Inside the fight for radical democracy in Britain’s new left party

This article Inside the fight for radical democracy in Britain’s new left party was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

How do you distill the hopes and dreams of nearly one million supporters, build a political party that accurately reflects them, and do so in a matter of months? With its founding conference imminent, and a surprisingly vast base of support eager to feed into it, this was the quandary that Your Party, Britain’s brand new left-wing party, found itself in this summer. 

One person who had a solution was Roger Hallam. The totemic climate activist, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, believed the party needed to do something both mundane and radical. It had to put its faith in local assemblies — meetings where ordinary people come together to discuss issues and find solutions.

Hallam and a small band of Just Stop Oil activists had already made the leap when they set up a group called Assemble in March 2024. Assemble had been busy holding local assemblies in community spaces across the U.K., and in July it held its first national one, called House of the People, where 100 randomly chosen and community-nominated people considered the demands of the local assemblies, and refined them to create a national People’s Charter.

Now, Assemble believed they could repeat this process on a larger scale in the service of Your Party. Instead of feeding into a House of the People, thousands of local assemblies would feed into the party’s inaugural conference, where a thousand randomly selected sign-ups would create the party’s procedures and first manifesto.

Assemble would need to scale up quickly to meet the provisional conference date of late November, but with support from Your Party, Hallam and his group knew it was possible. They were also convinced that, should the party fully embrace local assemblies, and let ordinary people guide both its policies and long-term structure, it would quickly blossom into a movement of millions.

On Aug. 17, just one day after a 13-month stretch in prison for supporting the disruption of a motorway, Hallam and the other Assemble co-founders went to meet the key organizers behind Your Party and deliver their blueprint. The Your Party representatives warned that there would be internal resistance to such intense democratization. But they agreed that this was the plan they needed to follow to pull off the conference and create a truly people-powered party.

Three days later, Hallam fizzed with energy as he sketched out the burgeoning alliance to curious climate activists, who were encouraged to help run the imminent Your Party assemblies. “This is a beyond-description massive opportunity and responsibility,” he said. “If we play our cards right, there’s no reason why we can’t get several million votes, win an election, and more importantly, change U.K. political culture.” 

In the book he speed-wrote during his last week in prison, “Your Party: Grasping the Enormity of the Moment,” Hallam went even further. He called Your Party “the biggest moment of our lifetimes,” something that could spark “a global political revolution” and ultimately “determine whether the world ends or not.”

All the main players are dead keen

If Assemble’s meeting with Your Party marked the engagement of the two organizations, the courtship had started more than a year earlier. Assemble was up and running for just two months when a general election was called in May 2024. The fledgling group adjusted, offering to facilitate local assemblies for any election candidates open to deliberative democracy.

In all, Assemble ran local assemblies with 30 independent candidates, including Shockat Adam, now the MP for Leicester South; Andrew Feinstein, who challenged Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his constituency seat in London; and ex-Labour councilor Sean Halsall in Southport. When Halsall later set up the Southport Community Independents party, born out of the local assemblies that were held in Southport, Assemble organized the launch. Assemble also helped the former Labour regional mayor Jamie Driscoll set up Majority, an independent political movement that recently held an assembly of more than 240 people in Newcastle.

All these figures would become instrumental to Your Party’s formation, a process started a year earlier by allies of the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Under the banner Collective, various socialist figures and factions had come together to form a replacement for the Labour Party, which had become unrecognizably right-wing and authoritarian under Starmer’s leadership. Crucially, the Assemble-backed figures would fall into both camps when Your Party’s two eventual figureheads, Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana, started struggling over control of the party. 

Tensions between Sultana and Corbyn had been evident since the party’s public unveiling in July, when Sultana unilaterally announced they would both co-lead the founding of the project, surprising Corbyn, who was resistant to anointing any leadership roles prior to the conference. But these tensions were quickly eclipsed by the incredible reaction to the party by the wider public. Within five hours of the party website going live, 80,000 people had signed up to the mailing list. Within a month, it was more than 800,000. 

According to a Your Party insider, both factions were initially united in embracing Assemble’s conference plan, and hoped to forge an alliance so that Assemble could co-manage it. “Sultana, Corbyn, all the main players are dead keen on the idea,” said an anonymous source in early September. The partnership was going to be formally announced in a matter of days, and Assemble would receive funding from Your Party, as well as indirect access to its mammoth mailing list. 

By now, Assemble was running a recruitment drive to ensure they could scale up in time for the conference. Former members of Just Stop Oil and other climate groups were invited by Assemble to online “bridge” meetings, where attendees were encouraged to sign up for trainings so they could help facilitate the upcoming Your Party assemblies. 

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While there was widespread excitement at the meetings, there was also concern. With Just Stop Oil shuttered since April, and Extinction Rebellion’s impact fading since its move away from disruption in 2023, there was already a sense that the climate movement was losing momentum. As one meeting attendee put it, “by focusing on Your Party, are we losing focus on the climate crisis?”

Sarah Lunnon, a co-founder of both Just Stop Oil and Assemble, as well as a former Green Party councilor, gave a heartfelt response. “I’ve spent most of my adult life campaigning on the climate crisis. I left mainstream politics to join Extinction Rebellion, and Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil,” she said. “But the system of government we have is incapable of addressing the climate crisis. Unless we change how we are governed, we cannot win. I’ve come to the fundamental position that we need a democratic revolution, and recognize the possibility of Your Party as a way to do it. When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, right now, this is the way.”

A sack full of foxes fighting each other

On Sept. 15, Your Party sent out an email detailing how the party would be founded. Assemble’s plan had been tweaked to accommodate the ideas of James Schneider, a key advisor to Corbyn and a long-term ally of Hallam’s — the pair had co-founded a project together to spread “assembly culture” in 2023. Instead of setting up thousands of local assemblies, there would now be a dozen huge regional assemblies. But the essentials of the plan remained, and the email linked to a form where volunteers could sign up for assembly facilitation training. The form, though, had nothing to do with Assemble. The group wasn’t mentioned at all.

Asked if the alliance was still happening, the anonymous Your Party insider sounded hesitant: “Your Party is still a project with people not always aligned. You have to get through multiple gatekeepers for something to be actioned.” Bertie Coyle, an Assemble co-founder involved in the Your Party talks, later described it as “an opaque situation.” Asked if the relationship was on or off, he added: “Right now, we’re just not in the know.”

Soon after these conversations, the extent of misalignment within Your Party would become known to all. The party launched a membership portal and tens of thousands of people quickly paid to join. Hours later, however, it was branded “unauthorized” by an urgent email signed by Corbyn but not Sultana. Corbyn instructed members to cancel their direct debits, while Sultana celebrated hitting 20,000 paid-up members on social media. She later posted a statement refuting Corbyn’s email and claiming she was being sidelined by a “sexist boys club.” A deep schism between the co-founders and their camps, which had created a breakdown in communication and stultified the party internally, was now firmly in the public domain. 

As the scandal broke, and legal threats were issued by both camps, the anonymous party insider texted: “It’s like trying to coordinate with a sack full of foxes fighting each other.” The next day, with the foxes still fighting, and the entire project seemingly close to collapse, an alliance of supporters stepped in to ensure the founding conference would happen regardless. Under the banner “Our Party,” they wrote an open letter demanding the formation of a new founding committee, staffed by trusted grassroots activists outside either faction. 

Assemble backed the Our Party proposal, and pledged to train up the more than 10,000 people who had volunteered via the Your Party form to facilitate the regional assemblies. Because the funds raised by Your Party were now tied up in factional battles, Assemble started its own fundraiser for the estimated $200,000 this would cost. 

But the Our Party letter was anonymous, and trust among Your Party’s supporters had been shattered. The grassroots rescue project failed to take off, attracting less than one percent of both Your Party’s support base and the funds required. Meanwhile, the party’s co-founders had entered mediation and retracted their legal threats. At least publically, the sack full of foxes had stopped fighting.

The schism hinged on how the party should be run. One side embraced the Assemble model of deliberative democracy, and handing power to the grassroots, and the other side remained at least partially wedded to a classic political party model, with some power retained by a central executive. 

For Hallam, the divide was largely generational. “Obviously there are outliers, but my general observation is that older people held this kind of Old Labour Party, centralist orientation, and the younger, principally newer generation wanted to do sortition and the assembly model,” he said. These generational tensions were exacerbated by a flimsy system of internal decision making that could easily be circumvented: “Structurally, Your Party has to have a power base separate from the center, which is a big challenge, so that no small group can sabotage or delay it,” Hallam added.

It was Corbyn’s older faction that came out of the fracas on top, with Sultana and her younger allies sidelined. Despite the widespread support for Assemble’s proposals a month earlier, they now found themselves sidelined as well. “Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana and all these frontline figures seemed to be behind Assemble,” explained the anonymous party insider, “but not all the bureaucrats.” The bureaucrats are a small group of experienced strategists and organizers who ran both Corbyn’s office when he was leader of the Labour Party, and his later NGO, the Peace and Justice Project. Forged by decades of working within trade unions and traditional party politics, they were wary of the radical democracy being preached by Hallam’s crowd, Schneider and others.

When a second, authorized membership portal was launched by Your Party a week after the first, the internal shift was readily apparent. The launch was accompanied by a video endorsement from Corbyn, but not Sultana. Instead, she released a short statement saying that, as a member of Your Party, she would “fight hard for maximum member democracy.” Three weeks on, no membership figures have been released. Presumably, there is not much to shout about this time. By sidelining Sultana, her allies and Assemble, it seems the party pushed away many thousands of its initial supporters.

In the aftermath of the bureaucratic takeover, the status of Assemble’s relationship with Your Party was unknown. A meeting between Assemble and the bureaucrats to clear the air was promised, but repeatedly postponed. When Sean Halsall, the Southport independent that Assemble supported during the election, was put in joint charge of the pre-conference regional assemblies, the group offered him advice. They also hosted mini-assemblies at promotional events hosted by Sultana. Hallam remained hopeful that the alliance might still bear fruit, partly because he felt the party still wasn’t functioning properly: “I’m not being judgemental of the people, but the center of the Your Party system has not been able to coherently organize what it says it will, nor decide what its core constitutional elements are.” 

But in a meeting with Halsall on Oct. 6, Assemble was told the organizing of the regional assemblies would now be kept strictly in-house, and that the two organizations would be “unassociating.” The reasons given included budget constraints (the regional assemblies are being organized with almost no funding, and will rely on volunteers from the Peace and Justice Project) and data security concerns. But there was also an acknowledgement that certain people in the party’s resurgent executive just didn’t like assemblies, and didn’t want them to be an integral part of its future. Assemble’s blueprint had been officially nixed by the bureaucrats. 

Hallam recently took part in an online debate about how the Your Party conference should be run. All the speakers agreed that in its current guise — with a planned total of 13,000 delegates attending over two days at the end of November, plus a final online vote involving many thousands more — the conference would be too large and too rushed for true deliberative democracy to take root. Like so much labeled democratic in Britain, the conference risked becoming a rubber-stamping exercise — a theatrical facade.

A beacon of hope

Assemble was born out of a recognition that single issue campaigns, like Just Stop Oil’s, were fantastic at grabbing media and societal attention, but otherwise inherently limited. As Coyle put it to European Alternatives, “transgressive actions that call for reform are radical in tone, but not content. Having tea with your neighbors in the function room of a mosque and thrashing out local matters isn’t radical in tone, but it is in nature. Taking hammers to a petrol station feels more radical than a sober, directly democratic process to decide on key national issues — but it’s not necessarily.”

In the months before Assemble’s launch, hundreds of Just Stop Oil activists were arrested for slow marching in protest of new oil and gas production. Facing severe new anti-protest legislation that, combined with a creaking justice system, they were paralyzed under bail conditions for years while facing up to two additional years in prison. Perhaps understandably, finding new recruits to replace them was becoming increasingly difficult.

Despite being founded by climate activists, using seed funding from the Climate Emergency Fund, Assemble is not a climate group. It comes with no policies attached, only a desire to replace the flawed representative democracy we are used to — where a politician supposedly represents their constituents but votes to please their party executive — with a more direct form of deliberative democracy. This would involve people deciding what they want and independently running for office to implement it. Ultimately, Assemble represents a profound belief in people — both in their inherent sense, and in their ability to overcome differences if the setting is right.

“People arrive with differing opinions, but a well run assembly does bring about consensus,” Coyle said. “They can be an effective and natural way to combat far-right disinformation.” As a case in point, he recalls how 15-minute cities — an urban planning model that became twisted into a totalitarian conspiracy theory — cropped up at the recent House of the People, Assemble’s first national assembly. “No one was shouted down, no one got angry. It just led to a discussion. And the group was able to find a positive way of resolving it and moving on.”

Taking part in these assemblies can be extremely empowering. In a recent interview for New Statesman, Hallam stated that after a “really good” assembly, half of the people involved could be expected to knock on doors for the cause. Two of the independent candidates that Assemble supported during last year’s general election, in Wigan and Milton Keynes, had no prior political experience but were inspired to run for office after taking part in a local assembly.

The ability to combat far-right disinformation and inspire political engagement couldn’t be more valuable in the U.K.’s current political landscape. The last election saw the second lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage in 1928, and the overwhelming favorite to win the next general election is Reform U.K., a far-right party that blames immigration for all of Britain’s ills, and plans to scrap any measures that address climate change. Between 2019 and 2024, a staggering 92 percent of Reform U.K.’s funding came from fossil fuel interests and climate deniers.

In September, Zack Polanski was elected the leader of the Green Party by a landside, and the self-described eco-populist ran on a policy program nearly indistinguishable from Your Party’s socialist co-founders. If Assemble now finds itself firmly outside the Your Party tent, could it bring deliberative democracy to the Green Party instead?

“Motions have been put to the Green Party executive by members supportive of us and people’s assemblies,” Coyle said. “Zac and Carla [Denyer, MP for Bristol Central and former Green Party leader] are pro-citizen assemblies and trying to adopt these new structures. Ultimately, whatever organization wants to wake up and smell the coffee, we’re willing to work with them.”

For now, though, Assemble will get back to working on their own local assembly program, and revitalizing British democracy on its own. “We did everything we could to pursue an inside track [with Your Party], even after it felt unpleasant,” Coyle said. “It may have been more principled to leave, but we decided to hang in there and take more crap in the hope it would benefit the wider movement.”

In a recent debate on Your Party’s founding conference, after Hallam argued for delegates to be selected via unfettered sortition, he concluded with an ultimatum. “What we need to do is focus on making sure that the fundamentals of open debate, discussion and deliberation can happen at the conference. If not, then there’s a great tradition of direct action, which, uh, you know…” As Hallam laughed, so did the moderator. 

When I later asked Hallam if this was a veiled threat or an empty one, he referenced the 1964 Democratic National Convention in the U.S., where an all-white Mississippi delegation was challenged and picketed by a surprise Black delegation, exposing how the party had systematically excluded Black people in the state. “There’s definitely a role for making a statement if the center of a political party is being duplicitous,” he added with a smile.

This article Inside the fight for radical democracy in Britain’s new left party was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/10/inside-fight-assemble-your-party-britain-new-left-party/