Among Glasgow’s iconic tower block flats stands Townhead Hall, where, on a freezing Saturday afternoon in November, a young woman with split dyed bangs and a keffiyeh around her neck is asking Glaswegians how confident they feel “reading and analysing party documents such as Standing Orders and constitutions”. The only audible response is from an older gentleman, turning to his comrades with a dreadful “Oh my God”.
Your Party is a new left-wing political party on the rise that aims to be, in its own words, “rooted in our communities, trade unions and social movements”.
To achieve this, they’re holding three meetings across Glasgow today, one here on St Mungo’s Avenue, where any member who pays their £5 per month fee can walk in and contribute. Roughly sixty members, although there was room for one hundred, are asked to help to amend the party’s potential constitution, if they stick to some ground rules: Be respectful, avoid jargon, and coordinators must write down every opinion presented – no compromises allowed.
Discussion kicks off, and a group of five discusses how much autonomy local branches would have. Should branches follow nationwide rules? How should this be worded in a constitution? What is all this fuss for?
Niall Christie, 29, was a Scottish Green member for nine years before leaving in July, and now volunteers for Your Party Glasgow. From what he sees, a left-wing alternative is urgently needed.
“We’re seeing a level of stress, economic hardship and social hardship that most people just haven’t experienced before in Scotland, and I think there is a level of moral responsibility on a lot of people who are looking at things and going, ‘I think, if I don’t do this, no one will.’”
“I’ve got a young son who’s a toddler. I hope that he’ll be on this planet for decades and decades longer than I will, and if I want it to be liveable, if I want it to be a good place to be… I need to put the work in”.
During a tea break, the kitchen, selling cups of tea for sixty pence each, is surrounded by older men discussing the party’s figureheads. One fumes about the member for Birmingham Perry Bar, former Liberal Democrat, Ayoub Khan. “I’m not happy with an MP who’s great on Palestine, but that’s it, making decisions for us. I mean, he called for the army to be brought in to break the Birmingham bin strikes, and he’s meant to be in a socialist party?”
The fallout between party figureheads is hard to ignore, as the party sits at only 50,000 members, one-sixteenth of the original 800,000 people who expressed interest in the party. This comes after disagreements between two of the founding MPs, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, became uncomfortably public, through a series of passive-aggressive tweets and contradicting emails.
The fallout itself was originally about party membership and, whether or not to open a formal membership portal, where members could pay their membership fees and access party documents once they became available. Sultana opened this portal, which Corbyn objected to. The tension has continued since.
However, Niall doesn’t believe that this will hold Your Party back in Scotland.
“There have been various points in the Your Party project so far, where me and other organisers in Scotland have seen what’s happened in London and Westminster and have gone, ‘Okay, this probably puts a pin in what we’re doing’, and we’ve probably been a bit despondent, short-term. But every single time that’s happened, people in Scotland seem to be galvanised.”
Post-coffee, everyone is offered the same question: Do they want Your Party Scotland to be separate from the UK-wide party? Members in one of the only cities that voted for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom a decade ago, are warned prior to this to not get too caught up in tangents about independence.
Cameron Scally, 31, is also a former Scottish Green member, and is now an organiser for Edinburgh and the Lothians’ branch of Your Party, and argues for a degree of separation. “Speaking purely in a personal capacity, I think there would definitely need to be a significant degree of autonomy at the very least, and preferably, it would function as a sister party, an entirely separate organisation.
“I think that there are a lot of people who rightly have a lot of distrust of the branch office of a broader UK party, and we see that in a lot of the ways that people are talking about Your Party right now, operating under the assumption that it will be that way.”
When conversations are stopped in their tracks at 5pm, volunteers try not to draw too much attention to a “certain someone”, who has snuck in and joined a group discussion about sovereignty. Until he is handed the microphone.
Jeremy Corbyn stands at the front of this cold hall and says that, whilst “no one ever wrote a handbook on how to form a political party”, he’s grateful for the work of volunteers and for everyone who turned up today. This soon becomes a speech on UK politics as a whole, as he calls the rhetoric of Robinson and Farage “racist claptrap” and condemns the media for “regurgitating this rubbish all the time”.
Whilst recent opinion polls show that 15% of Scots would consider voting for “A new left-wing party led by Jeremy Corbyn” in May 2026, tying with the Conservatives, they both fall 6% short of Reform UK.
He then moves on to Labour. “I don’t know what Rachel Reeves is going to do with the Budget, and if she knows, then she certainly isn’t telling me”. After a laugh break, he adds, “I mean, she could, I could give her some advice”. This receives a murmured, “She’d never listen to you” from the back row.
Leaders don’t seem to matter at all to the starting point of Your Party’s Scottish presence. Whilst Corbyn speaks familiarly with some older members, and one man enthusiastically star jumps to photobomb the group photo, the cult of personality isn’t there. Despite the ongoing quarrels between leaders, today simply isn’t about them. Niall seems to be right. “Up in Scotland, we’re kind of removed from it.”
“We are, to an extent, used to fighting happening at Westminster, and us just getting on with things in Scotland”. This seems evident as the old gentleman at the back of the hall, being told that the door he’s pulling is, in fact, a push door, is treated like any other pension-age member, and not a former Labour leader.
Featured Image Credit: @yourpartyglasgow on Instagram
4th year Politics and Journalism student.
Secretary for Brig
The Herald Student Press Awards Columnist Of The Year 2024 (which sorry i’m still not over)
