When independent MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched their new political venture in July 2025, they did so under a name that seemed almost deliberately empty: “Your Party”. Initially dismissed as a placeholder, the name is now official, having been narrowly confirmed by members at the party’s inaugural conference in November.
The name won just 37% of the vote against alternatives including “For the Many”, “Popular Alliance” and “Our Party”. The contested nature of this choice, and the peculiar blandness of the winning option, reflects a deeper crisis in how the far left names itself in the contemporary era.
Ten years ago, my research into 20th-century British Marxist groups revealed that these organisations once operated within what I characterise as a coherent naming culture. Terms like “communist”, “workers” and “socialist” were commonly used and carried substantial symbolic weight. Throughout the 20th century, British Leninist groups used these terms not merely as brands but mechanisms to articulate their identity, legitimacy and relationship to the revolutionary tradition.
The patterns were remarkably consistent within each tradition. Orthodox communist groups emerging from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was founded in 1920, showed complete conformity – every single one retained “Communist party” in its name, even decades after splitting from the CPGB.
Anti-revisionist groups, influenced by Maoism, displayed a different pattern. Of the 11 groups I studied, nine used “communist”. More significantly, seven appended “Marxist-Leninist” to their names – an attempt to reconnect some of the smallest and most peripheral groups, often with only a handful of members, back to a grander tradition of messianic leaders.
Most revealing were the Trotskyist groups. Of 13 major organisations, only five used “communist” at any point. Of the remainder, six instead opted for “socialist” in their name and six included the word “revolutionary”. The word “workers” featured in four names. This diversity masked fundamental instability in leftist politics. Most Trotskyist groups changed their names at least twice.
The left’s endless internecine disputes on nomenclature were infamously satirised in Monty Python’s riff on the idea of the Judean People’s Front. It’s hard not to detect some of these dynamics also at play in Your Party’s troubled launch.
When Lenin rebranded “social democracy” as “communism” in 1917, he was not simply changing a label but investing enormous symbolic capital in a term that would shape leftwing politics for seven decades. The Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920, became the anchor of this naming culture in Britain, with splinter groups and rivals forced to negotiate their position relative to these established terms.
This naming system became increasingly dysfunctional over time. By the 1970s, even terms like “party” had become almost impossible to define coherently within the Leninist tradition. Was a “party” the revolutionary vanguard waiting for its moment in history, or a conventional electoral organisation competing for votes?
When the Socialist Workers Party emerged in 1977 from its predecessor International Socialist, it attempted to embody both definitions simultaneously, presenting itself as both a mass political party and a disciplined Leninist cadre. This contradiction contributed to rapid, often confusing shifts in strategy that alienated members and observers alike.
Whose party?
Your Party emerges from the wreckage of this collapsed naming system. The term “communist” was largely unusable in British politics by 1991. “Marxist-Leninist” had become a punchline even within the far left. “Workers” sounded antiquated in a deindustrialised Britain. Even “socialist” carries decades of baggage. What remained? A name so generic it barely qualified as one at all.
The genius and the problem of the name Your Party are inseparable. The name refuses to make the traditional ideological commitments that far-left names once signalled. It does not claim to be the vanguard party, does not invoke workers or socialism, and does not even claim ownership of itself through terms like “our party” – which, tellingly, came last in the naming vote. Instead, it performs a nominal sleight-of-hand, suggesting both maximal democracy (“it’s yours!”) and minimal commitment.
This vagueness might appear strategically savvy in an age of widespread distrust of traditional party structures. But the chaotic conference that ratified the name suggests otherwise. The bitter disputes over collective versus individual leadership, the expulsions of members, and Sultana’s boycott of the first day all point to unresolved issues. When 20th-century Trotskyist groups battled over whether to call themselves a “league”, “tendency” or “party”, those were not merely semantic disputes but arguments about organisational structure and democratic accountability, encoded in nomenclature.
Your Party attempts to avoid these arguments by adopting a name that articulates no clear position. But the politics of naming cannot be escaped so easily. What does “Your” signify when members cannot agree on basic questions of leadership or membership rules? Whose party is it, ultimately?
The polling data tells a sobering story. Support for Your Party fell from 18% in July 2025 to just 12% by November, while the Green party, with its clear brand identity, experienced a membership surge. Perhaps voters and activists sense the same problem that plagued late 20th-century Leninist groups – when you cannot articulate what your name signifies, you cannot sustain a coherent political project.
The collapse of Leninist naming culture reflected the exhaustion of a symbolic system where words like communist and workers had been stretched to accommodate too many contradictions. Your Party represents an attempt to build something new without that vocabulary. But in trying to avoid the old mistakes, it may have created a new one – a name so empty that it cannot provide the symbolic foundation a political organisation requires.
Nicholas Dickinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
