Can Your Party help to halt the relentless rise of the far right? - Bruce Whitehead

So we must look for the sunny uplands, with fresh faces and ideas... as well as some old faces with great ideas that haven't been tried properly.

Your Party members have voted to stand in the 2026 Holyrood election, with the party's co-founder Zarah Sultana saying Scotland deserves better than "a politics that wears the veneer of progressivism". Picture: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

I always enjoy listening to Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South. Her speeches are electrifying and inspirational. On Sunday she enthralled three hundred Scottish members of Your Party at its inaugural Scottish conference in Dundee, offering a brighter future for everyone, not just the middle class or the super rich favoured by the mainstream parties. She talked about "public ownership of energy, transport, finance and industry, with decisions made in the public interest - not for private profit."

Her words reminded me of Mike Cooley, the Irish engineer and union leader who urged Lucas Industries, which was laying off workers in the 70s, to switch from weapons making to "Socially Useful Production" - a plan hailed by Tony Benn MP as "one of the most remarkable in British industry". It rejected the "Lucas Plan" and he was sacked. But maybe its time could come again for our own Leonardo plant which makes laser bomb guidance systems; swords into ploughshares anyone?

But the fledgling Your Party is hitting problems which stem partly from Zarah's youthful exuberance and her desire last summer to get started. The premature launch meant the founding group of MPs were struggling to catch up with the essential mechanics of running an effective national party that can organise to stop the far right. Many of her supporters want access to the email addresses of the 800,000 who signed up are shared with the proto branches.

But for all Ms Sultana's energy, she now needs to listen to wiser heads and understand the serious legal implications of electoral law. That bureaucracy is there to protect us all online. Data leaks are a scourge of modern living and can lead to massive hacks which harm jobs and livelihoods. Plus it can help criminals target and groom vulnerable people. So GDPR - that hated term - is the villain of the piece - not Jeremy Corbyn, or the Independent Alliance MPs who founded the party; and because of Zarah's over-hasty early launch, there's been a mess to clean up.

It's in hand. The party's Executive committee will be in place soon, and the Scottish executive will follow soon after, leaving plenty of time to organise for Holyrood.

Then, it's down to the anti-cuts, anti-hate parties to work together to beat those that peddle only fear and loathing, and which scapegoat the innocent, desperate refugees fleeing bombing and genocide - often under British-made weapons.

The worst thing Your Party could do in May is to risk splitting the progressive vote, by failing to build an electoral alliance with the other parties of the left and centre. It's shown that maturity already by consulting local branches in the Gorton and Denton by election, to ensure that the Greens are given a free run against both the right and against a mortally damaged Labour brand.

The same co-operative attitude will allow Your Party Scotland to stand candidates against the parties which have inflicted severe cuts in essential services, including some Greens, who cheerfully fell in line with SNP austerity. But this year, Your Party members should work with Green candidates backing policies that help the poor and vulnerable, if polling indicates they have strong support, in order to stop the far-right Reform politics of hate.

As expected, the Dundee conference affirmed Your Party Scotland support for independence, a fact acknowledged by Jeremy Corbyn's speech. So now Your Party will campaign for a referendum. Personally, I'd prefer to stick with the English and Welsh unity and strength that socialism entails, but a stronger federal arrangement might satisfy all the British nations. We'll see very soon.

But an even better outcome would be if Zarah Sultana, Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Goldsmith were to lead a Rainbow coalition of democratic, anti-racist, ant-capitalist MPs to defeat the corrosive and dangerous flirtation with far-right racist ideology that Reform is offering. The first step is for Zarah and Jeremy to stop fighting each other. It takes two to tango. So will they sign up for Strictly: The Reconciliation, and deliver a pasa doble that wins the judges' votes?!