The Canary spoke to Zarah Sultana and Jamie Driscoll after a packed event in Newcastle on 6 September where Sultana received a standing ovation for her powerful speech. And considering all the energy and enthusiasm around the Your Party project, we asked why it’s taking so long to set up the new party‘s founding conference.
Zarah Sultana: Conference must be democratic, with “one member, one vote”
Zarah Sultana understood supporters’ impatience, saying:
This is a political party that people have been desperately wanting for ages… And I understand the desperation in our communities that people just wanna get on with it and start doing stuff.
But we need to just get structures and governance and conference right. And you can’t really jump the process and you can’t really fast track that.
She also emphasised that:
the project we are undertaking is huge. It’s historic. It’s got over 750,000 people already interested
And she asserted:
It’s really important that we have a conference arrangements committee that is gender-balanced – it’s not just led by MPs, it’s regionally and racially diverse.
We need to make sure that conference is democratic. That’s what we’re all desperately wanting. So it has to have one member, one vote.
Everyone’s voice has to matter, she stressed, and democracy has to be “at the heart of this”.
Jamie Driscoll: “everything has to be member-led, member-decided”
Zarah Sultana came up to speak at the conference of Majority, “a progressive coalition of activists and voters who powered Jamie Driscoll’s recent Independent North East Mayoral campaign”. Driscoll has been part of the efforts to build a new mass party on the left.
Responding to the early days of Your Party, he pointed out that “all births are messy”, and that:
The first third of any project is actually pulling together what it is and scoping it out. And we’ve gone from zero and it’s out there.
Then, the next third is pulling the resources together, the people, the governance…
And then actually the last third is the delivery – and people look at that bit and think that that’s the project.
One trade union general secretary, he added, told him “well, our conference takes a year. As soon as we’ve finished, we start the next one.”
He said:
I certainly will be pushing as strongly as I can that everything has to be member-led, member-decided, including the election of general secretary and these sorts of positions.
Ensuring that kind of democratic communication and decision-making, he highlighted, is “gonna involve electronic platforms”, and “anyone who’s dealt with software knows that takes time”.
We’ll be releasing the rest of our coverage of Majority’s Newcastle event over the coming days, including the rest of our interview with Sultana and Driscoll.
