Over the next month thousands of Your Party members will attend regional assemblies in the run-up to a founding conference November 29-30 in Liverpool.

In July, when Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn announced their launch of a new left-wing party to challenge Starmer’s right-wing authoritarian government, 850,000 signed up in support.

Millions of workers and young people are looking for a way to fight austerity, genocide, escalating global imperialist war, the rise of the far-right, climate catastrophe and the assault on democratic rights. Hundreds of thousands recognise the need for a political break from the Labour Party and for a new mass party of the working class to fight for socialism.

Your Party is not that party.

Corbyn has made clear the party they are constructing is a Labour Party Mark II. Its key initiators include labour and trade union bureaucrats such as Karie Murphy, Executive Director of the Leader of the Opposition’s Office under Corbyn; Len McCluskey, former Unite General Secretary; Andrew Murray, a lifelong Stalinist; and James Schneider, a co-founder of Momentum with Jon Lansman who facilitated Labour’s purge of left-wing members under Corbyn. They are setting up a reformist political vehicle to block, neuter and prevent a political reckoning by the working class with the Labour Party and prevent the growth of a genuine mass socialist party against capitalism.

Your Party’s 263-word “policy statement” sets out the party’s “broad principles and purpose”, a collection of sound bites committing the party to nothing.

It will be a “member-led socialist party that stands for peace, equality, social justice and international solidarity,” aimed at the “transfer of wealth and power, now concentrated in the hands of the few, to the overwhelming majority in a democratic, socialist society.”

But how will the wealth and power of the capitalist oligarchy and the British state be “transferred” to the majority? The words “capitalism”, “expropriation” and “socialist revolution” do not appear. Will giant corporate monopolies, banks and billionaires peacefully relinquish their wealth in response to legislation or popular pressure from below?

Your Party’s “broad principles” are suspended in thin air, outside of time and place. There is not a single reference to any of the concrete political events and experiences worldwide or in Britain which make necessary and urgent a mass socialist and internationalist party of the working class.

Trump’s efforts to erect a fascist dictatorship in the United States, the promotion of far-right parties across Europe, and the worldwide eruption of imperialist military violence, including Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians to forge Trump’s “New Middle East”, point to the violent reality of capitalism: a ruling class that will stop at nothing to defend its wealth and power against foreign rivals and against the working class at home.

Your Party’s documents make no reference to history. Corbyn offers no explanation for the transformation of the 125-year-old Labour Party into a ruthless instrument for Thatcherite and far-right policies. None of the major struggles of the working class in Britain or internationally are reviewed. Your Party claims to be socialist yet has nothing to say about the Russian Revolution, or the fight by Leon Trotsky against its betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy. No lessons are drawn, even from the past decade. This would expose Your Party’s initiators, including Corbyn himself, and their international allies’ (Bernie Sanders in the US, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and Yanis Varoufakis in Greece) betrayal of the working class.

Corbyn’s mission statement defines socialism as fighting to “shift the balance of power at every level of society” through “organising and campaigning in communities and workplaces, trade unions and social movements”. But the union bureaucracy’s central role over the past 40 years has been to “shift power” and wealth away from the working class to the corporations and the state.

While promising “the broadest possible social coalition with the working class at its heart,” the independent interests of the working class will be subordinated to rotten “coalitions” with capitalist parties such as the Greens (a party which defends NATO) and Corbyn’s Independent Alliance of MPs (including Ayoub Khan who called for the Army to be used in against striking workers in Birmingham) and to cross-class alliances with “social movements” dominated by the affluent middle class.

Its constitution and standing orders, also published October 17, are a bureaucratic stitch-up. This includes total control over the founding conference by Corbyn’s key backers, with delegates randomly selected via “sortition”, attending as individuals rather than elected representatives of a branch, and with branches having no right to move amendments or resolutions for debate.

The constitution bans members joining from other national political parties, “except if specified by the CEC”, the party’s governing Central Executive Committee. Members cannot “affiliate with or participate in organisations undermining Party values”. Both strictures will be used to ban and expel those belonging to what Corbyn’s key allies have contemptuously decried as “Marxist sects”.

About 40 percent of the CEC will be unelected, handpicked by CEC officials. Corbyn’s Independent Alliance MPs will “steward” the new party between the founding conference and the election of the CEC next March. A single Leader model is outlined, killing Zarah Sultana’s pronouncements about “co-leading” the party with “Jeremy”.

Pseudo-left spin merchants

Despite its reformist programme and the rotten political record of its key initiators, the entire gamut of middle class pseudo-left groups from the Socialist Workers Party to the Revolutionary Communist Party has rushed to embrace Your Party, promoting the fiction that it can be transformed into a vehicle for socialism.

They are seeking to repeat their pernicious role in 2015-19, when they hailed Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, claiming it heralded the start of 21st century socialism. Instead, Corbyn betrayed the anti-austerity and anti-war mandate bestowed on him by the membership, capitulated to his Blairite attackers at every juncture, authorised a free vote on the bombing of Syria, supported NATO and the Trident nuclear weapons programme, instructed local Labour councils to pass Conservative government cuts, and refused to challenge the campaign against “leftwing antisemitism” manufactured by the British state to crush his own supporters and criminalise the left.

Corbyn makes no reference to this history. Sultana’s brief commentary on “the capitulations of Corbynism” has been swiftly withdrawn. Britain’s pseudo-left happily comply with this cover-up, concealing their own rotten past while reprising their role as accomplices to Corbyn, under far more dangerous conditions.

RS21, a splinter group from the SWP, spoke for all these opportunist outfits in a wretched statement published October 8:

“Recent weeks have been rocky and challenging. Unaccountable political leaders and movement bureaucrats have done serious damage. Our difficulty in moving beyond the limits of Corbynism reflects the weakness of the left today in Britain and the disorganisation of the working class. Those with the power to bring a new political project into existence come from places like the Labour left and union bureaucracies, both rife with petty factional manoeuvring, bureaucratic stitch-ups and bullying, and with no clear political basis.”

Having outlined the rottenness of Your Party’s chief instigators, they blame their own “difficulty” in moving beyond Corbynism on “the disorganisation of the working class”. These political scoundrels then make clear their central argument: a new mass party of the working class has legitimacy only if sanctioned by the labour and trade union bureaucracy.

Your Party, they insist, represents an opportunity to “launch a new layer of militants and collective leadership that represents the contemporary working class”. They urge, “We need to seize this opportunity, not ‘wait and see’… the chance to set up a mass socialist party with a serious commitment to building the self-activity of the working class is too big to give up on so soon. We want to work with leftists and activists in the Green party without abandoning our bigger goals.”

Yes, a mass socialist party of the working class is needed urgently. Such a party must be international, linking British workers with their class brother and sisters worldwide; it must be based on the political independence of the working class from the capitalist class and its servants in the labour and trade union bureaucracy; and it must encourage the growth of rank-and-file organisations in every workplace and neighbourhood to mobilise the working class to expropriate the wealth of the oligarchy, break the resistance of the state, and place economic and political power in the hands of the working class, the overwhelming majority of the population.

Such a party will only develop in a determined fight to develop socialist political consciousness in the working class against the reformist, pro-capitalist politics of Corbyn, Sultana and their backers in the pseudo-left. A party capable of defeating imperialism requires a leadership grounded in the lessons of history, based on the century-long struggle of the Trotskyist movement for the strategy of world socialist revolution. That party is the Socialist Equality Party, the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Join its ranks today and help prepare the genuine mass socialist party of the working class that will be forged in the class battles ahead.