Your Party: if the name sounds terrible, there’s a good reason for it

Introduction

In July 2025, independent MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched a new political project under the deliberately plain title “Your Party”. Initially treated as a placeholder, this label became permanent after it narrowly won backing from members at the first party conference in November.

Internal debate over the name

At the conference, “Your Party” secured only 37% of members’ votes, losing out individually to alternatives such as “For the Many”, “Popular Alliance” and “Our Party”, but still emerging as the final choice. The controversy around the decision, along with dissatisfaction about how dull the winning name sounded, underlined a deeper identity crisis across the contemporary far left.

Historical naming cultures on the left

Research into 20th‑century British Marxist groupings shows they once operated within a clear naming culture. Terms like “communist”, “workers” and “socialist” functioned not only as descriptions but as symbols of legitimacy and continuity with a revolutionary tradition.

Communist tradition

Orthodox communist factions that grew out of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), founded in 1920, consistently kept “Communist Party” in their titles even after they split away. These names signalled both adherence to Leninist politics and a claim to inherit the mantle of the original party.

Maoist and anti‑revisionist groups

Anti‑revisionist currents influenced by Maoism followed similar but more elaborate patterns. Among 11 such organizations surveyed, nine used “communist” and seven combined it with “Marxist‑Leninist” to link very small, marginal groups back to a grand tradition of charismatic leadership.

Trotskyist factions

Trotskyist organizations displayed greater variety in naming. Out of 13 main Trotskyist groups, only five used “communist” at any point, while others preferred “socialist”, with six incorporating “revolutionary” and four using “workers”, and many changed their names repeatedly over time.

Naming, structure and accountability

These naming disputes were not just semantic. Labels like “party”, “league” or “tendency” encoded arguments about whether a group should act as a disciplined vanguard, a broader electoral formation or an internal current within a larger organization, all with implications for internal democracy and accountability.

Monty Python and factionalism

The famous Monty Python sketch about the various “People’s Fronts” satirised precisely this culture of fine‑grained splits and competing titles on the left. The tensions visible in the early life of Your Party echo this long history of quarrels over names and organizational form.

The decline of the old lexicon

The traditional Leninist naming system gradually lost coherence. By the 1970s, even the meaning of “party” in a Leninist sense was contested, suspended between the idea of a revolutionary vanguard waiting for its moment and that of a conventional electoral machine seeking votes.

An illustrative example

One example discussed is a socialist formation that tried to be both a regular political party and a tightly organized Leninist group. This dual identity produced rapid strategic shifts and confused both members and outside observers, ultimately raising the question: whose party was it meant to be?

After 1991: words that no longer work

By the early 1990s the old vocabulary had become increasingly unusable in British politics. “Communist” was widely discredited, “Marxist‑Leninist” had drifted into self‑parody even on the far left, “workers” sounded anachronistic in a deindustrialised country, and “socialist” carried heavy historical baggage.

Space for a generic name

This erosion of established labels created a void. Into this space steps “Your Party”, a name so generic it almost ceases to function as a traditional party label at all.

The ambiguity of “Your Party”

The strength and weakness of the name lie in its deliberate vagueness. It sidesteps familiar ideological signifiers such as communism, socialism or workers’ politics, and it avoids the possessive tone of “Our Party”, which notably received the fewest votes in the naming ballot.

A nominal sleight of hand

The title performs a linguistic trick by hinting at both maximum inclusion and minimum commitment. It invites individuals to project their own priorities onto the party (“it is yours”) while withholding a clear statement of collective ideology or purpose.

Conference turmoil and unresolved questions

The fractious founding conference suggested this ambiguity is not simply clever branding. Fierce disputes over whether leadership should be collective or individual, the expulsion of members, and Sultana’s boycott of the first day all indicated deep unresolved tensions.

Naming cannot avoid politics

Your Party tries to move beyond the old arguments encoded in labels such as “party”, “league” or “tendency” by choosing a title that appears neutral. Yet the article argues that politics always re‑enters through questions like what “your” actually means once members must agree on leadership, membership rules and strategic direction.

Public reception and polling

Polling data paint a sobering picture of public response. Support for Your Party reportedly fell from 18% in July 2025 to 12% by November, while Labour, with a well‑understood identity and established membership, maintained a stronger position.

A familiar problem

This decline hints that many voters and activists recognize a problem that also affected late 20th‑century Leninist groups. When a political project cannot clearly express what its name stands for, sustaining a stable and convincing organization becomes very difficult.

Symbolic exhaustion and a thin new brand

The waning of Leninist naming culture reflected the exhaustion of a symbolic system that tried to contain too many internal contradictions under words like “communist” and “socialist”. Your Party represents an attempt to launch something new while refusing that tired vocabulary.

A name without substance?

In distancing itself from the old lexicon, however, the party may have swung too far in the opposite direction. The article concludes that a label as hollow as “Your Party” risks failing to provide the symbolic anchor that any durable political organization requires.

Key quoted idea

“The brilliance and the challenge of the name ‘Your Party’ are intertwined. The name avoids making traditional ideological commitments, yet its very emptiness may leave the project without a clear political centre.”

Author’s one‑sentence summary: The article argues that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s blandly titled “Your Party” emerges from the collapse of older left‑wing naming traditions but, by stripping away ideological content, ends up with a brand too empty to offer lasting coherence.

The Conversation — 2025-12-06