Your Party South East CEC hustings meeting

Your Party Swale is proud to be hosting a hybrid hustings event, Castle Connections, Queenborough, ME11 5AY. Tuesday 27th January at 19:00.

The meeting is hybrid and ticketed through eventbrite.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/your-party-swale-cec-se-region-hustings-tickets-1980322114754

Update on CEC Nominations – South East

Your Party Swale can confirm that we are currently aware of seven nominations for the upcoming Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections for the South East.

The candidates we are aware of at this stage are:

John Durtnall

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

Steph Lewis

Del Mehmet

Hannah Barker

June Tobin

Max Shanly

Hustings are due to take place from 4th February, and we look forward to hearing from all candidates as they set out their vision, priorities, and plans for the party.

We encourage members to engage fully with the hustings process and take the opportunity to hear directly from those standing for election.

Nominations Open: Central Executive Committee Elections 2026

Nominations are now open for the first Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections of Your Party, and members in Your Party Swale are encouraged to take part.

The CEC will be the democratically elected body responsible for leading and running the party — overseeing staff and resources, shaping national strategy, and delivering the decisions agreed at the founding conference. It will also act as the party’s collective leadership.

Who can stand?

Any verified member of Your Party, including members based in Swale, may nominate themselves to stand for election.

Key dates

Nominations open: Monday 5 January 2026

Nomination deadline: Friday 16 January 2026

Voting opens: Monday 9 February 2026

Voting closes: Monday 23 February 2026 (5pm)

Results announced: Thursday 26 February 2026

Seats available

18 ordinary member seats, with two representatives elected from each English region (at least one woman per region)

4 seats for public office holders (MPs, mayors and councillors), elected by the whole membership

Scotland and Wales will each elect a representative for their reserved seat through their own democratic processes

How to take part

To nominate yourself or vote, members must verify their account through the members’ portal. Verification is quick and ensures a secure, one-member-one-vote election.

Members in Swale who want to help shape the future direction of the party nationally are strongly encouraged to get involved.

👉 Nominate yourself, verify your account, or read the full election rules via the members’ portal.

Members’ vote now open 📣

Your Party has opened voting on a key question about the make-up of our Central Executive Committee (CEC): 

Whether to expand ordinary member seats to 18 so every English region has two seats with gender balance.

🗳️ Voting is open now and closes at 20:00 on 30 January.

To take part (and vote in the CEC elections), members must first verify their profile.

📅 CEC election voting runs 9–23 February, with results on 26 February.

Self-nominations open 5–16 January, and member endorsements 21–29 January.

This election will shape the future of Your Party as we build, organise and campaign on the issues that matter. 

Get involved and have your say.

Branch Vote Update

Members have now voted to confirm our new Interim Steering Committee and approve the change of our branch name from North Kent to Swale. This vote was conducted by Balotilo and announced at the branch meeting on Thursday 18th December 2025.

Following the vote, Stuart Gaylor has been appointed as Interim Chair and Treasurer, and Michael Attwood has been appointed as Interim Secretary.

Plans for future community engagement will be discussed at our next meeting, taking place at Kemsley Community Centre on Tuesday 13th January 2026.

Minutes from the meeting will be circulated in due course.
You can meet the Interim Steering Committee by clicking the button below.

Swale Borough Council Meeting 10/12/25

On Wednesday evening we witnessed a deeply troubling moment for local democracy and the rule of law in Kent — one that will alarm any fair-minded, law-abiding resident.

Your Party Swale unequivocally condemns the intimidation, verbal abuse and physical aggression that took place at the Swale Borough Council meeting. The behaviour on display disrupted democratic debate and stopped councillors from discussing a motion intended to recognise Swale as a Borough of Sanctuary.

An unamed individual arrived carrying a megaphone, made it obvious that the intention was to derail the meeting. Joined by several others — including individuals covering their faces with balaclavas — clearly keen to hide their identities before what followed.

Before Cllr Hannah Perkin could finish introducing the motion, this group launched into shouting, insults and spitting, forcing the meeting to be suspended.

Your Party Swale extends our full support and solidarity to councillors of all parties who were subjected to this disgraceful behaviour while carrying out their duties on behalf of residents.

Let us be absolutely clear: this is not democratic engagement. It is intimidation, designed to undermine trust in our public institutions. If allowed to continue, it risks pushing decision-makers away from doing what is right for the community, and instead rewarding the loudest and most aggressive voices. We urge all councillors to stand firm and not be deterred. Our local democracy suffers when representatives feel unsafe or unable to explore ideas that could benefit residents.

We support any initiative that builds a welcoming, inclusive and compassionate community in Swale. We commend Cllr Hannah Perkin for bringing forward the motion and Cllr Alastair Gould for seconding it. The quiet majority of decent, respectful Swale residents stand with you both.

Violence, abuse, and attempts to intimidate those participating in public debate can never be accepted. We will continue to work with the Police and with councillors of all parties to ensure that those who attempt to undermine democratic processes are held fully accountable.

As a strong signal that democracy in Swale remains robust, we call on councillors to make a clear, united, cross-party statement at the next meeting — one that firmly denounces the actions of the small group who disrupted Wednesday night’s proceedings.

Friday 12th December 2025

Timothy's Blog

A blog by Timothy Fitzgerald:

3 December 2025

A Personal View of Your Party and its Detractors on ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’

I am grateful to the grass-roots organisers of Your Party for your spirit of equality and
solidarity, and to those who were in Liverpool for the Your Party conference.

I’ve hoped for a long time (I was born in 1947) for a united opposition to the liberal capitalist
State. Can it happen at last?

I joined the Labour Party in 2015 because Jeremy Corbyn and others were trying to extend
democracy into the local communities. I quit the Labour party when ‘the left’ and ‘the right’
joined forces to smear Corbyn and to destroy what he and others close to him were trying to
do. Now I have joined Your Party.

The strength and resilience of Your Party will lie in the local neighbourhoods. It’s true that
we need to win elections, but many of us might agree there is very little ‘democracy’ in
parliament. That’s why they call it a ‘whipping system’, to force members into line or expel
them. And the House of Lords? Democracy? It’s a contradiction in terms.

The media pundits and the academics have for a long time referred to Britain as a ‘liberal
democracy’ and a ‘liberal’ State. In my view we should disentangle two different meanings
of the word ‘liberal’. The older meaning was something like tolerant, generous and flexible.
Those are virtues that we would want to live by. But in the late 18th century the term became
co-opted by an emergent ideology of selfish Individualism and private property
accumulation.

The modern State was never intended to be liberal in the older sense. It was invented to
legitimate rapacious (mostly male) private property accumulation and the theft of the
common resources of humankind. It was invented to make armed robbery look respectable,
and, if that failed, to suppress any dissent. This seems a perverse meaning for ‘liberty’ and
‘liberal’.

Opposition to the liberal capitalist State may need parliamentary representation. However, the
roots of opposition must surely be established outside in the people, in democratic, self-
organising communities, in work cooperatives, housing cooperatives, banking cooperatives,
and common ownership of what we produce and how we produce it. The wasted talent,
creativity and energy of the commons is a tragedy.

That is what I believe Jeremy Corbyn was trying to do. Corbyn seems to me to be a moral
agent (rare for politicians) who has been at the forefront of most campaigns for social justice
for forty years. He may be an old white man, but he is far more radical and internationalist
than some of the so-called ‘left’ commentators. If he was only another narcissistic ego
interested in power, I think he would have taken a different route.

Some things went wrong at the Liverpool conference, but so what? Much more seems to have
gone right. Self-critique is healthy and necessary, but losing sight of the common goal is perpetual self-defeat. After the debacle of Labour, many hoped that the futility of factional divisiveness and name-calling would seem obvious. And yet a wide spectrum of ‘left’ and
‘right’ opinion makers seem to want to up-front division. It is not only the mainstream media
but also the alternative media that reproduces the divide-and-rule strategy. This is dim-witted.
While sections of the so-called ‘left’ celebrate our divisions, like a self-fulfilling death-wish,
the corporations and their billionaire shareholders continue to burgle the family silver.

The conference actually voted for a collective leadership. The membership can always
change this later if it chooses to. Yet many platforms on You Tube on both ‘left’ and ‘right’,
competing to attract viewers, actively promoted divisions between the ‘leaders’ Zara Sultana
and Jeremy Corbyn.

I put ‘Your Party’ into the You Tube ‘find’ button and these are the video titles that came up:
‘The hilarious meltdown in Your Party’; ‘Comedic disaster’; ‘Absolute clowns: reaction to
the chaos of Your Party conference’; ‘Zara Sultana’s vision defeats Team Corbyn’; ‘Your
Party conference: total chaos’; ‘I was kicked out of Your Party conference’; ‘How Zara
outplayed Corbyn and his allies’; ‘Corbyn’s Your Party on path to failure’; ‘Is Your Party
Dead?’; ‘Your Party civil war: Corbyn speaks but Sultana boycotts’; ‘A Circus: Your Party
hit by yet more infighting at farcical inaugural conference’; ‘It just descended into pointless
chaos’; ‘Inside Your Party’s launch: Breakthrough or Breakdown?’; ‘Zara Sultana arrives at
Your Party conference after boycotting Day One: “This is a witch-hunt”; ‘Your Party votes to
reject Corbyn and Sultana as leader!’; ‘Corbyn declines to call Sultana a friend’; ‘Low
numbers, low enthusiasm: a day at Your Party conference’…

These titles come from a wide variety of podcasts across the spectrum, from (in random
order) The Telegraph, Owen Jones, Sky News, Maximilien Robespierre, Politics Joe, GB
News, Novara Media, Channel 4 News, Times Radio Politics. Two things about these
headlines hit me: 1) the focus is mostly on the two leaders and the leadership competition,
and not the ordinary citizens who attended, organised, participated; 2) they are largely
negative – chaos, low numbers, boycotts, breakdowns, witch-hunts, farce.
True, these are only headlines. If you take the time and energy to go into these in more detail
you will find more nuance – if you are lucky. But the headlines are what busy people read
and internalise. They set the mood. They encourage defections and loss of faith. The
competition for attention with flashy negative headlines is what the liberal capitalist media
specialises in. The so-called ‘left’ too often replicates the dominant ethos that it claims to
oppose.

The most informative podcast that I could find was by Crispin Flintoff. He spent the whole
two days there interviewing a variety of people who were not celebrities, but who were
passionate, energetic, articulate, the actual life-blood of the movement, much more
interesting than the professionalised commentators. It was these ‘ordinary’ people who did
extraordinary things. They vividly brought home what a messy and yet creative business
founding a new grassroots party is.

I heard and read praise for Zara Sultana’s speech. She said much that I agree with. She said it
with passion. She is a highly intelligent person. But, speaking personally, it did not electrify
me. It perplexed me. I found a contradiction running through it. On the one hand she strongly
advocated in favour of grass-roots democracy, against a competitive leadership struggle
which produces divisive factions. On the other hand she spoke as though she is the de facto leader stamping her authority on the party and laying down the manifesto that the whole of
the party must agree with.

This is not a blame game. We need Zara’s brilliance and energy. We need Jeremy’s
experience and dedication. But most of all we need to focus on people, on issues, on
solutions, and on strategies. And we need deep compassion and solidarity.
Not everyone who gets blanket-labelled as ‘right’ are our enemies. In my view ‘left’ and
‘right’ no longer works, if it ever did 1 . It is a rhetorical labelling, useful for divide-and-rule.
The mainstream media loves this rhetorical trick! It helps sow chaos. Meanwhile the men and
women who own most of the media laugh all the way to the bank. And they own the bank.
I think most ordinary citizens such as myself, when we talk together as human beings, are
concerned with issues of social justice, equality, sharing the ownership of common resources,
democratic participation, equal access to decision-making, redistribution of wealth, peace and
the ending of wars, and basic human solidarity. These are moral demands. The labelling of
‘left’, ‘right’, ‘loony left’, ‘extreme right’, ‘moderate centre’, are slogans that corral people
and obliterate many possible commonalities. Who decides where ‘centre’ is? It’s a fiction,
and the narrative is operated by a class of largely anonymous people.

I dare to say that there is a lack of self-critique among self-identifying ‘left’ intellectuals. The
left and the right are part of the same competitive market for self-promotion. Ordinary people
who are desperate for real change are forgotten while the ‘left’ media help the ‘right’ media
to divide any possible unified opposition. Our collective awareness is fragmented with a
verbal blither of name-calling. Our attention is distracted from the self-entitled unelected who
help themselves to our common resources.

And then, conveniently, the Green Party under the brilliant leadership of Zack suddenly
becomes socialist. How did that happen? Yet another division. The establishment wins every
time. I will continue to hope that Your Party flourishes. I believe it will. Despite ‘the left’ and
‘the right’.

1 I gather it is derived from the seating arrangement of the pre-revolutionary French Assembly. The King or his
representative sat in the Centre. The Nobility sat on his right. The liberal bourgeoisie and a few radicals sat on
his left.