Start with the good news, because there is a lot of it.

In the summer of 2025, 800,000 people gave Your Party their email address. Over the following winter the Green Party of England and Wales went from about 68,000 members to more than 200,000, and in May 2026 it had the best local elections in its history. A Labour government is in office, and the largest movement of new political joiners in a generation went somewhere else.

That settles an argument the left has had for thirty years. There is space to the left of Labour, and it is not small. Hundreds of thousands of people are looking for a party that will stand up for working people, for migrants, for Palestine and for the planet, and they no longer think Labour is it.

The space opened, and nobody built a pole in it

The bad news is what happened next.

Your Party did not become an organisation. Red Mole followed it in nineteen posts, from before it had a name, and the balance sheet is a list of decisions by a leadership to stop a membership from becoming a party: no branches for a year, the membership data kept in a few hands, a conference vote for dual membership buried by administrative stalling, no published minutes. In April, according to the groups it targeted, the executive voted to bar members of organised socialist currents it had not approved. The party that drew 800,000 sign-ups reported 55,000 members in December 2025.

The breadth was not the mistake. The machine was. A broad party run by a clique that treats organised currents as a threat cannot become a members’ party, however many people sign up.

The Greens took in far more people, and many of them are socialists. Greens Organise, the party’s left, asks its council candidates to open the books, fight cuts and demand a wealth tax. That matters. But the Green Party is an electoral party. It has no strategy for the workplaces, and its leadership’s answer to a cuts budget is still to set one more humanely.

So where did the people who were let down by Your Party go? Most went home. Some joined the Greens. A few hundred went into the Socialist Federation, which was constituted on 31 May out of the Members’ Charter grouping that fought for democracy inside Your Party and lost. The Federation is still working towards its founding congress.

What was missing was an anti-capitalist pole: a current visible enough, democratic enough and rooted enough that people angry with Your Party’s leadership could see it and choose to join it. That pole did not exist. It does not exist now.

A federation of survivors is not a strategy

The comrades of the Socialist Federation deserve respect. They fought for internal democracy when it was unpopular with the people who held the keys, and they were right. Their platform calls for a democratic working-class party independent of Labour and of the Greens. Their June conference wrote in everything the Socialist Alliance left to goodwill: instant recall, minuted minority positions, no bloc votes for affiliated groups and a strict separation of powers.

The same conference turned down, by nearly two to one, a pledge that every candidate would oppose every cut. I moved it, with two comrades, and lost. The federation built the chassis and, that afternoon, declined to name the destination.

That is the problem with a federation built from the survivors of a defeat. It is a lifeboat. It keeps people together, and that is worth doing. But it cannot by itself become the party it is waiting for, because it starts from the left’s own ranks rather than from a rise in struggle, and its first instinct is to protect what is left.

We have seen this before. The Socialist Alliance gathered the far left and stayed the size of the far left, and the largest group in it ended up running it. Left Unity, launched in 2013 on a wave of goodwill, did the same thing more slowly. In fact, a party grows out of a confident movement that produces new activists faster than the left can absorb them. Without that, a new party is the old left with a new letterhead.

That is why this is a long-term project. The pole has to be built where people are already fighting: in the unions, in the Palestine movement, in climate and housing campaigns, against the far right. A left that is strong there will be able to gather the next wave of people looking for something to the left of Labour. A left that is not will meet that wave the way it met this one.

The revolutionary left is too weak, and divided the wrong way

Here we have to talk about ourselves.

The revolutionary left in England and Wales is small. Its biggest groups have a few thousand members, most have a few hundred, and ours has fewer than that. Its divisions are real: Workers Power was right in 2020, answering the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s call for regroupment, that the differences between these groups are “real and sincerely held”.

But the worst division is not between ideas. It is between campaigns. Too much of the left’s work goes into fronts that each belong to one group. A union militant who wants to fight racism finds one group’s front; a student who wants to fight austerity finds another’s. Each front recruits to its parent and treats the others as competitors. Each group guards its own front more jealously than it builds anything shared.

The result is that the left is weaker than its numbers. Its activists are spread across rival platforms, its calendars clash, and the people it most needs to reach see a row of stalls rather than a movement.

We are not the only ones saying so. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s 2025 conference passed a motion, The rise of the far right and reassembling the left, that puts it well: “A left which is divided into single-faction groups, each cultivating its own garden, where cooperation is limited and debate stifled, is tremendously debilitating.” Its practical proposals deserve a hearing too. It wants the unions to stop handing their anti-racism to Stand Up To Racism and to mobilise their own members behind their own banners. It wants local labour movements to become “centres of local political life”, with trades councils revived and anti-cuts initiatives set up. That is common ground, and it should be acted on.

Where the motion goes wrong is in what it thinks regroupment is for. It says the AWL should “see ourselves as central in piecing together” a new Marxist left, and that “we may need to focus on winning individuals to our perspective, rather than groups”. It lists among the “politically reactionary movements” the left has wrongly backed everything from “Scottish nationalism at the milder end, to Hamas”, which makes support for Scottish self-determination a mark of the bad left. A regroupment whose terms are one group’s positions, and whose aim is to win individuals to that group, is recruitment with a wider net.

The motion also lists the AWL’s past mergers as successes: the Left Faction of the International Socialists in 1975, and “the ‘Thornettite’ WSL” in 1981. Both ended in brutal splits that left both parts weaker. The first fusion, the International-Communist League, broke up in 1976, its minority’s leaders, by their own account, suspended at a meeting they were not invited to. The minority’s account, published in the Workers Power magazine that December, adds something the AWL leaves out. Both sides had agreed that the fused group’s main work would be a joint Action Programme, and that was where it broke. Every debate of substance, Workers Power wrote, “was sabotaged by charges of cliquism, apolitical factionalism”, and the differences were “lost in a storm of slander and manoeuvre”. That is one side’s version. Its lesson holds either way: a joint programme written inside a fusion becomes a contest over who leads, not a guide to what to do. The second fusion is the one to study, because on paper it did everything right.

Socialist Press announced it in May 1981 as “a new Trotskyist organisation some 300-strong”, made of “two equal-sized Trotskyist organisations”. Its platform of July 1981 named its differences, on Afghanistan, the EEC and the general strike, fixed “a timetable” to decide them, and let “the different views” be “expressed publicly”. John Lister wrote that the talks had avoided any “moratorium” on differences or “agree to disagree” formulae, the kind “that have marred previous fusion bids and laid the basis for further splits”.

Workers Power was not convinced. In June 1981 it argued that the differences over Afghanistan and the EEC had been “glossed over” as tactical, and that the two groups had agreed to disagree on how the post-war workers’ states were formed. “Without clarification on such questions,” it wrote, “differences, like those over Afghanistan, will occur again.” It added a sentence the AWL’s motion could still learn from: “Goodwill and non-aggression pacts are no substitute for the hammering out of the real political differences.”

The warning was borne out. Within a year the WSL had divided over the Falklands. By the summer of 1982, Workers Power noted, the promised joint programmatic document had not appeared, and the one issue of the theoretical journal carried “no notice of the resolution of the disputed questions”: Afghanistan, the general strike, the EEC and Kampuchea. The timetable had lapsed. The debate on Afghanistan was held off by both sides, and in the end it was settled after 36 of the minority had been expelled in April 1984 and could no longer vote. The internal record is all in the archive. The guarantees were written down, and they did not hold, because there was not enough trust for a majority to keep its promise or a minority to accept defeat. War has no victors: From 300 people in the summer of 1981, the group had fewer than 150 voting members in the summer of 1984, even when Thornett’s expelled faction is counted.

“Reassembling” is a revealing word. It belongs to the 1970s, when several groups tried to put the left back together organisationally: the AWL’s predecessor with its 1974 “Open Letter for a Revolutionary Regroupment”, and one of ACR’s own predecessors, the International Marxist Group, with the unity offensives that John Ross’s Faction and Party argued for in 1976. What those projects lacked was not goodwill or even good rules. It was trust and political convergence, which come only from common work and open argument over time. Without them, the first serious test reopens every division. Reassembly is the wrong image. The pieces do not fit back together, because they were never one thing to begin with.

Workers Power was right about 1981, but its own answer is no better. It has held the same line since 1975, and replying to an earlier AWL call in 2020, it said groups should unite only on a written programme of principles, strategy and tactics. That sounds rigorous. In practice it means waiting until one group’s finished document is accepted by everyone else, and that is not unity either.

What we can learn from 1987

There is a better model, and it comes from our own history.

In 1987 two small British groups, the International Group and Thornett’s Socialist Group, fused to form the International Socialist Group. Their Fusion Text did not demand agreement on everything. It set out seven programmatic points, clearly enough that the new group could be held to them. It named its disagreements openly: three different theories of the Stalinist states “may be combined” in one organisation, and a debate on Cuba was needed. It scheduled discussions on a timetable. It left tactics to perspectives documents that a conference could change. It committed the group to “an unremitting struggle for theoretical clarity” and rejected “unprincipled political combinations”.

Two years earlier, Phil Hearse had warned what happens without that. Uniting the left on democratic rules alone, he wrote, forgets “that between abstract programmatic references and written positions, there are crucial questions of strategy and programme in practice”: how to relate to a mass reformist party, how to fight in the unions, how to apply the united front. Those are the questions that decide what members do every week.

The 1987 text had the same form as the 1981 platform, with named differences and a timetable. The difference was not in the wording. Thornett’s group had just been through the 1984 expulsions, and the International Group had just left Socialist Action over what it called unprincipled manoeuvres and blocs in its leadership. Both had learnt what a fusion without trust costs. The 1987 fusion held together, drew in others, and became the Fourth International’s section. It is the nearest thing to a successful regroupment the British far left has.

The loyal joiner

There is a paradox in our own tradition, and we should face it before asking anything of anyone else.

Part of the left joins broad projects to recruit from them and leaves when the recruiting stops. We have rightly criticised that. Our tradition has done the opposite. The International Socialist Group was in the Socialist Alliance and in Respect. Socialist Resistance was in Left Unity. Anticapitalist Resistance was in Your Party. Each time we joined loyally, built the broad project in good faith, and hoped that this one would become the party. Each time the project broke, and we were left smaller and starting again.

A loyal joiner could still be a kind of sect, one that joins everything. It puts its hope in the winds of the mass movements creating the next vehicle, instead of people working with a plan of their own. When the vehicle fails, nothing visible is left for the people it disappointed to gather round. That is what happened this year. The people let down by Your Party looked for a democratic, anti-capitalist current with its own plan of action, and the current that should have been there had spent its energy building someone else’s party (sadly, a party that Corbyn himself has no real enthusiasm for).

The answer is not to stop joining. Broader parties and broader campaigns are where the next wave of people will be. It is to join with our own pole intact: a visible plan of action of our own, and our own organisation of those who draw the lesson. Unity in action and independent organisation are not opposites. Each needs the other.

Unity, test, organise, and start again

The space to the left of Labour will open again. In party it already has, in the Green Party in England. The cost of living, the climate, the wars and the far right will keep it open.

Your Party will go on with its bureaucratic restrictions, as Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain do. Each has a leader and a place on the ballot paper. None has the democracy or the action programme that a pole needs: members who decide, and demands they can fight for where they work and live.

When the next wave comes, the people moving into the space will not be looking for the left’s existing groups. They will be looking for a movement that wins things, and for an organisation they can trust to let its members decide.

That is what the left can build now, and it will take years. Unity in action, then a concrete test, then organising those who draw the lesson from it, then starting again at the next opportunity. Do that well and the next Your Party will find a pole already standing. Do it badly and we will be building lifeboats again.

Scotland is different. The national question, a Scottish Green Party with its own record in government, and Ecosocialist Scotland’s own judgement of its allies all mean that what is argued here is for England and Wales.