Working notes / Jan B

There’s still plenty of appetite for a new, popular socialist party in Scotland. Councillors and party members from the Scottish Greens are jumping ship, and the party doesn't even exist yet. TUSC and the Scottish Left Alternative has skipped the Your Party initiative and are aiming directly at the May '26 parliamentary elections and the question of fielding candidates; their hope is to 'fold in' to Your Party when (if) it gets off the ground. ⁠I've heard a lot of quiet scepticism from Scottish...

Last week a number of councillors and members resigned from the Scottish Greens and switched to Your Party. Greens and Green-curious comrades are miffed, considering the popularity of the new English & Welsh spokesperson, Polanski. For those building Your Party, sentiment has been mixed. In Glasgow, this felt like a vote of confidence. South of the border, Your Party hopefuls were more worried that this spelled the beginning of an unproductive tension between the two left parties. In England...

150,000 supporters of Tommy Robinson gathered in London on Saturday 13th. I took the train back from London to Glasgow that evening. A raucous multi-carriage debate ensued between drunken Tommy Robinson supporters and all sorts of other people who variously agreed and disagreed with what they were saying, and others who didn't know what to think. The journey's been on my mind since. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are attracted to the popular far right and they're always so bloo...

There was a public meeting of about 200 Your Party Glasgow supporters on Friday, 5th September at the Renfield Centre in town, organised by volunteers from the WhatsApp group, including myself. Tickets (required because of worries over venue and facilitation team capacity) ran out within 24 hours. There were also plenty of people who showed up without tickets. The meeting began with a short 'working agreement' introduction, was followed by a speech composed of peoples' online submissions. 20 gr...

Max Shanly's written a good long thing for it: https://medium.com/@maxshanly/born-for-life-or-marked-for-death-a12d87220e42 Whilst I didn't have time to finalise it, here's some sketches I began towards some explanatory graphics, in case these are useful to anyone. (Illustrator-editable PDF here.) Key aspects Sequencing Read the full proposal here: https://medium.com/@maxshanly/born-for-life-or-marked-for-death-a12d87220e42 ...

My understanding now is that Roger Hallam's involvement in Your Party isn't so straightforward nor so bounded. It sounds like the synthesis he's found with James Schneidder is for the 10 x 1000 regional assemblies to engage in constitutional design—to be decided/approved by Thursday 4th. (The only alternative founding process I've heard published is Max Shanly's.) For these regional assemblies, he's started at the end point, then worked backwards to clarify 4 stages of role recruiting and setup...