On 18 September, a rift between Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn resulted in “chaos” for Your Party. On 19 September, a group calling itself ‘Our Party’ materialised with a proposal to temporarily manage the fledgling political organisation. One criticism was that it wasn’t clear who was behind the proposal, although they did say they were from “the trade union, tenants’ union, anti-racist and pro-Palestine movements, as well as local Your Party groups”.
Providing some degree of clarity, Joshua Virasami of the Our Party group has spoken to Novara’s Michael Walker on how the group came about.
Thissss https://t.co/ptBtoTvFHL
— Joshua Virasami
(@JoshuaVirasami) September 19, 2025
Our Party/Your Party
Ed Sykes reported the following on Our Party on 19 September:
The campaign is calling for members to build the party from the ground up, with democracy as its foundation, ensuring it never repeats the stitch ups and ‘jobs for the boys’ characterised by Labour. It will bring members together to shape proposals for the party’s founding conference, ensuring the voice of ordinary activists sets the direction from day one.
The piece highlighted the group’s key demands for implementing democracy in the party. Their stated intention is to manage proceedings until the conference at which point the party and its structures will be democratically formulated.
As described by O N C A, Virasami is “an artist, writer and political organiser whose work intersects across political struggles and whose campaigning sits in a variety of organisations”. Speaking to Walker on the Our Party initiative, he explained:
What we are is an unaligned… group of supporters from around the country. You know, yesterday, when this went down… lots of people contacted me from lots of different groups around the country. There’s some people who were connected to a network of 50 groups, and everyone was like, “What’s going on? Like, is this it? Is this the implosion? Is this the end of of the party?”
And you know, it was a really sad time. I remember I was sitting in the park for an hour just in silence thinking like, you know, a lot of us have invested our our hopes and dreams into this for so many reasons… We’re living in a a situation of permanent and humiliating crisis. There is a genocide, there is a climate crisis, and the far right are on the march. And we we put our hopes into this party, and it seemed to be crashing before our eyes.
And so lots of us got together. Dozens of us, you know, there’s two dozen that are like connected to the thing, but there’s dozens of people that are connected to it. And we were like, we need to stage an intervention, because right now, it seems that there’s two intractable forces… fighting for control of the party, when actually it’s not just about them. It’s about the people that build the party. It’s about the people that are building the party right now across the country. And we have a stake in this. We have a say. We don’t just want to watch it collapse before our eyes.
So that that’s the kind of energy that we came with. Not a faction trying to lead the party or… organize a coup. We are members and supporters of this party. We are people who… work hard… I was up until 1:00 a.m. most days of this week trying to work to get this party going. So yeah, we’re people who just want to see it survive, because the stakes are… higher than they’ve ever been.
Virasami also explained that he’s been on Your Party committees for the past several months.
You can watch the interview in full from the 26th minute onwards:
Other developments on this story include Corbyn stating he’s “determined” for the conference to happen, and the following statement from the group overseeing Your Party donations:
Statement from @JamieDriscollNE @BethWinterCynon & myself on the finances of Your Party of which we are the custodians pic.twitter.com/7JGMEj1xuC
— Andrew Feinstein (@andrewfeinstein) September 20, 2025
Featured image via Parliament / Novara Media (YouTube) / Parliament
By Willem Moore
