The Party Question in Unchartered Waters
Your Party washed up on Scotland’s shores, while Civic Scotland mobilisations have lapped gently against the Parliament’s walls. Neither will help the Left articulate a new national vision.
British politics is in a period of decomposition. On both the left and the right, the political formations which dominated the 20th century are breaking down. The Conservative Party faces an existential threat from Reform UK. Support for the Labour Party has slumped to record lows in a string of opinion polls while Keir Starmer looks set to lose another former heartland. In Wales, Plaid Cymru’s recent by-election victory dealt his party its first parliamentary defeat in Caerphilly for 100 years.
Meanwhile, membership of the Green Party of England and Wales has doubled since Zack Polanski was elected leader in September. Despite its rocky launch, more than 800,000 people have expressed interest in Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new left-wing party.
This fragmentation extends north of the border, too. The SNP have lost more than 30,000 members since 2021. To save face, Scottish Labour has simply stopped publishing its figures. Just 12% of Scottish Greens bothered to vote in their own leadership contest earlier this summer. We are, according to Professor John Curtice, in “uncharted waters”. These changes to Britain’s party political landscape are evidence of a more systemic shift. Much to the disdain of grey technocrats like Keir Starmer and John Swinney, politics is back (or sort of). Today, ideas and policy are no longer solely the responsibility of the market as in the early naughties. Even right-wing thinkers recognise that there is, clearly, an alternative to neoliberal globalisation.
The politics which has returned, however, is not the politics of old. It is not characterised by mass parties, institutional organisation or class conflict. In fact, trade union membership continues to fall while traditional electoral coalitions disintegrate. Instead, as Anton Jäger argues, “post-politics” has been replaced by “hyper-politics”. This frantic and transient period sees formal politics re-enter our lives but exist apart from society’s class base. Everything is considered political, but there is no conflict of interests. Collective life is not resurrected, nor is mass organisation constructed. This is the environment in which the Scottish left and labour movement seeks to assert itself ahead of the 2026 Holyrood election. The question facing those preparing to lead any left-wing electoral alternative into next year’s contest is how to overcome the challenges posed by hyper-politics — and whether it can be done in such a narrow timeframe.
On Friday 24 October, Your Party Glasgow hosted Zarah Sultana in Maryhill Community Halls. The rally, attended by around 300 people, was the first time that either Sultana or Corbyn had spoken in Scotland since their Autumn bust-up. These “teething issues”, Sultana said, were now behind the Party, which plans to hold a series of deliberative assemblies and an in-person founding conference before the end of November. Sultana was also clear: Your Party will stand for the Scottish Parliament in seven months’ time.
Your Party washed up on Scotland’s shores. It did not emanate from Scottish contradictions nor originate from Scottish movements. Its leading figures represent Coventry and Islington, respectively. Nonetheless, more than 40,000 Scots signed up to the initial mailing list, demonstrating clear appetite for a fresh electoral formation. Those who have progressed to become paying members now face the urgent challenge of articulating a national vision which situates Your Party within the Scottish context from which it is presently detached.
Doing so is no easy task. The Party has yet to be formally established in England, never mind in Scotland, and local branch structures remain informal. It seems implausible that on the current timeline a Scottish conference could be convened before the end of 2025. In this context, for Your Party to stand in 2026 and consequently shift the work of party-building to the work of electioneering — with limited chance of success — would be to indulge, rather than reject, transient “hyper-politics”.
The day after Your Party Glasgow’s Maryhill rally, thousands gathered outside the Scottish Parliament to join the ‘Scotland Demands Better’ march. Organised by the Poverty Alliance with the support of the Scottish Trade Union Congress and dozens of other civil society partners, the campaign has a range of demands, including “an acceptable standard of living for everyone”.
If Your Party risks succumbing to hyper-politics, then Scotland Demands Better is reminiscent of the post-politics which preceded it. The initiative echoes the spirit of 1999 when ‘civic Scotland’ and an Alphabet Soup of organisations, be it the STUC, SCVO or SCDI, united to influence the early years of the Scottish Parliament.
Welcomed with open arms by Edinburgh’s new political class, civil society was slowly pacified by the Scottish Government’s ‘co-design’ approach to policy development. True to the politics of the ‘third way’ moment in which it was born, Holyrood has long blurred the lines between the state and the third sector, adopting a culture of endless consultation, which places ‘stakeholders’ on an equal footing and ignores different class relations. The proximity of civic Scotland to the country’s governing class has, consequently, narrowed considerably in the quarter-century since the Scottish Parliament convened.
Writing in The Herald ahead of 25 October, Neil McKay predicted that the Scotland’s Demands Better march would prove “deeply uncomfortable” for the Scottish Government. However, as demonstrators set off up the Royal Mile and away from Holyrood, John Swinney was anything but threatened. The First Minister enthusiastically lent his support to the initiative and commended those marching “for a better, fairer Scotland”.
The campaign did not so much confront the Scottish Government as have a quiet word in its ear. It would be wrong, however, to have expected much more. After all, the principal organiser of the initiative, the Poverty Alliance, is core-funded from St Andrews House. Ultimately, the fact that the job of organising such demonstrations has fallen to the third sector reflects the weakness of Scotland’s left. One would have to go back to 2022, if not further, to find a similarly well-attended anti-austerity demonstration.
This article was originally published in the Winter 2025 edition of the Scottish Left Review.