What last night’s first meeting in Croydon of the new Your Party showed is that it has a long way to go before it can even begin to field election candidates and harness the energy of its near-1million supporters, reports our Political Editor WALTER CRONXITE
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“Oi!” shouted a fella on the other side of the rush-hour busy Lower Coombe Street. “Oi! Matey!”
He had not just fallen out of the Surrey Cricketers, but was nonetheless in need of some help. “Where’s this Jeremy Corbyn meeting?”
He was part of a couple, from Thornton Heath, in their 40s at a guess, and Google maps wasn’t helping them in locating Ruskin House. And we were all running late.
A bit further up the hill, we came up to the houses being built on a patch of green space, a final monument to the incompetences of Brick by Brick which bankrupted the borough (BxB was handed the site for a pittance and had planning permission, but just never got round to building the homes; that’s been left to a private developer, who acquired the site at a bargain price).
Here was a woman, also looking at her phone, and lost. “The Your Party meeting?”
“Yes!”
“You’re nearly there. Follow us.”
It was one of those strange pied-piper moments, as we arrived at Cedar Hall with it already packed with people seated ready for the meeting to begin.
Keeping them in the dark: almost half the audience in the Cedar Hall last night had come to shine a light on the new Your Party
Is this what the start of a revolution is supposed to look like?
The party being founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, as yet without a name apart from the stop-gap “Your Party”, is not yet a month old, and this was the first meeting of like-minded people to be held in Croydon.
In the week or so since the meeting was announced, the number of those registering online as “interested” has risen from 650,000 to 800,000. This is quickly transforming from a mere political party into a mass movement.
Polling by Ipsos, published today by the New Statesman, suggests that at least one-third of people who voted Labour in 2024 would consider voting for the new Corbyn-Sultana initiative. And nearly half would vote for an alliance between the new party and the Greens.
The audience in Croydon last night was not made up of hardened activists, although there were a few recognisable faces there. But no disaffected or deselected Labour councillors, it is worth noting.
Those attending were mostly “ordinary” people, many non-political before now, like the couple from Thornton Heath, curious to find out what it is all about, perhaps to get a glimpse of Corbyn or Sultana. Organisers had definitely better book a bigger room for the day that Your Party’s leaders come to town.
But as others have alluded to, Your Party will suffer growing pains. It probably already is undergoing such pains, if reports, even from the most left-leaning publications, of “rifts” and disagreements over the direction of travel, are anything to go by.
Last night, the meeting was conducted with half the audience sitting in the dark. Some of the lights in Cedar Hall weren’t working.
At the top table were three grey-haired, or no-haired, blokes, with a banner fixed to the wall behind them. They said that this is not to be Labour MkII, but it looked very much like old-school Labour from the 1970s or ’80s.
Not Labour MkII: John McInally addresses a packed Cedar Hall at Ruskin House last night, an event that felt like a Labour meeting from the 1980s
More than once, someone referenced the aspiration for the new party, whatever it ends up being called, not being “top-down”, like Labour, but being “grassroots up”. The audience applauded that, and more than once.
The Labour of McSweeney and Starmer, the Labour Party of government, had become a party of “cuts, privatisation, austerity and war”, and was “haemorrhaging authority”, said trade unionist John McInally, to a loud round of applause.
“I can’t believe how repressive the Labour government has been, worse than expected,” said another speaker (as well as not having the lights working, the organisers weren’t very good with introductions).
Reform UK, another new party, was a real threat to society, and its members were growing bolder by the day in their fascist and racist rhetoric. A High Court judgement, handed down that afternoon, to evict asylum seekers from a refugee hotel in Epping, would only embolden them. More applause.
They spoke of how, in nightly news bulletins, genocide in Gaza was being played out before us on our television screens. “Never forget. Never forgive,” they said. More applause.
But there’s a problem for a grassroots movement that works upwards: no one wants to make decisions, or to be seen to be making decisions. And time is not on Your Party’s side.
There was a call for the unions to disaffiliate from Labour, the party that, more than a century earlier they had helped to form. Strong applause. It was important to extend the new party “beyond the activist layer”, someone else said. More applause.
The three old blokes gave way to a couple of women, Mel Mullings, from Black Lives Matter, and Paula Peters, from Disabled People Against Cuts. Both made impressive, and often passionate, speeches.
“We want welfare, not warfare,” Peters said, as she warned of more, and more damaging, changes to the benefits system to come. “People, friends, have died because of these cuts,” Peters said. This was real. This hurt. This mattered.
“I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with what Labour has done to us,” said Mullings, a union official and mother, speaking of the financial collapse in Croydon and its impact on ordinary working people.
The floor was opened for members of the audience to speak, and this is where the free-form, unstructured nature of the meeting started to fall apart a bit. No one wanted to take charge. Grassroots up, remember?
A few people started to drift away, including the Thornton Heath couple. Had they been scared off? Bored? Or a bit of both?
It was nearly an hour and a half into the meeting before the first mention of Brexit, which remains the biggest act of self-harm this country has ever seen. There was hardly a mention of the housing crisis.
And this revolution, if that’s what it is, is being televised.
After half an hour, someone remembered to point out that the annoying bloke wandering around at the front in the half-lit Cedar Hall was actually filming the meeting, and if anyone didn’t want to be shown… But it was all far too late for anyone to object by that point.
Twenty minutes later, some other bloke, from the back who struggled to make himself heard – ironic, really, as he was from Sqwawkbox – announced that he, too, was filming everything, and if anyone minded… Retrospective sign-offs of filming permissions are not really the sign of ethical broadcasting, or in these cases, narrowcasting.
It was all getting a bit shambolic, really. Some said that they thought it was a good idea for the new party to choose candidates for the local elections just nine months away. Some were less certain. Those that spoke seemed to have forgotten that Croydon has a mayoral system these days. Could they select a candidate? No one seemed quite sure.
And what about the Greens? Some, at the top table, seem to quite like the Greens. One bloke who got up to speak, a member of the Socialist Party, didn’t much like the Greens. What’s a new party to do?
It then got even more 6th Form debating society. Not that there’s anything wrong with 6th Form debating societies, except for a lack of realism, experience and sound judgement.
This is where the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party came in. One speaker, wearing an RCP T-shirt and fetching hat, and probably too young to remember the Croydon riots of 2011, called for all-out revolution. There was at least one person in the room who had lost her family home and livelihood in the Croydon riots.
Corbyn, I was told, could not attend the Croydon meeting because he had only got off his plane from Japan the previous day, having been at the 80th anniversary commemorations for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the consensus was for an end to wars and conflicts.
It was around this point I got up and sneaked out the back. I’d stopped bothering to take notes a while back.
At least one thing that became abundantly clear from the Croydon meeting: as well as a name, Your Party needs an organisation, and urgently.
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Pity the meeting was so unstructured. Bottom-up discussion and decision-making doesn’t exclude chairing or facilitating meetings. Or someone checking the hall for basic comfort for the audience. But it seems there’s plenty of enthusiasm for an authentic left wing party, given much disappointment with Labour on a range of issues.
Were you there? A very good description if you weren’t!
Wanted to go but on reflection perhaps just as well I couldn’t make this one.
“There was a call for the unions to disaffiliate from Labour”
Only 11 unions are affiliated to the Labour Party . The TUC has 48 unions as members.
Is this on the assumption that they would then immediatly affiliate to Corbyns party and pay for it because that isn’t a given.
As the chair of the meeting I am puzzled by the comment that the organisers were not very good at introductions.
Mr Downes (sorry Mr W Cronxite) managed to correctly record the names of the principal speakers so I must have got that part right.
We then had numerous speakers from the floor, none of whose name I knew. They were asked to give their names which nearly all did, so it is all a puzzle what WC is talking about. We were also castigated for a fault with the lighting as if this was a demonstration of political ineptitude, the logic of which escapes me.
Fair play to WC. He conveys the excellent attendance and the diverse nature of the attendees – not features of 1970s and 1980s Labour meetings in my recollection – yet somehow similar in the mind of WC.
WC says the meeting became unstructured when contributions from the floor were called for. Again a puzzle because the structure was for each person to be given 3 minutes, which by and large they stuck to. What would a structured meeting look like in comparison?
WC appears astonished that not everyone agreed with each other all the time. Had he expected a North Korean type unanimity?
Castigation that there was no mention of the housing crisis? I recollect many such references. Perhaps WC didn’t record it properly because of inadequate lighting which resulted in his giving such extraordinary importance to a trifling detail.
We will take on board the solemn injunction that we need an organisation and urgently. We had not realised that until this startling fact was revealed by WC. It is unbelievable that three old blokes arranged a meeting with such a big attendance of people who had never met before at a few days notice and failed to iron out every detail of every feature of the party in advance. Our report card has been marked “Must do better” and with the enthusiasm on display we will. Can we say the same about WC?
Is your name David Percival?
Well thanks for that. Because you failed to introduce yourself by name on the night.
And anyone who thinks staging an event such as this in a half-lit hall is a “trifling detail” clearly needs to reconsider how to present significant public events.
If the lights are off at your own events, how can we trust you to run a whelk stall, never mind a council or a country?
I am David Percival and I did introduce myself at the start. I am sure it would have been pointed out at the time if I had not and I am assured by other attendees that I did. My recollection is that I said “I’m David Percival and I have been asked to Chair this meeting”.
As far as the lights are concerned the organisers cannot be expected to know some of the lights were not working or to have had them fixed without delaying the meeting. It was not ideal but it did not affect matters to a significant extent.
I am very supportive of Inside Croydon generally and welcome constructive criticism but I feel the report of the meeting was looking for something to snipe at rather than welcoming a hopeful development. I am sure the new party and Inside Croydon will get along fine in the future.
You might have mumbled something. But I was in the front row and I couldn’t hear your name.
And if you won’t accept responsibility, as organisers, for such a major shortcoming as the light not working in the room (did no one actually check the venue earlier in the week or beforehand?), then what does that say about what can be expected from your organisation going forward?
But yeah, just as thin-skinned as Labour: if you think that our sketch of your event was “criticism”, you ain’t seen nuffink yet.
Calm down. Cronxite wrote a sketch, not a verbatim account. If you can’t take a bit of mockery about your inaugural meeting, and appreciate the free publicity, what would you be like in power?
Did attendees pass their motions to the front?
I registered my interest, David, but nobody contacted me. Organisation is needed.
The expressions of interest have sadly not been shared with us but if you would like to share your contact details through Ruskin House you will assuredly be made aware of future events.
See. Never take responsibility. Ever. For anything.
W
Nothing for Reform or Labour to worry about here then. Seems this is the standard group of takers and idealists having their rant. Likely not able to organise a round of drinks in the Cricketers.
Thanks WC for some sketch writing. Enjoyable.
Perhaps the new party needs‘Momentum’ for organisation/entryism?
That will be the death of an initiative with noble ideas
In a previous post I informed IC readership that I will keep them impartially informed of my involvement with Your Party ‘warts and all’. So here goes.
The decision to organise the meeting was taken so as to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak, soon after Corbyn and Sultana announced the founding of Your Party. Although not party to the decision, I fully agree with it. Cedar Hall was booked as the anticipated attendance would be too large to be accommodated anywhere else at Ruskin House. It was unfortunate that the lighting was only for 50% of the room but being a summer evening it was not too inconvenient for us, and although I was seated in the lighted part no one from the shadows complained. I would contend that any seasoned activists that were there would have stories about attending meetings in more unforgiving circumstances. I will take the views of Walter on board, however I will also take the pluses from the meeting:-
More than 100 attendees, some in wheelchairs coming at short notice,
The speakers all keeping to the allotted time,
Heartfelt contributions about their experiences,
Broad attendance from all genders and backgrounds.
The meeting was chaired with experience and with the recognition that the meeting had to have a semblance of structure but not to be too rigid given that the meeting was inaugural and that there probably were attendees who were at their very first political meeting.
There was representatives from the Communist Party, Revolutionary Communist Party and Socialist Party. I do not recall anybody from the SWP and as a former member I would have recognised the verbiage and to be honest all of them put together did not even form a significant minority. And Walter is correct in that no faces from the Labour Party were prepared to glimpse over the parapet.
There was agreement that monthly meetings should start being held and I would expect that from these meetings organisational and policy decisions will be taken.
I asked the cameraman who was filming the speakers when and where the filming will be shown and he told me he expects it to be shown on the Crispin Flintoff show, which is on YouTube, either this Sunday or the next.
Strike? That sounds a bit premature
Not Your Party’s fault half the lights weren’t working. That was down to Ruskin House. I asked the barman why they weren’t and he said an electrician had been unable to fix them earlier that day. A bit crap, I thought, but in keeping with the downbeat vibe around the other rooms on the ground floor.
As for people being late and unable to find Ruskin House which is obviously Googlable; that’s about upping one’s game and hardly the fault of the organisers.
For me the issue is hot to get more young and BME people at the meetings in future, and that’s going to take music and a far more showbiz atmosphere with food and drink etc.
I’m a grey-haired old lefty who’s been on plenty of demos, and if that’s the ‘vanguard’ then fair enough. But one or two were nodding off, and we need a lot nore energy in the crowd than that. And I don’t mean the young opportunist idealogues of the RCP.
Solidarity to all present. Onwards and upwards.