Should Jeremy Corbyn seek my advice on setting up a new political party I would say, as someone who has been there and got the T-shirt (or, specifically, the mug): don’t do it! I can’t comment on the electoral potential for a socialist breakaway party but I can say that forming a new party comes with no little blood, sweat and tears.
The Yorkshire Party
Along with two likeminded souls, I set up the Yorkshire Party in 2014 in advance of the European parliament elections in June of that year. Essentially, it was a name only (we didn’t even have an accepted party symbol at that point) but we wanted to test our core idea of Yorkshire devolution and thought that a region-wide election would be a perfect laboratory.
Although the result gave the embryonic party a very modest 20,000 votes over the entire region, there was enough goodwill, and in particular offers of ongoing support, to convert this trial run into something more durable; in other words, to form a ‘real’ political party.
Within a year we had a leader, a deputy leader, a website, a constitution, an executive committee, paid up members, policy groups, branches, vetting procedures for candidates and all the other trappings a party comes with.
Constructing a new political party
And therein lies the problem. If you’re looking at constructing the party’s internal mechanisms, that is time you are not outward facing in terms of campaigning and getting, what you hope, is a distinct message across. Political parties are nothing if not campaigning organisations; they are not there to discuss operational minutiae such as who precisely on the executive committee should have voting rights and who can propose constitutional amendments at conference.
In addition, a lot of the leadership’s time is spent dealing with personal matters: massaging egos, lifting morale, managing expectations and reinvigorating defeated candidates (and there will be a lot of those in the early days). Then there are inevitable disputes. Clashes of different kinds amongst members in a small party can cause huge disruption, so disputes mechanisms need to be robust and have trained people in charge of their implementation.
It is vital that these disputes do not become bitter and protracted, as the media will be on the lookout for any division, along with any bust ups, slips up, and gaffes. A party’s instinct is often is to try and control behaviour from the centre as a way of avoiding this, but this has to be balanced against letting people participate, learn and ‘do politics’. After all, doing politics, surely, is why people join a political party, especially one with so little history, in the first place.
Party political funding
There is also the question of finance. Running a political party has never been cheap, especially in the modern era when professional software is needed to run a database of members, supporters, those likely to vote for the new party, and so on. In the absence of large corporate donors, it takes a lot of work to raise even modest amounts by way of donations from members and supporters; a task where the leader has to be front and centre.
Once again this is an activity which means the leader is not campaigning and not putting the party’s message across in the media.
What does success look like
Finally, there is the question of the end result. Part of the reason for setting up the Yorkshire Party was the view of some involved in the already established cross-party and non-party group, the Yorkshire Devolution Movement, that to achieve devolution in the region, pressure on the established parties was best done through the ballot box. This is comparable to the way that UKIP’s relative success forced the Conservatives into calling for a Brexit referendum.
In many ways the Yorkshire Party has succeeded, or at least partially succeeded. After all, in our region the devolution genie is out of the bottle as we now have four directly elected mayors with meaningful powers to impact on their local communities. Yorkshire devolution purists would argue it is not enough – they seek a ‘One Yorkshire’ deal with an elected assembly for the region – but undoubted progress has been made since the formation of the Yorkshire Party in 2014, so success, of sorts, has been achieved.
What chance does Corbyn have?
Although there is the undoubted thrill of seeing enthusiastic individuals join the team and finding people in good numbers to vote for what you believe in, saving deposits or pilling up votes in good second places is not a substitute for the substantial change you seek. I do not know what Jeremy Corbyn’s new party would see as a success, but whatever it is I doubt it can be done without cooperation and collaboration with others across the political landscape.
In summary, it might be that this new party captures the imagination of the electorate and, certainly, the nature of the new venture will excite many. However, the distractions, mostly administrative, that come with setting up a new party could have the potential to undermine that same excitement and cause the whole project to fail.
