Anyone playing bingo with the left-wing lexicon would have been sure of a fully marked-off card by the close of Your Party’s founding conference on the banks of the Mersey.
Witch hunt – check. Sabotage and intimidation – check. Faceless unelected bureaucrats – HOUSE!
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Sultana: Expulsions at conference are undemocratic
Bonus points were also on offer if you spotted the right-wing newspaper reporter forced to hang around outside the conference after a mysterious and unfixable error with his accreditation stopped him from accessing the venue.
For a party painting itself as the face of the new left, there was plenty of dated behaviour during this two-day jamboree.
A gauntlet of leafleters awaited all attendees from an extensive range of left-wing organisations.
Your correspondent ended the gathering with literature from (deep breath) – the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Unity Platform, the Socialist Equality Party, the Democratic Socialists, the Democratic Bloc, the Spartacist League, Workers Hammer, the Weekly Worker and, of course, the Morning Star.
Tensions make compelling politics
This plethora of groupings led to some predictable positional tensions.
At one point the Democratic Socialists – who had already split from the more formal Your Party grouping to align with Zarah Sultana’s supporters – then split again, this time from Team Sultana, and called for members to reject the founding constitution and political statement that they had spent the past 24 hours trying to amend,…
