and then they took however six out of the seven largest cities in Spain with varying degrees of success. Barcelona and Encombe were the most famous example, etc.

Hello, this is Keir from the future here, just time travelling back to correct myself. I keep talking about Citizens' Assemblies here, but what I really mean is Citizens' Platforms, which are a slightly different thing. So that was an example of particularly the second example, a Citizens' Assembly example, that was an example of huge participation,

because the idea would you get people to discuss what they wanted, they would form a political program, a political platform, and that platform would be the basis upon which people would be elected, all done over a couple of months, very successful at least at first, but eventually that wave has rolled back and even Barcelona, and Coma, who were in charge of Barcelona for something like 12 years, I think, are out of office. So there are some precedents when you look abroad,

but drawn on different sort of political histories and a different context, etc. I mean, the other ones we could talk about is momentum, which you two could talk about. And then there's the enough is enough campaign, if you remember that, from 2002. And once again, that... 2020, don't you mean? I do mean 2022, indeed, sorry. 20 years. What's 20 years? When you get to my level of seniority, 20 years means nothing.

but that was a similar sort of thing where very large numbers at five to six to seven hundred thousand people signed up to it really very like five demands basically where really just like wage rises lowering electricity bills and so forth but in a way that was another that was the previous failed attempt to perform a political force from this sort of dynamic of huge numbers of people

signing up to something really quickly and then enough is enough in the end all that happened was a series of rallies around the country and then nothing it was a real a real dropping of the ball basically and as far as i understand it you know people the people who initiated that some around the magazine tribune and then some leaders of the more radical unions etc there was just this inability to let go of the process and to allow local groups to form and so it basically went to I think, as far as I understand. But momentum as well might be something to discuss in terms of something, a process a little bit like this.

Well, it feels to me like the process is very similar to the process of forming momentum. Maybe more than Podemos. Podemos, as you say, really was ex-Neilo. I mean, it was like an experiment by a bunch of guys in a political science department. And I don't think they made any use of prior existing organizations and networks, whereas that's not totally the case here for the reason. we've explained, with momentum, indeed. So momentum was the organisation that was set up in order to support the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. So it was set up as an

organisation for people in the Labour Party who wanted to support Corbyn's leadership. But the process by which it was initially set up was, well, it was quite complicated because basically, I mean, there was an organisation set up and it got an office and it got a little bit of money from a couple of unions and it was called Momentum and it was just a few guys in an office. like campaigning to support Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the party. And it came out of his leadership campaign. But of course there was a general sense that what was really needed was some sort of a mass organisation.

And they had this email list, which had like 300,000 people on it, who basically just at some point they'd got in touch, expressing sympathy for Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party, even before he became leader. And then in the months before momentum was formally constituted, there were various kind of local groups sprang up to some extent with official support and encouragement from this office which had come out of his leadership campaign and to some extent just sort of spontaneously and naturally they tended to form out of various existing networks groups of local activists

some of whom were people in the labour network the existing networks of the labour left especially people around the Labor Briefing magazine network. Some of them, like far left and troxies groups who weren't actually in the Labour Party, but were still active locally or had active relationships to communities of activists in the Labour Party. But then this was all happening before the organisation was formally constituted with a constitution, etc.

And then you got to this moment when, okay, the organisation has to be actually created. People have to be given the chance to join it as members. So what happens is an email list, an email goes out to all 300,000 people on that email list, and the email is signed by Owen Jones, and it's saying, we are now launching momentum, click this link, join momentum. And loads of people did. I mean, not as many as might have been hoped, frankly. I think the membership might have got up to close to 30,000 at some point. I can't remember

now. It may never have got over 20,000. It was always a fraction of the people on that email list and the people who joined the party to support. Corby, which is a real problem. There's a whole book to be written about, well, why couldn't they get more? people to join it and what would have happened if they did. Anyway, but then, okay, so then you have this huge kind of aggregation of people who've signed up to this thing. They've now joined this thing called momentum, but this thing called momentum still doesn't have an organizational structure or a constitution. So how are you going to actually make one come into existence? So an event was held, which was sort of the founding conference of momentum, but that founding

conference of momentum wasn't really something that was connected in any meaningful way to that mass membership of people who'd signed up online, it was basically people who were invited by the people working in the office who'd been working on the leadership campaign in an attempt to create some sort of a representative cross-section of people and groups who had been supporting Jeremy and his leadership. And I was at it because I was invited. I mean, really, I was invited because I had got to know most of the people in the Momentum Office at that time and they were like me. But technically, I mean, in theory, I was there, I was there to represent of the soft left. And if you don't know what the soft left means, we'll talk about that next time

on the next microse. And then that founding conference had a big set of debates about, well, what should happen now? Like, what should the formal structure of momentum be? And one of the key debates, areas of debate really was, well, how much should it be an online organization, which makes all its decisions online and which people join online? And how far should it be a federation of local branches, which will form out of these existing informal groups that have already sprung up? And at one end of that debate, you had people from Trotskyist organisations like the Alliance for Workers Liberty, who, as well as calling for me to be expelled from the conference, were trying to argue very hard that these existing local groups that they were involved in should be like the only sort of sovereign constituent body within the, well, they should be the only elements of the sovereign constituent body of the part of the organisation. And then you had like people like me at the other end saying, look, this is rubbish because the number of people in the total number of people, the total number of people, people represented by these informal networks. The activist is probably a few hundred, at very most a few thousand.

But, you know, we've got 10 to thousands of people who joined the organisation by replying to an email from Owen Jones, and those people need to be represented in some way. And in the end, you know, what was worked out, it was sort of a compromise, but it was basically agreed that whatever organisational structure was set up would have to be ratified online. Like all of the people who had signed up for this, you know, it responded to this email from Owen, would have to be given the chance to both the chance actually to put forward possible amendments to any proposed or constitution, et cetera, and to vote, to finally have a vote. At the end, what was established was actually more, it was more of a traditional federal structure

based on local branches. I mean, I think it shouldn't, I think they should have been more adventurous. We're sort of allowing people to organise themselves online through interest groups if they wanted to. But also, with final say over key votes, especially the election. of the people who would actually run the organisation from one month or the next, always happening online, so that all members get a chance to vote for things, which is like a reasonable outcome. It was a reasonably democratic outcome. I think there was always resentment from groups and networks who felt that they hadn't been

properly represented, who accused the office of manipulating things and making it too undemocratic, although my perception was always that there was some grounds of those complaints, but mostly it was people who thought that they and their five friends who'd called themselves Momentum before Momentum existed had somehow won the right to be permanently, the key, the key group, one of the key network, part of the key network that would run the organisation. And I think you can say maybe similar things are happening now with your party. So the real tension, the real debate around your, that's going on. I mean, I would say there are a couple of things going on. of local groups have been set up, sort of pre-brances of this non-existent party, this party

information. I would say at the most extreme end of the continuum of discontent with the centralised organisation are people who seem to think that those pre-brances have already earned for themselves some sort of democratic legitimacy that should in some way be represented in the constituent process, setting up the organisation. and I guess at the other end are people who think that the way things are actually working is totally fine and I would probably put myself I think sort of in the middle I would say as I said when momentum was first set up look the fact that you had a bunch of mates decided to hold a meeting and call yourself a branch of this non-existent organisation means nothing I mean it's good well done well done for it's not a bad thing to do

but it doesn't mean you've earned any democratic legitimacy because really because you haven't earned any privilege in response to people who don't happen to have a bunch of mates, who've held a local meeting, and who've just signed up online to join the organisation. They have as much democratic right as you do. But on the other hand, it is really, really important that ultimately all of those people who signed up online should have a chance to properly participate in the democratic process to set up the organisation. And the thing that has happened is very soon after the whole idea of your party, was announced by Zara, and then finally eventually confirmed by Jeremy, very soon after that,

we were told that what the process would be, there would be some process leading up to a founding conference that would involve regional assemblies of members and or supporters that would then somehow feed up and build into a final authoritative founding conference. What exactly the relationship between those things would be was always quite unclear. There was a groundswell of support quite early for the idea that the founding competition, once it actually happens, should be chosen, as Keir has said, by sortition, meaning it's basically chosen at random from members who say they want to go. And there's quite a lot of support for that.

The reason for that is simply that, well, you know, there's no way you could physically get the hundreds of thousands of people who were at that time who were expected to be members, like all in one room together for a founding conference. And it wouldn't really be fair to have some sort of process of bit of elections when really the organisation hadn't had any chance to develop an internal culture, so people would just be relying on kind of prior fame and celebrity and networks of influence to get themselves elected. And there was quite, there was a lot of support for that idea.

And my understanding is that, yeah, that has been adopted as the idea. But then the question then is, well, what's the relationship between the assemblies that are happening and the final conference, and what is going to be the role of the membership in relation, the wider membership of people who don't get to go to the constitutive conference chosen by solicitation, what is going to be their relationship to that conference and its final outcomes. The things that people are very worried about, and I think are legitimate to be worried about, are two things.

One thing is, well, because it was declared months ago that this founding conference but definitely have to happen by the end of November this year, then those assemblies are happening with a very short time scale. So basically people who are members of the party or people who signed up to show interest in the party, got an email like a couple of weeks ago saying, right, the regional assemblies are happening and your one is happening like probably next week or the week after. No, that's not true. It's not true?

Much shorter than that. The first thing was announced, the first assembly was announced in November, in Norwich. It was held in Norwich last Sunday and they had like three or four days. Yeah, that's true, but that wasn't out, I mean, the average was like people were given a week or two, like a couple of weeks notice, but it doesn't matter. So the one in Yorkshire has been held in. Bradford, I can't go, and it's been held on November the 7th, and it was announced two days ago. So that's a little bit more time, isn't it? Yeah, but I would also say, I would say it's

absurd. You can't, you don't, I mean, I've been, I've been event organizing since I was 20, like on the left, and you don't organise anything with less than six weeks notice if you actually expect anyone to turn up, apart from your immediate mates who you told the date a couple of weeks before everyone else. So the suspicion that these, these assemblies are not being set up in a properly participatory way. And in fact, they resemble a corporate consultation exercise. In other words, something designed to create the veneer of participation while actually having no effect at all. That is an understandable suspicion that lots of people have. And then there is an even bigger question, really, as to what exactly is going to be the relationship between

the mass membership online, the people who can go to these regional assemblies and the final conference? And it's not clear at all. As I understand, as I understand, understand it, it looks very unlikely that we are going to be in a situation in which any member can make proposals for this founding conference, which the mass membership can then vote on if they don't, if they're not at the conference. I mean, Kear, maybe you can elaborate a bit more on specifically what is being proposed now as this process. Yeah, so the bit the bit that's left out there is that, so there've been four documents produced by the organising committee, we are not allowed to know who they are or how they came together. But their four documents have been produced.

One of them is like a constitution. One of them is a political platform or political statement, which is very short. One of them is standing orders, these sorts of things, basically. And they were released like, I think they were released sort of 36 hours before the first assembly. So people were supposed to have read those deliberated and then thought about what they would like to change them. The form that the assemblies took, so the first one was in or it's only been one so far as we record this, was that people would be, where you would go, you'd get put into a small group,

and you would discuss part of one of these documents, and then there'd be minute note-takers who would take notes, etc. And then those notes would be fed back, they'd be put into a massive Google Doc, apparently. And then there is some process, which has not been revealed by people, undertaken by people we don't know who they are, has not been revealed either,

who will then take all of those things up and they will be used to, all of the feedback will be used to change the founding for founding documents. And then those documents will go to this conference in Liverpool at the end of November. And once again, there'll be some sort of sortition. So each day they're thinking is there'll be 6,500 people chosen at random for the first day, a different 6,500 chosen at random for the second day. It might actually be that, in fact, there would be 6,000, 5,500 for the first day's morning, and then 6,500 for the first day's afternoon.

So it would be that sort of thing, basically. And they would also have some sort of process where they could feed into the alteration of these documents, and then there will be, after that conference, that feedback will somehow through some sort of process, which has not been announced, that will be turned into something that can be voted on. So we don't know if we'd be able to vote. Would you like option A or option B, and you vote online for that? or whether it'll just be, do you accept or reject this constitution and political, everything

altogether? We don't know whether it's going to be that. All of those have huge significance, basically. Once again, this is an incredible difficult process to do, and there are timescale which is basically impossible to do well. That's sort of what's gone on. The other thing I would say is that there's this sort of like buildup of desire for something to happen. And so, you know, in the meantime, before this process is announced, you have the eruption of these proto branches. There's lots of them around the country, and they're starting to be networked together, but they're just initiated, as you said, Jim, by whoever initiates them, shapes the initial shape of them, I think. So in some parts of the country, the Socialist Worker Party have

initiated these, which is a Trotskyist group, a long-running Trotskyist group. And a well-known MI5 front organization. Thank you, Conspiracy Gilbert. Thanks for popping in. Yeah, anyway, who have a particular way of doing things, which is, Very, very controlling, basically, in the history of second up front groups, these sorts of things. And those have been very difficult processes where they're the ones who are initiating that. And it's been very difficult to get any initiative back from them because they initiated it. Other places, in Leeds, for instance, it was sort of like residual Corbinist networks,

which were like re-remote, re-animated, basically, Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, et cetera, to initiate a group. It's fairly well advanced, actually, you know, a steering committee. has been elected, these sorts of things. I'm loosely involved in that. I've joined that sort of proto branch, etc. I thought the proto branch's relationship will be to the membership when it's finally announced.

We don't know, basically. We don't know how, whether they just get ignored or whether they get turned by some other process into actual branches of this party, which has not been formed yet, we don't know. But the other thing that's been formed, actually, is quite a lot of an sort of ecology of factions or tendencies people are talking.

or calling themselves. They've looked at this process or looked at the way the process is going and thought, there's very, very few people now, very, very few people, because lots of people walked away from the organising committee, lots and lots of people either walked away or basically were disinvited from that organ. So it's a very small group of people doing all of this stuff, very, very small. And lots of people were saying, well, look, you know, we need an organised response to this. We need to do some thinking beforehand about what we want the party to look like. Otherwise, the party is just going to be a reflection of like this handful of people who are at the centre of this. And so an array of factions came together.

I shall reveal that I am loosely involved in one of those factions called Organising for Popular Power, which came together in a weekend in London where with an emphasis on the idea that the party should not just have an electoral focus, but also should have like capacity base building, building up social infrastructure, these sorts of things. It should try to be active within local areas, to try to have an immediate effect on what goes on in those areas without having to have an intermediation through electoral politics, through election councillors, etc, etc. I just want to be a little bit of a devil's advocate.

This might be tanky, Nads coming in. But I'm just wondering about the whole, you know, we're talking about the whole membership being able to have the right to vote, right? But, you know, with clictivism and stuff, isn't there the argument that if you've made no contribution to something whatsoever and you've not helped organize anything, why should people who can just like click a button have the same rights to vote about the future of a party or like put their idea forward compared to people who have been literally organizing people on the ground? Like I think there's a, you know, there's a fair argument there. And perhaps, you know, especially after like in referendum gate, other otherwise known as like Brexit. I guess I understand why there's some reticence of giving the same rights to a membership that perhaps have not been involved in anything ever. My feeling about that is always, I mean, who I'm always bothered about is the people, you know,

who do care about the issue, but they've got, you know, they've got kids, they've got jobs, they've got caring responsibilities, they can't go to loads of meetings. And I think, you know, you've got to give those people, like, the opportunity to have a say everything to a certain extent. I mean, I would say, I mean, it is a real issue because I would say, historically, it's a potential danger for any democratic, political organisation on the left or right, actually, and it is a long, you know, a century of bitter experience on the left surely shows this is a real danger quite often that if you don't empower those people, you end up allowing the people who have the most time on their hands and to take over any organisation. That is the strong argument, isn't it? That is the strong argument, yeah. Yeah, but there isn't an outside of that, though, is there?

Because horizontalism didn't solve that problem. In fact, it exacerbated that problem when it was like mass assemblies, etc. Whoever had the most time, whoever could last them out the most, they were the ones who had the most controlled. You know what I mean? It is just this huge tension in politics, and various political parties and organizations have tried to address it in different ways, but it's like an unresolvable,

I mean, my view is it's not a massive problem, really, because, look, I mean, the people who do a lot of organising on the ground, who meet a lot of people, you know, they will establish relationships, they will establish reputations. And that will give them more weight with the membership. It should do. But ultimately, it should be down to the membership, like voting individually for things online to make final decisions. And in the end, if you haven't, like, if you're, if you're like a local organiser who thinks that should give you your words more weight, but you haven't managed to actually persuade enough actual members, to agree with you, like to win your position, then that's, you know, you haven't won, you haven't won the argument. I mean, that was one of the arguments around sortition, actually, was that, so people were immediately against sortition. I thought it was an interesting idea, but it all depends on how it's done. But the argument for it would be, well, look, because it's just going to be random members of the party who signed up, who were going to be chosen,

you've got to do a huge process of political discussion and political education. You've got to put your point across and try to persuade people of it. And so it would militate against that idea of, well, no, actually what we've got to do is join this committee and make sure all of our supporters are at this committee to pack this thing and then get this past here, etc, etc. It would be an open process of deliberation and discussion. That's the sort of ideal. I don't know if it's going to work out that way. Who has access to the members?

But I think that's key because if you don't have that culture, and this comes back to, you know, like the cultural spaces of the left, like whether it's formally, like its assemblies or its groups or whatever, which Jeremy rightly pointed out, a lot of people don't have time in this era that we're living in, you know, or capacity or headspace, you know, because of all of the fucking social reproduction and all of the other bullshit that capitalism is putting on us. Like, people don't have the energy for it, like the mental energy for it. But without it, what you get is people being influenced by social media. And what is social media driven by algorithms, right? So in terms of forming, people's opinions on things. Like we have a huge, like the democratic deficit is huge, but also like the debate deficit, like people being able to engage, whether cerebrally or practically in some kind of like considering of different opinions. So I think that is part of the problem, is that that is the terrain that we're working in. And it makes processes like this incredibly hard to get right. It does make it hard to get right. And I remember these debates all going on in the early

days of momentum. And I mean, one of the, one of the anxieties people had about doing too much stuff online was indeed it'll just be people with big social media profiles who get elected to stuff. And at one point, I sort of took the view. It wasn't, it wasn't like I definitely thought this, but I thought this was a view worth entertaining that, well, was it really the worst thing if we ended up with like the, the key people on the sort of central committee of the organisation being like Owen Jones and Ash Sharker? Because at least we all know, who they are. Like, we all know how to reach them. And they, they, they sort of accountable to a public. Whereas instead, what we actually did end up with momentum, to be honest, we ended up

with these groups of local activists from various areas being elected to the national organization. But mainly they were, to be, they were entirely groups of local activists hand-picked by the people in the central office, who then sort of recommended to the members that they vote for those people. And they were all people, like, I'd never heard of, you know. So, and most of us had never heard of. So you ended up with this situation where in reality, the whole, you know, sort of central coordinating group was really being handpicked by the people working in the office. I sort of thought it would have been more democratic if like Owen Jones had actually been on the central coordinating group. And because, you know, I felt like Owen was like I knew

who he was and I knew where he was to shout at if I disagreed with him about something or if they were doing something. And I'm not saying that should be carried to its logical conclusion. I'm not saying that rule by social media following is the form of government we should be heading towards. But there's something to that. There's something to the idea that will people who already have a high level of public visibility potentially have a kind of accountability to the public as it's actually constituted. I don't know what you do with that observation. I don't know what you do with it. I do think there is something you should do with it, which is I think, and I think this should have happened with momentum and didn't. I think you shouldn't rule out the idea.

of the sort of the platform party, the network party, the thing that Paolo writes about, I think Keir was talking about, I think you have to find ways of making the platform online elements of organisation and party form not the whole thing. And you have to make them work in tandem with the opportunity for people to meet each other in person and the opportunity for local branches to have some both autonomy and authority. But I think on the British left, actually, we haven't been bold enough in experimenting with sort of empowering people to use online mechanisms to coordinate themselves. I think that would be a more interesting way.

Trying to find ways of doing that would be a more interesting way of dealing with this fact. It is still, it is a fact that we do all live online now. We're not going to stop. Maybe we should, but we're not going to stop all living online. So I think actually finding some way of institutionalizing actual democracy in the sphere of online, you know, the online where we live in, there's a more interesting challenge than just sort of setting up party structures and organisational structures to pretend that isn't really happening. Because I think the effect of

that is you just get those kind of forms of influence laid on top of these old structures in ways which end up actually being less accountable. I mean, I do think you need to mitigate for both. And I do agree with the idea of having the one member one vote. Ultimately, I do, of being able to enact democracy through online mechanisms. But I, I, I, I, don't agree with that point about having, you know, internet left celebrities as, as being representatives. I'd way rather people that I've never heard of who are in, like, local groups somewhere than, than internet celebrities who have, like, look, tweets. That's, that's my position on it. Well, I think it's a question of what's the least bad option. Like, it probably was,

that probably ends up being a less bad option than letting, just, just handing over control of the British left to wear in. Like, as, you know, I think he's, there's where, I mean, part of me, I'm also guys in the government. I just think you look at the you look at the shit show of the your party process. You look at to be honest, you look at how badly led the Labour Party was like from 2017 to 2019. I'd rather just let Owen be the be the like benign dictator of the British left than that than that. That was bad. And I think this does this does speak to something actually we've we've danced around a little bit but we haven't really talked about yet that I know I'm sure listeners are going to want us to talk about because it's meaty stuff.

part of the context of the whole current perceived crisis around your party is the fact that the whole process does seem to have revealed very serious limitations and shortcomings in the capacity of either Zara or Jeremy to be these kind of leading figures on the left. To her credit, Zara has done quite well, I think, for example, publicly apologising of her part in fallouts and also endorsing calls for kind of maximal member-led democracy, things like this. None of this really alters the fact that she's 31 years old, and in no sane organization or mass movement, would somebody who's 31 years old be like a top leading figure? It's just that is a symptom of a basically unhealthy movement. I mean, maybe that's just where we are. Maybe we're just stuck there. But to me, you know, she comes across. And she comes across when she's speaking like someone who, you know, has very serious politics, is intelligent, is committed, but is really very inexperienced. And she doesn't come across, and this was always the problem with Jeremy,

she doesn't come across like someone who was going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with her. She comes across as someone who does a really good job of inspiring and firing up and making feel represented people who already agree with her. But this was always the problem with Jeremy. I remember Owen himself actually saying of the start of the Jeremy Corbyn leadership, that one of the big risks was Jeremy had spent decades like talking to rooms of people who already agree with him.

And you saw that happen with the whole story of the Corbyn leadership was he was great at a rally. And those rallies were full of people, but they were all full of people who had always already agreed with Jeremy. And part of the whole process of Corbynism was people realising, oh, actually there's like millions of people in Britain who agree with Jeremy Corbyn. Because we had spent the past 30 years being told by the media that there was like 10 people left in the whole country who agreed with Jeremy Corbyn. So that was big. But he didn't persuade people who didn't already agree with him. He rallied together all the people who did. And one of the things that's happening right now is people are looking at Jeremy, they're looking at Zara, they're looking at this whole process, and then they're looking at Zach Polanski, who we will talk about in a lot more detail in a couple of episodes, but he's doing a very, very good job of talking in what seemed to be a very reasonable and persuasive way in the mass media about a very radical program and the need for radical program. He looks like someone who might actually win over some people who aren't already self-identified socialists to support.

for a radical program. And, you know, one doesn't want to accord too much importance to the personalities of individual leaders. On the other hand, part of the deal with being a leader rather than an organizer or a factionist or an influencer or anything else is personality does matter. And it doesn't look like your party has a convincing leadership. If we ask ourselves now, I think this is really important, especially given the situation right now when we're recording, which is an incredible situation, which is the Green Party has reached 15%

in national opinion polls for the first time, apart from a weird, freaky surge doing the European elections in the late 80s. And Zat Palanski is universally regarded as doing the thing that so many of us wanted Jeremy to do for the past 10 years, and he was never really able to do, which is take on the kind of Bernie Sanders' role of putting forward in public on the teley a basic socialist position on all issues in terms that. are sort of antagonistic towards capital and are not just appealing to people's kind of sent a moral outrage at injustice.

He's doing it really out, and it seems to be working, and it's attracted tens of thousands of people to join the party already. He's doing all that. They're going to get a few dozen seats. They're going to get the low hanging fruit. The 50 seats, which are going to be easiest for a party to the left of Labour to win in England,

they've already got. And they are mostly, they are quite affluent, seats in cities with a lot of young professionals, a lot of kind of downwindly mobile, frustrated graduates, and even a lot of their older colleagues who were still, who were just politically high, quite politically sophisticated and sick of stammer, them and university towns. The Greens have got those now. You're, they are not, they are not available to your party now. So where might be available to your party? Where might your party actually be able to win some support? It's going to have to go out into the post-industrial areas. It's going to have to go

out into the council estates. That is a much tougher terrain. And to win on that terrain, you have got to have a figure who is at least as good as Zat Pananski, a convincing a kind of working-class audience who are not really interested in ideology and they're not that interested in Palestine, for the most part, that you are on their side and that you have got what it takes actually to pull together a political project which can deliver for them. And right now, as far as I can see, your party does not have a leadership. And it is not even clear that it has networks that are going to be capable of bringing forward a leadership of that nature. But I don't know, what do you got, what do you think about that? It's a huge problem that the lack of development of leaders

in the, in the UK basically, you know, Zach Plancy sort of came out of nowhere, you know, who's a Lib Dem back in 2018, I think even still, you know what I mean? Well, he didn't come out nowhere. They did it. We'll talk about this when we talk about, we'll give everybody my understanding of Zach as an organic intellectual when we talk about the Greens. But what I mean is that like, there wasn't an organized process to develop leaders that he came out of. And if you want to look at what that looks like, you have to look to the US in which both AOC and Zohan Mahdani, who's going to be the next mayor of New York, there are organizations which are looking for and developing leaders, basically, both the DSA and the

Justice Democrats. You know, there are organizations which are trying to find the next leaders. You know, my worry about your party is the small group of people who currently have control of it. You know, they actively do not want to go out and find new leaders because their power, their power comes from being from their closest to Jeremy Corbyn base. And once Jeremy Corbyn goes, there's no way. There's a, there's a reason the nearest we've got out of the whole experience of Corbinism to a new political leader, a new generation of political leaders, was a 31-year-old from Coventry in Coventry South, historically one of the most left-wing constituencies in the country, and not very representative of the rest of, even the

rest of England. I mean, Zara is great, but they should have been, by now, like 15 people. including some people older with more experience. There's a reason that didn't happen because, and this is the thing which the people, you know, people like Carrie Murphy have been being accused of by people around the Corbyn Project for the past eight years. They shut down, shut out, actively prohibited and inhibited any process that could have realistically led to the emergence of a new generation of leaders properly. We should just take a little assessment, I think, of, like, where we're at with us.

I do think it's true, you know, that there was this huge space, electoral space to the left of Labour. It was massive and, you know, it had huge potential. Has that been completely close by Zach Palanski and the Greens? I'm not sure. He's definitely doing left economic populism, well, probably better than Jeremy Corbyn did. That's totally true. is there a ceiling for the Greens? Can they, you know, are they unable to move to address the sort of

constituencies that the Labour Party used to address and now seem to come to reform, except, we don't know. But one of the ideas that people have been sort of like thinking about, I think, is to say, well, look, let's think of the left as an ecosystem and wonder what, and think about what, you know, perhaps, and we sort of mentioned this last time, perhaps everything doesn't happen through one party. In fact, perhaps different organisations fulfil different

functions. One of the reasons I've considered joining the Greens, one of the reasons I haven't is I think it will be a more difficult arena to try to initiate some sort of process for extra parliamentary politics, i.e. for doing the sort of activity in which you're trying to change the composition of a constituency. I try to mobilize people who aren't mobilised, trying to change the way people interpret the world by doing these sort of like base building activities, etc, trying to organise people around renters rights, these sorts of things, trying to build up social infrastructure even

to replace the sort of social infrastructure that's been withdrawn, trying to set up these sorts of projects, which have a later effect on politics, if you know, on electoral politics, if you know what I mean. That seems to be still more possible for your party. We'll have to see how it pans out

and whether it turns into anything that is remotely attractive after the conference. It seems much harder to think of the Greens doing that. I might be wrong about that, but that's my sense. And so perhaps you do have something, where you do have some sort of division of labour, and perhaps you do have Zach Palancey been quite efficient at doing the left populism

through electoral politics and through media representation, etc. And then you have other people doing other stuff that needs to happen, but it's less likely to happen through the Greens, etc, etc. I don't know. That could be one way in which all of this sort of pans out. We don't, we, it's still a very volatile situation. The whole of British politics is a very volatile, in a very volatile state.

We sort of don't know how it's going to pan out over the next six months to a year and there's sort of like four years until the next general election. The reason that there's been a massive rush to try to push the founding of your party through is that there are local elections next May which could have be really, really quite significant

and there's some sort of idea. I presume that in some sort of forms that there'd be candidates from that from either your party or from smaller constituent parties or organisations which are going to lead into your party such as Jeremy Jeremy, Jamie Driscoll's majority organisation up in the North East, etc. It's really quite, you know, it's a really difficult thing to think through. But I'll tell you this, it's a much nicer problem to have than the complete and utter demobilisation of the left, which we've been living through for the last couple of years. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I mean,

it's, you know, it is a remobilisation of the left. It's a remobilisation of the left across several fronts, but, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I think you're right in everything you're saying. Insofar as there is a role for your party, I mean, I think you're, I mean, if it's, if, if it's all going to be like base building and community organizing and not electoral politics, and it's not a part, it's not going to be a party then, is it? Because, I mean, it's significant that you referred to DSA, that Democratic Socialists of America, which isn't a party.

and that one reason it's been able to do all that kind of work is because it's not a party. That's one of the key reasons I would say why it hasn't it has been able to do some of that work successfully. Yeah, it runs candidates through the democratic platform basically.

Yeah, sure. Which it might be another argument for us needing some sort of equivalent of the DSA here. But then that does leave open the question of whether if your party has a role to play in an electoral ecology,

what is that role? The role is going to be I mean, the role we would all like it to play is challenging reform. I mean, this is the thing. All the evidence right now is the Green Party is building up all this support. It's all coming from Labour. All the evidence suggests they haven't taken one vote from reform. And that's what it looks like to me.

It looks like to me they're going to function as a party, which is going to put massive pressure on the Labour Party and possibly destroy it from the left by mobilising a big part of Labour's organic constituency, which is downwardly mobile graduates and their family and quite a lot of their parents, you know, Frank, basically. The question then is, well, who can challenge reform out in working-class areas, especially in England?

And that should be a role for your party. I think I've got to say, your party is going to be very lucky to be able to get itself into a position where it can fulfil that role before the Labour Party kind of, you know, has a kind of panic and moves to the left and starts trying to play that role itself in communities it's been embedded in for 100 years. It seems quite hard to see, actually, what, you know, it's quite hard to actually see your party succeeding playing that role. But I agree, just because it's hard, just because it's unlikely, it doesn't mean you shouldn't have a go. You definitely should. Someone should have a go. Right now, someone has to try it.

And it would be interesting to see, I don't know how we'd be able to measure this or even observe it, like in the your party kind of, you know, event structure coming up, like what kinds of people are showing up? Because I bet you, you know, 50,000 people from the 800,000 who've signed up are going to vote for reform. Like, there will be a lot of people who are potential reform voters, if not, you know, members of the PLC or limited company or whatever it is. That will have been really attracted by, you know, Jeremy Corbyn. There's like a definite populist crossover there. So it'll be interesting to see who actually show who's mobilisable or who you can mobilize, you know. I'm not really sure about that. to be honest, I think by far the biggest majority of people who are going to reform

a conservative party. And I think it's a hegemonisation of the rights, basically. So there will be some people who are reform voters, who you can win back to a left politics from reform. But I think the battle is sort of around the outside, basically. That's not exactly what I'm saying. I'm not saying when it comes down to voting, you know, where they're getting the actual votes from. But I do think that there is, a crossover between that anti-establishment language which comes out of both reform and your party's initial comms. I think where I'm doubting is whether those people are actually going to show up to meetings. I think some of them might. The Conservative Party, as with Labor, is a broad church

and there's all different kinds of people in it. But I do think that the kind of like anti-establishment vibe like we'll cross all of you know green party but also your party and and reform you know because that's what people are really sick of i think to close out because it's acfm we should talk about how we all will be feel about your party i mean kear already has a bit because i've been mostly we've been sounding quite skeptical quite cynical but i mean i still feel like i said on the last episode actually i feel firstly i feel a sort of affinity with it i don't really feel the Greens for reasons I'm still trying to work through and I think it's partly it is partly just habit like I've been not joining the Green Party for 30 years so like it's a it's a habit for me to

be really friendly to the Greens and to be doing things like standing up at saying to Jeremy Corbyn like in the early days of his leadership we shouldn't be running candidates against green MPs this sort of thing so I sort of it comes naturally to me to think of the Greens as someone else's project that I'm totally sympathetic to cheering them on in their way. In your party, I do feel a bit like, well, I mean, I feel that I completely feel the kind of pull towards wanting to be in an explicitly socialist party, all the stuff is talking about being the sort of thing that I've always thought, like, organically, spontaneously. That's what politics should be about. I feel a bit of attachment to Jeremy, although, you know,

I think Zach is doing a fantastic job as well. But also, until quite recently, I sort of was feeling quite sanguine about it. Like other people, I was watching, I was experiencing, especially sort of your younger comrades who got very excited about it, then becoming very despondent, very despondent. And I was thinking, well, you know, this is a bit naive, really, because this was always going to be like this. It was always going to be a very difficult process. There were always going to be teething difficulties. There was always going to be this tension, indeed, between these different ideas of authority, and it was going to take time for people to get used to this new thing and to work things out. But then in the past few weeks, I have, I have it,

I have started to share this kind of sinking feeling that, you know, it's not going to get half a million members. It looked like it was going to get a few months ago. That it does really look, like despite my best efforts to be sort of generous and non-dudgmental, it does look like people like Murphy are just trying to sew things up in such a way that there, there isn't really a participatory constituent process. There's just the appearance of one. And it feels like I still have hopes for it and I really want it to succeed but I share a bit of that sort of sinking feeling although maybe not as much despair as some people yeah I have to be honest about the backdrop for me which is that I'm still very much burnt from 2019 so like my

involvement in participative democracy and you know political party level has like completely changed. Like the night, you know, I was working for momentum up till the right, the last, minute. And I just wanted to get out of politics. I wanted to get out of politics. And that's mostly what I've done in terms of my career. Like, I've had a career shift. And that's a response to 2019. I still have the same values and ideas. And I hugely value the space that is this podcast. But if I'm completely honest, the reason why I've not thrown myself into your party is I do have that skepticism. And I haven't quite, you know, like you, Jeremy, I think I'd agree with a lot of things that you said. I very much feel like an observer and I want it to succeed, but I'm,

I'm skeptical. And I'm skeptical, I think, for all of the reasons that we discussed, but also I'm just quite sympathetic, you know, I'm not, I'm not coming at it from a kind of sneering perspective, you know, well, they should have done this and they should have done this. I think what they're trying to do is, is really hard. So I do want to to succeed. And I would love there to be a mass organization and it wouldn't be that I wouldn't get involved at some point. But at the moment, I still feel very much burnt from 2019. And I think politically my priorities are women's rights in Palestine. Like those are my bottom lines. And I completely understand that as an organizing principle, Palestine, even though it is

the biggest global issue for me, is not necessarily going to be an organizing principle for your party. And I kind of understand that because it's not the everyday life of people here in the UK and people might be influenced by all sorts of, you know, Zionist propaganda, which is all over the place. But I think like, you know, women's rights and the rollback of feminism is, you know, quite central to me. And that's, you know, not necessarily a space that's been fronted by your party or any of the parties actually. But coming back to Jeremy, your initial point, this also really does stand for me. And perhaps, again, this is my training

and where I spent most of my political life since I was 21. It's apart from anti-war stuff, a workerist perspective is really central to my politics. And that makes it very difficult for me to join the Green Party. And I'm not saying the Green Party isn't going to be great. And I have a lot of friends who have very similar politics to me that have joined the Green Party. But I find it difficult too.

Doesn't mean I'm not going to. do it, but I find it difficult, too. So I think for those reasons, I'm still very much both practically and psychologically and emotionally, like on the outside currently, even though I am watching with interest. For me, I was more in the position of you too. I'd sort of signed up actually for the, you know, as part of that 800,000 wave. And I thought, oh, there could be something interesting here, couldn't there? But like, you know, let's just see how it pans out. And then I got invited to go down to this weekend where people were trying to pull together

like renters unions and various different sorts of like base building sort of organisations and I was asked to go and present a little bit from the radical abundance book which has got a strategy which is the side of that but not totally unrelated and it was at that weekend

there were lots of really good people there and there was really good discussion asking actually yeah there could be a real chance here there's something really interesting could happen here like you know if we do get like a large sign up of members, you could actually do something which could change the country to some degree. And I got really quite committed to that. And then two days later, Sarah and Jeremy did the whole, you know, the team around them did the whole membership fuck up. And I got to admit,

I was angry. I was really viscerally angry at both Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultan and the people around them, like really, really angry at them. That's dissipated now a little bit. I've also got a little bit more sympathetic, this is an incredibly hard thing to do, etc. And so, you know, basically, I've got involved to a certain degree, you know, I'm going to see how it pans out over the next few months. What would I do then? I, you know, I could imagine myself perhaps saying, all right, okay, this experiment is over. Now, now let's try and join the Greens. There's a few reasons why I'd find that difficult. The Green Party around me is very right wing, for instance. Just in my local constituency, I don't like the people, some of the people involved.

so that's just a personal thing but like the situation is just incredibly volatile we just don't know how this is going to play out of the next few years so it's like that thing of like try to get involved see if it's working out in this area if not then just then the attitude to take

I think it's pulled back and see whatever opportunities are out there basically and that's the attitude I think we need to take this is asking about Oh, that's pretty far out.