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
PLUS: How you can get to listen to Jeremy Corbyn in our latest Andrew Fisher Interview podcast
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.
- Sign up now by clicking here for our Patreon page to access our exclusive interview with Corbyn as soon as it is released, as well as our archive of interviews and a stack of other subscriber offers
Read more: Can Corbyn’s ‘Your Party’ handle its daunting challenges?
Read more: Four black women among six councillors rejected by Labour
Read more: Mounting complaints of suspected fraud in Labour’s selections
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
