Your Party should leave elections to the Greens, at least for now

Below is an edited transcript from my ‘hot take’ in the latest Life of the Party. If you’d rather listen you can do so here. This is definitely thinking aloud territory, so let me know what I’ve gotten wrong in the comments.

Joe Todd: Okay, so I’m doing the hot take this week, and it builds on that discussion really nicely. My hot take is that, at least for the foreseeable future, Your Party should focus on base-building, organising and building social infrastructure in communities, and just leave the electoral stuff to the Green Party.

I’ll explain why. We’ve said on this podcast a bunch of times that we’re not going to achieve socialist transition just through electoral power. You can’t just get elected, get into Westminster, pull some levers and then you’ve got socialism. It’s a struggle through the institutions. It’s going to involve massive conflict, and you’re going to have to build various sources of power that aren’t just MPs in parliament or councillors. It’ll involve really strong trade unions, really strong communities, and deep organising to remind people that collective struggle is real and that you can be powerful together.

I think there’s an emerging division of labour in the movement between the Green Party and Your Party. The Greens have obviously surged in the polls and they’ve got this charismatic individual leader in Zack Polanski, who’s really broken through. The party’s remarkably united, and they’ve got people who are experienced at winning against-the-odds elections with very few resources. They’re now in this productive dynamic with polls, the mainstream press and Labour, where the question is: are the Greens going to hit a tipping point where they overtake Labour and become the hegemonic left party in the country.

We’ve seen that the anti-Reform vote is powerful. That last by-election in Caerphilly in Wales - Plaid did incredibly well and it’s because the anti-Reform vote flocked to them as they were the strongest progressive challenger. There is a genuine possibility that the Greens could surpass Labour in the polls and become the most viable party at the next election for this anti-Reform coalition. This is incredibly exciting for them. It’s incredibly exciting for the left. But because they have this massive electoral opportunity, the Greens are inevitably going to focus very heavily on elections.

There are lots of people in the Greens who believe that base-building, social infrastructure and organising is really important. But this massive electoral opportunity and the gravitational pull elections tend to have means they’ll end up putting the vast majority of their energy into elections.

And I actually think this is ok. They should take the opportunity they have and focus on it. Their barometer of success should be next May’s council elections. Polls will be another.

Your Party is a different story. They are divided, lack a charismatic leader and are massively down in the polls. Their electoral prospects are limited. And yet there are 55,000 members. The organisation can raise one to three million pounds a year. There are proto-branches across the country that could go out and do the base-building and social infrastructure work that we’ve talked about. Their catastrophic launch period may actually afford them a certain freedom to do this.

One to three million a year could be spent on a national staff focussed on elections. It could also be spent opening social centres in formerly industrial regions where Reform are doing well, showing that the left has a presence in these places. This isn’t huge money, but it’s enough to start building something.

Your Party can’t judge itself based on next May. It’s going to perform badly for all the reasons we’ve discussed. It’ll just be setting itself up for failure, unquestioningly adopting an electoralist understanding of what parties do and how they should be judged. Instead, their metrics should be numbers of active members, membership composition and ability to mobilise in its target communities. Eventually this will show in the polls, but it’ll take time. If this is a generation project, as Zarah says, that should be ok.

There’ll be wrinkles in this, for sure. Your Party will inevitably compete in a few elections. Jeremy and Zarah will run, and maybe the party will contest five or ten seats. It’s not that electoralism as a tactic should be completely killed, but that it becomes one of many tactics - rather than a driving logic.

However, this altered conception of Your Party won’t happen without a push. The party was founded by MPs, the leadership factions are MPs. There will be a dominant, unthinking orientation towards electoralism. This is where the upcoming CEC election will matter. If people think Your Party should focus on organising, now is the time to campaign for it, when there is little pull towards elections with few opportunities on the horizon.

As an aside, this would make the relationship between Your Party and the Greens so much easier. With different purposes, at least temporarily, you limit the need for Zarah and Your Party activists to differentiate themselves and stumble into a weird political maximalism.

We can stop litigating this zero-sum argument about which party you’re supposed to be in, and instead think about what each organisation is best placed to do right now. Then we have a healthier, more productive movement ecology which makes future cooperation - including on electoral alliances - so much easier.