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Zarah Sultana celebrates, as Your Party backs ‘collective leadership’

Your Party members have backed a proposal for collective leadership at the founding conference. The options presented to members were the collective leadership model or single leadership. Notably, Zarah Sultana supported the option which won, whereas Jeremy Corbyn was a proponent for the alternative:

Your Party: collective Leadership

Following the vote, Your Party will have a collective leadership for its first two years. This will mean the party makes decisions via a collective group, which is headed by a non-MP. As the decision will mean there will be no leadership contest between Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, outlets like the Independent have framed the story as follows:

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana dropped as Your Party leaders

Sultana, meanwhile, supported the result:

I have fought for maximum member democracy since day one. Seeing members choose collective leadership is truly exciting.

Together, we’re building a new socialist party – radically democratic and powered by a mass movement. This party will be led by its members not MPs. This is only the beginning.

The result is seen as a loss for Your Party current co-leader Corbyn:

Corbyn has previously made his feelings clear on why he supports the single leadership model:


Others such as Novara’s Michael Walker are heavily critical of the collective leadership model:


Walker’s colleague Steven Methven took issue with Walker’s point about dual membership, showing that there’s a breadth of opinion even within individual left-wing media organisations:

Methven also noted that the Your Party leadership model vote was tight:

Regarding the potential Your Party leadership options, Ed Sykes wrote for the Canary on 28 November that members will vote either to make this CEC the collective leadership, or simply to make it part of a leadership team alongside a single elected leader. The former would represent a significant break from how parties usually work in the UK.

He added that leaders have taken on a more prominent role in Britain in recent decades. And this has arguably contributed to the anti-democratic policies that have come to dominate over that period. In this context, a more collective, grassroots, member-led model of leadership could help to challenge the destructive idea that the ‘leader-centred’ system we have today is the only way to do things. Alternative models like this already exist in some trade unions, left-wing parties in Europe, Latin American grassroots movements, and further afield.

Featured image via Zarah Sultana

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.