The Connections convention held in Sheffield on Saturday 6 June 2026 brought many socialists for a well organised and largely comradely event. This was apart from some attempt to have comrade Chris Williamson ‘no platformed’. We were unaware of this ‘behind the scenes’ activity until Larry O’ Hara recorded that “Ex Labour MP Chris Williamson spoke at a Republic YP workshop” adding “to the discomfort of some de-platformers”.
So, the demonisers and witch-hunters were among us? Who has forgotten the press and the Labour Party bureaucracy hunting down ‘anti-Semitism’? These kinds of wedge issues lead to attacks on democracy, free speech and comradely behaviour. It is how some far-left intellectuals try to become guardians of ‘proletarian’ morality. The thought police want to read your mind, identify any impure thoughts and banish you to the wilderness.
Still nothing came of it. Before identifying some important political divisions within the Convention, I want to agree with the general assessment of Larry O’Hara for Dem Bloc (see Tale of Two Conferences 6 June 2026). It was “a qualified success”, good for networking and discussion but with a somewhat awkward finish. Republican Labour Education and Republic YP comrades took a similar overall view. We thank the organisers for their hard work and a fine lunch between the workshops.
April 12 and May 6
The convention took place with these events of 12 April and 6 May in mind. On April 12 the left in Your Party suffered a defeat. The Central Executive Committee (CEC) decided to exclude various Marxist groups and overthrow the Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC). The coup against the ISEC put Niall Christie, a supporter of RYP elected to the CEC to represent Scotland, in an impossible position. He resigned along with all members of the ISEC.
On 6 May we had the first round of national and local elections since YP was launched in Liverpool. Given the challenges we face from the Labour government, Reform and English fascism the performance at the polls was poor. This is no criticism of the effort put in by YP and other socialist candidates and their supporters. (I include myself in that list). These elections highlighted the massive gap between what is needed and where we are.
Plenaries, official Workshops and self organised Workshops
The Convention was organised through an opening Plenary, followed by two official workshop sessions. The first workshop session began from 1-45 and the second session from 3-30. At 5pm there was a closing Plenary. In parallel with the official Workshops were two sessions of self organised or fringe meetings.
The Republican Labour Education Forum and Republic YP provided two fringe workshops. The first was the Republican Labour Education Forum’s session about Tony Benn’s Commonwealth. In the second, Republic Your Party led a session on the way forward. It was the first time most RYP comrades met face-to-face. We found ourselves singing from the same song sheet.
In the opening Plenary I spoke from the floor supporting Nick Long’s observation that the Labour Party had taken twenty years to become established and Your Party was barely six months old. We needed more patience and determination whilst recognising the current epoch demands urgency. There must be more focus on the YP programme and understanding the nature of the current epoch (for example a ‘crisis of democracy’) and how to respond to it.
First divide – Workshops on organisation-structure and programme-epoch
It is of little concern whether workshops were official or fringe. All knowledge about the many topics on offer is valid and welcome. However, there is politics behind the kind of topics chosen for the mainstream workshops and self-organised fringe. There was a rough divide between matters of organisation and structure in the mainstream, and programme and nature of the epoch in the self-organised fringe. What kind of political thinking led to this configuration of topics?
The mainstream workshops were mainly about, for example, ‘creating and running assemblies’, ‘local election organisation’, ‘getting young people active’ and ‘delegate organising’ and ‘Neurodiverse people in activism’. The issues of anti-Semitism and Transphobia seem to be about divisions not programme. There was a session on organisation and strategy run by Dem Bloc on ‘Party, sect or movement’.
The self-organised workshops were more concerned with programme and nature of the period. There were two sessions on the question of programme, one in the name of Tina Becker, Democratic Socialists and others and the other by the Republican Labour Education Forum on Tony Benn’s Commonwealth. There were discussions on the nature of the present epoch including the ‘World on Fire’, ‘Socialism and the current crisis’.
The question is not about the validity of the topics on offer to participants. All knowledge about the truth is useful. However, Your Party remains the polo-party with a hole at the centre where the programme should be. This issue has to be a mainstream issue. Even basic ideas about what a programme is and what role does it play are not necessarily understood or agreed.
In Your Party there are at least three kinds of programmes in play – social monarchist, republican and communist. Simply recognising this fact and the relative merits of the cases being made would have been a real gain for everybody present. The failure of the TM leadership is not primarily about speed but about their failure to lead on the question of the Your party programme. This is probably because Corbyn’s social monarchy programme is assumed. Debate would question its value.
The Grassroots Left (GL), the CEC electoral front for the majority of the YP left, focused on organisation and structure. Its failure is not because it did not win an election against TM. It is because it had no programmatic foundations. Therefore, the coalition behind it collapsed and left nothing behind. The remnants of GL came together at the Sheffield conference. The topics chosen for the mainstream workshops suggest nothing has been learned from the failure of the GL. This has now turned into a debate between leave or remain.
Second divide – Remain or Leave
The action of the CEC on 12 April split Your Party into ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’. This was the second major divide at the Convention between those who have left Your Party or advocate leaving and those who remain and advocate remaining. Remainers include Dem Bloc, Republic YP and Platform for a Democratic Party. Leavers include the newly formed Socialist Federation and the Democratic Socialists. Members of the CPGB (Weekly Worker), excluded by the 12 April decision, are in favour of remaining.
The 12 April CEC decision was a defeat for the left, not least Republic YP who lost our only ‘voice’ on the CEC. One response to defeat is to leave and announce plans to set up an alternative. New small sects can be formed at the drop of a hat and with a great fanfare of trumpets. It is avoiding reality. A mass party cannot be formed by ill-fated breakaways that don’t have any programme. Your Party has gathered tens of thousands of members and this is where the fight for a mass party has to take place and be won.
There are different cases for remaining in Your Party. Republic YP argues that it is premature to leave this pre-party formation before the fundamental questions of purpose and programme and a shared view of the epoch have been agreed. The fact that the present elected TM leadership of YP have violated democratic norms and good practice is not a reason to leave YP. All that has happened is that Corbyn revealed the YP unofficial programme being imposed on Scottish YP. This advances our knowledge and shows the relations between England and Scotland must concern all members in England.
Republic YP has seen political force being applied against us. Of the seven candidates who endorsed our platform, two had been illegitimately barred from standing (CW and RR) a third (NC) was pushed out the door. Our reaction is that the more we are being attacked the more we need to resist, not simply in the negative sense but by making the positive case for the kind of party that is needed. This is why one of our sessions drew on the work of Tony Benn.
Republic YP had every reason to resign from Your Party to protest the unjustified and undemocratic CEC decisions. But we came out firmly against leaving. We should have not run away after the first whiff of Corbyn grapeshot. Once the YP programme has been decided it will be possible to make a political determination as to whether the party has any future or not. Instead we are playing the game of personality cults and trying to assess the value of the party-monarch (e.g. Corbyn or Sultana) instead of the party itself as defined by its programme.
Third divide – Trotskyism and Labour Populism
A third major division is over what kind of party should Your Party become. On one side were Trotskyist-Stalinist trends, which wanted to build a mass communist or Marxist party and had joined Your Party with this aim in mind. On the other side are those who want to build Your Party as a mass populist party of Labour (i.e. the trade union movement) to replace the established Labour Party.
The presence and influence of the Trotskyist groups at the Convention was obvious. These included Workers Power, Anti-Capitalist Resistance, the Bolshevik Tendency, the CPGB, the Spartacist League, Socialist Alternative, and the International Socialist Alternative. There was no sign of the SWP, the Socialist Party or RS21 but their members may have been present.
The leading populist Labour politicians include Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll, Beth Winter, George Galloway and Chris Williamson. We could add former Labour MP, Dave Nellist to the list and Tony Benn even though he is no longer with us. Prior to the launch of Your Party, there were two versions of populist Labour in the Workers Party (George Galloway and Chris Williamson) and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (Dave Nellist).
Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and Chris Williamson were present at the Your Party Liverpool founding conference with Chris as a ‘dual member’. Andrew Feinstein and Chris Williamson were the only two who spoke at the Connections convention with Andrew invited to address the opening Plenary session and Chris at the Republic YP meeting. Populist Labour was present among the rank and file at the convention through Democratic Bloc, Platform for a Democratic Party and Republic YP.
It would be a mistake to think that these two broad trends were homogeneous blocs. There are important differences or variations within both of the ‘camps’. In general, the Trotskyists have rejected Corbyn’s Your Party as he rejected them by ending their ‘dual membership’. The perspective is to build a mass communist party now by appealing directly to the working class. However populist communists do this in the name of ‘socialism’ not in the more scientific ‘communism’ associated with Stalinism. In the new Democratic Socialists and the Socialist Federation we have two Trotskyist communist fronts established from within Your Party.
Amongst the populist Labour trend the divide is between social monarchist Labour and republican Labour. The former takes their historical reference from the 1945 Labour government and the latter from Tony Benn’s republican Commonwealth Bill. Republic Your Party was set up to make the case for Tony Benn’s political break from Old Labour and adapt that to the current epoch in the UK in 2026.
Fourth divide – Convention Statement
There was considerable confusion and abstention over the Statement debated in the closing Plenary. Larry O’Hara’s report provides detail of the process by which “a ‘Draft Statement’ at odds with the Connections network’s nature” was produced. The undeclared or unrecognised struggle between Trotskyists and populist Labour was played out in the Convention statement.
In essence the Trotskyists were seeking to get the event to make commitments to their direction of travel and link to the transitional formations of the Socialist Federation and the Democratic Socialists. The statement therefore includes reference in the draft to “socialism (the rule of the working class)” to be replaced in an amendment by “a classless society in which production is for need, not private profit, with a planned economy in place of the market and private ownership”. This echoes a long running debate among various strands.
Some of the Trotskyists were trying to turn the convention into an appendage of the Socialist Federation or the Democratic Socialists. Hence its commitment to planning “for a socialist challenge in the 2027 local elections…preparing the ground for the building of the kind of member-led party we actually need”.
If the statement were passed, would it overthrow the original idea of Connections as a parliament-assembly not a party? There is a role for Connections as an assembly with democratic-republican secular principles. It would remain a non-party organisation as a democratic body not a factional one.
There was therefore confusion and unease about the statement. Larry says “Virtually every amendment saw mass abstentions, and virtually no votes in favour or against: one passed with a single vote for! In vain Khan, Wimborne-Idrissi and yours truly argued no statement was needed”. Of course a democratic meeting can pass whatever resolution it likes, but not one that overturns the constitution of Connections and repurposes it for the factional interests of launching a new party.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hey, why not BUY ME A COFFEE if you appreciate this post, or, better still, take out a MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION and support our work. Even if you can only commit to £1 a month, it all helps folks!
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
