Your Party Founding Conference Speech
by Zarah Sultana
“Your Party” is a new UK socialist political party launched in November 2025 by former Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and Zarah Sultana who was a Member of Parliament representing the Labour Party from 2019 to 2024. Your Party aims to be a left alternative to the Labour Party—rooted in the working class, trade unions and social justice movements with a member-led democratic structure. This is the transcript of the speech by Zarah Sultana at the founding conference.
November 30, 2025—Thank you, Conference. Thank you for being here in sunny Liverpool today. And it gives me extra pleasure in saying that as a Liverpool fan and as always, you’ll never walk alone.
I want to start off by thanking all the workers that have made this conference possible. I want to extend my solidarity to Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union and the tape workers on strike. You have our solidarity.
I am so honored to co-found this party with Jeremy Corbyn, who I have an enormous amount of admiration and respect for. I know that I speak for all of us when I say he gave us hope when he became leader of the Labour Party.
But now we are building something new, Your Party, with more than 55,000 members. In just a few months, we have built something no one in Westminster believed was possible—a mass democratic working-class movement, the largest socialist party in the UK since the 1940s. And this, our inaugural conference, is historic. There are more than 2,000 delegates in this hall with thousands more watching online and voting.
And today we will finalize the structures of a party that belongs to its members—not to Members of Parliament (MPs), not to donors, not to nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats, but you, its members.
Some will say that the decision to adopt the collective leadership model is a win for me. It is not. It is your win. It is you, the members who have won. But you need to deliver that win. So, if you’re watching at home, take out your phone. If you’re in this hall, vote yes to the Constitution as amended.
But before we move forward, we have to confront what took place yesterday. The expulsions, the bans, the censorship on conference floor are unacceptable. It’s undemocratic. It’s an attack on members and this movement. And those decisions were made at the top, not by you.
Many of those people who were expelled found out only after they had arrived in Liverpool. People who had traveled across the country, took time off work, booked hotels, spent hundreds of pounds that they could not easily spare, discovered at the door that they had been barred. And the shocking sight of a Muslim woman being manhandled and dragged out of conference is something that should shame any party that claims to stand for equality and justice.
These actions come straight out of the Labour Rights handbook. The same playbook we have all lived through for years. The witch hunts, the smears, the intimidation, the bullying, the legal threats, and the leaks of the Murdoch press.
Let me be absolutely clear. The members will not stand for this. The movement will not stand for this. And I will not stand for this. I did not leave the Labour Party; you did not leave the Labour Party to create another Labour Party. And everywhere I’ve traveled in over 30 towns and cities across the country, from Worthing to Glasgow, from Merthyr Tydfil to Birmingham, working-class people have said the same thing: This party must be run by its members, not MPs. This party must never be captured from above. This party must never become a Labour 2.0.
And that is why we are here to build a new kind of politics—democratic, principled, and rooted in the power of the working class. Everyone in this room and everyone outside of this room knows what’s wrong with Britain. Nothing works and nothing gets better. This country is rigged to serve the rich and powerful who bought and paid for it. And we plan on beating them before they lead us into fascism to protect their own wealth and power.
Our diagnosis is simple. In the last 20 years, mega donations to political parties from the rich haven’t just doubled. They haven’t just trebled; they have gone up sevenfold.
When prices go up on your weekly shop, supermarket bosses are pocketing that and then buying politicians. When your rents soar, landlords use your cash to lobby MPs, so their interests are protected. When the seas rise and our towns flood, energy bosses buy another private jet while we all pay the price.
The billionaires buy up our newspapers, our social media platforms, our TV channels to gaslight us into blaming our neighbors for the mess. They want you angry, just not at them.
Our message to our friends and our neighbors is if you want to know why your life is getting harder and why everything keeps getting worse, know that the people who control your food, your home, your energy, and your media, they are sending billions of your hard-earned money to the Cayman Islands. And they’ve got three political parties, Labour, the Conservatives, and Reform—all sewn up. So, you work harder for longer, for less, while politicians take money from poor kids and pensioners. Everything gets difficult so offshore bank accounts get fatter.
The only thing that none of these old parties will ever say is that there is enough room for everyone in this country except for the rentiers who own Britain and charge us just for living in it. They are the real parasites and it’s about time they got taken on and taken down.
And we have a weak and pathetic Labour government that is pushed this way and that way with the political winds because it does not have the political will to confront the parasites who own Britain.
We are here to break up a system that humiliates our disabled friends and neighbors and deprives them of the cash that they need while funneling an extra 11-billion-pounds-a-year to arms companies. That’s right. Keir Starmer wants an extra 11 billion pounds on defense every year and all the old parties back it—£350 of our money every second on war.
That’s money into the pockets of shareholders for the merchants of death after two years, where our money has funded daily spy flights over the ruins of Gaza, aiding and abetting a genocide. This is a Labour government happy to oppress people abroad and at home. This isn’t a coincidence. The politicians who attack the disabled in Liverpool and demonize the desperate arriving on small boats, they are the same people who blow up our world with war, occupation, and genocide.
But we know that the real enemy of the working-class travels by private jet, not migrant dingy. So, it’s not about stopping the boats, it’s about stopping the private jets.
Ordinary humans suffer everywhere so the mighty and powerful can sleep in silk sheets in their blood-soaked mansions. And as socialists, we stand with the oppressed everywhere from Sudan to Congo to Palestine. And let me say this loudly and proudly. I am an anti-Zionist. And if we fight for it, your party will be an anti-Zionist party. Free, Free, Free, Palestine!
So, we must sever all ties with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel. We must expel the ambassador and shut down the embassy and stand with the Palestinian people until every inch of their land is free. From the river to the sea—a single democratic state with equal rights for all. And we must ensure there is a day of reckoning for those who have enabled genocide—Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, and all responsible—are held in the docks of the Hague.
And as a movement, we care so deeply about Palestine, in part because we know that the starvation and annihilation of a people in distant lands shows what our political class would do to us if they thought they could get away with it.
The same people who run Britain want you to believe that every refugee is a rapist while they grab 12 million pounds of taxpayers’ money to protect a parasite called Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor.
Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, who has never seen the inside of a cell or a courtroom. Because what matters to the rulers of Britain is not the safety of women and girls, it’s the peace and pleasure of the powerful.
What a sick society we live in where our political and media class bend over backwards for the Royal Family including Prince Andrew—close friends with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
That’s our money that provided him housing. That’s our money that defended him in court. That’s our money that put food on his table. Well, not anymore. We shouldn’t just abolish Andrew’s titles. We should abolish the monarchy itself.
The truth is we have an epidemic of fake populists who rail against every elite until someone mentions a wealth tax and then suddenly, they go quiet. Just look up Reform’s donors. They are bought and paid for by the parasites. But the real scandal is that this Labour government is mimicking them.
When Farage says, “Kick an immigrant,” Starmer replies, “How hard?” and shamefully uses the same language as Enoch Powell, calling us an “island of strangers.”
We are not an island of strangers. We are an island that is suffering. And we see politicians constantly shifting the blame from people who actually have all the money.
And then we have our home secretary, Shabans Mahmood, talking about seizing jewelry from refugees endorsed by fascist Tommy Robinson.
And our politics desperately needs an organized working class that fights back and says, “If you come for any of us, if you come for the pensioners among us, the disabled among us, the immigrants among us, the queer and trans among us, if you come for any of us, you will have to fight all of us.”
And a politics that does not center the most marginalized isn’t worthy of the name socialism.
That means saying loudly and unequivocally, refugees are welcome here and trans rights are human rights. The rise in transphobia we are seeing is deliberate. It is being stoked as a wider culture war designed to divide us. And just like with Muslims, with migrants, with disabled people, the goal is always the same. Find a scapegoat to distract people from those who really holds the power.
It is an old tactic of the ruling class—divide and rule. And our movement has to say with one voice, we will not play your game. We stand with our trans siblings, with migrants, with Muslims, with disabled people. We stand with the most marginalized.
And I stand before you as a proud child from Lozells in Birmingham. My grandparents came to this country after Britain’s rulers looted their homeland. We are here, as Sivanandan1 said, because “you were there.”
I grew up being told by politicians and police officers that my neighborhood was suspicious or worthless because we committed two offenses as soon as we were born. We were Muslim and we were working-class, and I will never apologize for either.
And yes, the stakes are enormous. The old is dying and if the new cannot be born, this will be the time of monsters. Centrist politicians presiding over decline and decay, pushing people’s rage towards the far right. But from New York, in the very heart of empire, a new politics emerges. Zohran Mamdani— unapologetically socialist, unapologetically Muslim, unapologetically immigrant—built a campaign that proved what is possible when the working class unites people who look different, play, pray differently, and love differently, but all want a life of dignity where people and planet thrive.
If we don’t win this global fight, decay will give way to fascism. And people who look like me will be imprisoned in tents and deported to war zones while everyone gets poorer except for the hedge fund managers who donate to Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. But if we win, we will hand over a world renewed for future generations.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about these stakes. It is a huge responsibility to carry. And you may have noticed that the process of starting up this party has had some hiccups. Some of that is my fault and for that I am sorry. But I want you to know that my aim from the very start has been to ensure that this party is led by you, the members, and not MPs. None of us have ever set up a new party before, never designed it—structures from scratch—and that process has been messy.
We have to get better at working with each other. We have to ensure that the best cure against any culture of backroom deals is people power. And that’s why I’ve been fighting for maximum member democracy. And we saw your hard work pay off this morning.
I know that I speak for many when I say I don’t want a party of witch hunts and stitch-ups. I want to work with every socialist in a spirit of comradeship and equality. And I want the working class to control this party as one day they should control the country.
We know that control of our economy has to be taken away from the parasitical profiteers and put into the hands of workers who actually generate our collective wealth. We are not here for tweaks of a broken system. We are not here just to lower some bills and sprinkle a wealth tax. We are here for a fundamental transformation of society to replace capitalism with socialism.
That means democracy in every workplace, every community, every corner of life. So yes, we will reverse the failed experiments of Thatcherism by taking water, energy, our railways, transport and communications back into public ownership.
But that cannot be the limits of our ambition. We must seek new horizons. The banking industry, food production, construction, and so much more. Because we know this fundamental truth. The working class can run society better than the billionaires, the profiteers, and the war criminals who rule over us today.
People used to say that a week was a long time in politics. These days it feels like everything can change in an hour or a day. Whatever difficulties we’ve had in founding this party that won’t matter, if from today, from now, we face the working class in all of its diversity and say with a united voice something that all the capitalist politicians have given up on saying—that in the sixth richest country in the world life can be better. You can breathe clean air, eat good food, and live in warm homes. You can spend less time working and more time with your loved ones. And you can look at your neighbors and know that they’re doing okay, too. Unless they happen to be billionaires, of course.
Finally, as a country, we face a stark choice. It’s socialism or barbarism. And we choose socialism.
And I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes and I’ve used this at every event I’ve spoken at. It’s a quote from Arundhati Roy who says, “Another world is not only possible. She is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Solidarity. Thank you so much.
Note: This speech was transcribed from the YouTube video of Zarah Sultana’s full speech at the Your Party founding conference in Liverpool on November 30, 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdObTwNrWWs
1 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, commonly referred to as A. Sivanandan or “Siva”, was a Sri Lankan Tamil and British novelist, activist and writer, emeritus director of the Institute of Race Relations, a London-based independent educational charity.