Britain

Your Party consolidates into Labour 2.0… What next?

Tuesday 14 April 2026, by Simon Hannah

The purges of the socialist left from Your Party by the Corbynite wing grouped around The Many is a factional move to consolidate control and construct a formation that will only ever be a shrivelled imitation of British social democracy.

Your Party started with a hugely exciting 800,000 people signing up for a new left party, when there is a crying need for one as Labour accelerates rightward under the reactionary pressures of Late Capitalism. Even if 25% of those people got involved, it would have been a huge breakthrough.

Instead, Your Party was torn apart by rival visions, a rehash of Corbyn-era Labour, focused on parliamentarianism and soft social democratic politics – where they were evident at all, or a class struggle party fighting for a more radical transformation.

This is also the difference between a narrow reformist sect and a wider ‘party of the left’ bringing together thousands of people angry with Labour and looking for clearer socialist politics alongside the existing revolutionary groups.

The decision to expel organized socialists is a ‘second time as farce’ version of what happened to the left in the early Corbyn years, when Labour Party full-timers operating in the notorious Governance and Legal Unit trawled through people’s social media and summarily expelled people they considered dangerous subversives.

Some of us warned at the time that Corbyn was very slow to get rid of witchfinder general McNicol and then failed to confront the weaponisation of antisemitism against the pro-Palestine movement and the left more generally.

Karie Murphy, who worked for Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party from 2016-2019, continued the sorry legacy of expulsions, particularly after McNicol’s resignation in 2018. That this is now being continued by the supposed ‘left’ who quit Labour or were forced out by Starmer shows that there is something internal to the logic of social democracy and the way it exerts control.

The move by The Many on the CEC is deeply cynical in that founding conference voted for dual membership (Option A) and rejected Option B which was a blanket ban on “national parties” being allowed to join. Now the CEC is effectively imposing Option B using their control of the mechanisms of power.

The expulsion of revolutionary socialists from Your Party will be greeted with relief in some quarters in part because some people are committed parliamentary reformists and actively oppose revolution. Indeed, the Labour Party was set up in 1918 to stop the spread of Bolshevism across Britain.

Others will have come across sectarian or controlling behaviour from some of the groups as well. “The SWP/Socialist Party took over my local branch” is a not uncommon complaint on some YP social media forums.

The reality is that if the wider membership of Your Party had been properly engaged and brought into activity, then no group would have been able to ‘take over’ anything. YP boasted 66,000 members in December, which was a miracle given the faction fighting between Corbyn’s wing and Zarah Sultana conducted on Twitter and then in the press.

A mass socialist party will involve revolutionaries and reformists, and as long as it is democratic and robust, we can work together to build a class-struggle party that fights around key issues like the cost of living and building a mass, working-class-led, anti-racist movement. ACR published a contribution towards the discussion in Your Party over its manifesto based around ecosocialism as a possible basis for working together for instance.

The early Labour Party contained socialist societies, and indeed, they often formed the left opposition when the party leadership moved to the right on crucial issues like supporting World War One.

It is clear that the dominant faction in Your Party is increasingly authoritarian and seems to have little intention of the party functioning, let alone thriving. Many suspect that Corbyn and his allies would rejoin Labour in a heartbeat if given the opportunity, so they are reluctant to build YP as a credible fighting alternative to Labour, let alone Labourism.

Others think they just have no idea how to do anything differently. In the end, what matters is their actions rather than their motives.

What happens next depends entirely on the activity of the most active proto-branches and members. The excellent turnout on the YP block on the Together demonstration was an important boost for those of us who want to build an alternative in the workplaces and communities, as well as at the ballot box.

In recent weeks, new initiatives such as the YP Members’ Charter have been introduced to organize members who care about grassroots democracy and the building of active branches. Your Party Connections has called a conference in Sheffield to debate the next steps.

The Green alternative

The Greens increasingly emerge as ‘the only show in town’ for many people who want a left-of-center alternative. The Greens under Zack Polanski appear like a breath of fresh air compared to everything else that is going on, and the threat of a Reform/Tory government looms large in people’s minds, so a left-of-center party that is combative around migrants’ rights and fighting the cost-of-living crisis seems like exactly what we need right now.

The primary warning here is that the same battles over democracy and principles will be played out within the Greens as more active socialists join them. The experience of the Green Left 15 years ago, trying to challenge the party leadership over the imposition of austerity in Brighton, is something people need to learn about.

The party is still ultimately an electoralist and parliamentarian party wedded to taking over the British state, which runs all the risks of being integrated into the smooth functioning of capitalism and imperialism as befell the Labour Party 100 years ago.

The kind of party we need

Clearly, if Your Party falls apart, that will be a strategic setback for the left. As we have said before, if you do not have a party that can fight for political power, then the left is stuck building social movements and doing trade union organising with no possibility of overthrowing capitalism. Your Party promised much but ultimately could not overcome the structural problems of the left in England, Wales, or Scotland.

We have shared before the document from the 2018 World Congress of our International organisation, on building ‘useful parties’ – organisations that make a difference on the ground in terms of the day-to-day struggles of working people and the unemployed, as well as the socially oppressed, but can link that to a wider political struggle against capitalism.

These are the key points we think any left party should aim towards. If you agree or want to discuss more, then get in touch:

 participation in the social movements and struggles of the oppressed and exploited, not as a political elite intervening from the outside but as an organic part of those movements and struggles in developing political analyses and demands, continuing the fight for those demands to the end. In this process, we also learn from these movements to deepen and enrich our own programme–as we have on feminism, ecology, LGBTIQ questions;
 building active, radical, and class-struggle trade unions, either through activity in existing unions or, where necessary and appropriate, building new workers’ unions. In the unions, act with autonomy and independence in relation to employers, governments, and parties, and ensure democracy in union structures and processes. Challenge the limits of the bureaucratic machine and the legislation that binds the unions to the state. Participate in and strengthen trade unions where possible, in the direction of democracy and unity, but fight against bureaucratism, overreach into government, and class collaboration. Understand that the struggle goes beyond the unions and their structures;
 Create spaces that take into account the diversity of the working class, organize with popular social movements, of informal, cooperative, precarious, outsourced, unemployed, homeless, and artisan workers, as well as with native and traditional peoples, and with fighters against racism, LGBTophobia, machismo, and in defence of ecology;
 the attitude to the state, institutions; to elections as a support to the activity in the mass movement, which must remain the centre of gravity of our activity; the role and relationship to the party of elected representatives who are often the most visible representatives of the party, whose actions (through votes) may be seen to have the most effect, and who are often the most under pressure to be “useful” in the short term. It is the party’s responsibility to determine the political framework for its action;
 the importance of an international and internationalist understanding of the world political situation leading to activity in international campaigns and active and practical solidarity, as well as participation in the FI (see below);
 the necessity for democratic and transparent functioning with broad democracy including tendency rights, against verticalist functioning, based on the rank and file membership’s participation in the activity and decision-making of the party, with the necessary organizational structures to ensure this; understanding the oppression that continues to exist even within parties that are against all forms of women’s and other specific oppression and developing structures, functioning and procedures appropriately;
 the importance of addressing the questions thrown up in the struggles and fightbacks of the oppressed and exploited (notably feminism, ecology, LGBTQI, and others);
 The party is committed to a policy of activity on demands and campaigns combating women’s oppression, in the context of participation in the class-struggle oriented groups, campaigns, and movements, with an understanding of the strategic goal of building an autonomous women’s movement. The party’s preoccupation with both education and activity on these questions is permanent, not to be set aside in moments of lower mass activity;
 the party seeks to build a feminist profile both externally and internally to not only encourage women to join but also to internally build a positive vision of women in the leadership;
 in addition to ensuring that the democratic functioning of the party enables all members to fully participate as outlined above, the party understands that social dynamics tend to exclude women from political participation, therefore it accepts the need for specific mechanisms (women only meetings, priority for women in speakers lists etc) that encourage women’s participation, and the recognition of further problems to be overcome;
 he party does not tolerate any form of sexist (or transphobic or homo/lesbophobic) behaviour. The implementation of this political position is the responsibility of the party, which ensures not only political education on these questions but also that the structures, functioning and procedures put in place work to ensure that the parties we are building, although they cannot be “islands of socialism” in a capitalist world, strive to prefigure the society we want;
 an unremitting fight against all forms of racism – including against indigenous populations,
 the importance of renewal of organisations through an open and dynamic attitude to recruiting radicalizing youth and integrating them into the party through autonomous youth sectors where young radicalized activists can gather their own experience, develop their own political work and programme, gather around questions related to the questions of the youth;
 the need for continuing educational programmes, including on strategic questions such as the state or the question of power, and international questions.

12 April 2026

Source: Anti*Capitalist Resistance.

Attached documents

• your-party-consolidates-into-labour-2-0-what-next_a9500.pdf (PDF - 953.1 KiB)
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• Simon Hannah

  Simon Hannah is a member of Anti*Capitalist Resistance and author of several books on political activism in Britain.

Bill Rees: Ecological Footprint Analysis Grew from a Boy’s Contemplation of “Soil and Sun”

Robert Jensen

April 17, 2026

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Hayden Valley, Yellowstone. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Bill Rees likes to say that ecological footprint analysis began with an epiphany—when he was 10 years old.

Sitting down to lunch on his grandparents’ Ontario farm with relatives he had worked with that morning, the sweaty kid realized he had played a small part in raising everything on the table—beef, chicken, potatoes, carrots, and a few other items the farm had produced so far that season.

Rees remembers the moment as thrilling. “You know the expression, ‘You are what you eat’? As a child, I realized I am what I eat, and that I grew what I ate,” said the renowned ecological economist, now 82. “I knew deep in my bones that farm work and food made me a product of soil and sun.”

That may seem simple, but how many people think about the importance of soil? Today’s high-energy/high-technology culture too easily obscures our dependence on ecosystems. Rees has spent his career trying to alert people to the consequences of ignoring ecological realities.

With his coauthor and former student Mathis Wackernagel, Rees in 1996 published Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Perhaps today’s most well-known sustainability metric, Ecological Footprint Accounting (EFA) estimates human demands on the carrying capacity of Earth. Comparing human consumption of bio-resources with Earth’s regenerative capacity, EFA shows that we are in overshoot—consuming resources faster than they can be replenished and generating wastes faster than they can be absorbed.

Rees retired from teaching at the University of British Columbia in 2012 but continues to sound the warning: Modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is unsustainable. Humanity’s total biological resource consumption and waste production exceed ecosystems’ regenerative and assimilation capacities.

Developing an Ecological Worldview

When Rees got to college, those farm experiences led him to the Life Sciences program in biology and ecology at the University of Toronto, where he went on to earn his Ph.D. in population ecology in 1972. He landed a faculty job in UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, where the director asked him to develop an interdisciplinary program on the ecological basis of economic development.

In planning meetings with economists, engineers, hydrologists, and geographers, Rees offered his early thoughts on carrying capacity. Senior colleagues assured him that globalization and free trade could alleviate the problem of local ecological limits and that free markets would stimulate development of substitutes for depleted resources. The not-too-subtle caution was that challenging the conventional wisdom that population growth and economic expansion could continue indefinitely would not help his career.

Rees’ deference to elders didn’t stop him from rethinking the standard definition of carrying capacity. Yes, trade and technology can ease local resource constraints, temporarily, but Rees’ farm-based awareness of our dependence on the land helped him invert the framing. Instead of asking how large a population a given area can support in an existing economic system, we should be asking how large an area is needed to support a given population, regardless of the location of the land providing sustenance. For example, the question isn’t “How many people can a city’s infrastructure support (subsidized by the sleight-of-hand tricks of trade and technology)?” but “How much distant land is needed to support the city’s residents?” Urbanites’ ecological footprints extend far beyond the city limits.

EFA uses consumption data from numerous sources to answer two questions. First, in any given year, how much of Earth’s bio-productive land and water (such as cropland, grazing land, forests, fishing grounds) are used to support a population, including the ecosystems needed to assimilate its emissions? Second, how much productive bio-capacity is available for that population to draw on? EFA shows that the human enterprise today is in overshoot, drawing down stocks of so-called natural capital and over-filling nature’s waste sinks.

The Problem of Overshoot

Most people treat climate change as the greatest ecological threat posed by MTI society. Rees offers a friendly but crucial amendment: Climate destabilization is a derivative of overshoot.

In 2024, 8.2 billion people had a total ecological footprint of approximately 21.4 billion global hectares (gha), an average of 2.6 gha per person. Available global bio-capacity was 12 billion hectares, or 1.5 gha per person. Not everyone consumes the same amount, of course, but as a species we are exceeding the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 75 percent. If we could replace all fossil fuels with alternative energy—but with the same number of people and the same aggregate consumption—we would still be in overshoot.

In other words: MTI society is unsustainable. Overshoot is, by definition, a terminal condition.

(A footnote: EFA is based on varied data sources and can’t be precise, given the margin of error in large-scale estimates. Critics suggest that this makes it unreliable as a sustainability metric. Rees argues that, if anything, EFA assessments underestimate humanity’s eco-predicament. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and other UN agencies, for example, reflect yields and productivity but not the depletion of the soil and water on which those yields depend. Also, EFA estimates only human demand for productive ecosystem area (bio-capacity); not all human demands on nature, such as toxic pollution, are captured by the method.

What’s Necessary?

A stable human presence on Earth will require far less consumption. Rees estimates that living within planetary bio-capacity would mean reducing economic throughput (energy and resource consumption, and pollution) globally by half. But to safeguard 85 percent of bio-diversity, half of global bio-capacity would have to be reserved for nature, which suggests that humanity’s current ecological footprint may be three times too large and require up to a 70 percent reduction. And sustainability with justice—greater equality of access to economic and bio-physical wealth—would mean that those with above-average wealth would have to reduce their consumption even more dramatically.

That leads to a question that has no definitive answer: How many people can Earth support, at what level of consumption?

Based on ecological footprint data, Rees suggests Earth might support up to 2 billion people living at Western European material standards. That roughly matches the estimates of other ecologists but may be optimistic, he said. Given non-renewable resource depletion and the degraded state of the ecosphere today, a human population compatible with long-term sustainability might be in the tens or hundreds of millions.

“’What’s the optimal population?’ really is an unanswerable question because of the known unknowns and unknown unknowns,” Rees said. “How would the fractious, competitive, sometimes warring, and grossly unequal global community agree on an adequate material standard of living? What is the trajectory of climate change, especially if we use all economically accessible deposits of fossil fuels?  And if we do that, how do we maintain food production and supplies of other crucial resources? How would we provision megacities that are dependent on diesel-fueled transportation?”

But we do know enough to recognize the outlines of humanity’s eco-predicament, Rees said. “We have a fairly firm grasp of the bio-physical trends that threaten the ecosphere and humanity’s future, and we are coming to understand the most significant anthropogenic drivers of overshoot. This means that we actually know what must be done to change our relationship with nature to reverse threatening trends. The problem is that all the effective whats involve a smaller economy with greatly reduced energy and material throughput, and lower populations.” Collective action is essential, but difficult.

“After two centuries of explosive growth, MTI societies have enormous cultural and population momentum fueled by bio-physically unrealistic material expectations,” Rees said. “Any significant structural changes are vigorously opposed by corporate entities—some more powerful than many nations—that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. So, while science tells us what to do, we do not yet know the how of making the necessary civilizational-level shifts in beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors and power structures. We’re flying in the face of culturally entrenched habits and innate behavioral barriers.”

What’s Possible?

Rees said that social policy should be shaped by data, logic, and a love for others and nature. But political and economic institutions find it easy to ignore the overshoot predicament. In his cultural analysis, Rees remains an ecologist, thinking about humans as products of evolution, not creatures with magical capacities. Overshoot can’t be blamed on a few bad actors but rather is the product of understandable human tendencies.

Like other species, humans are capable of exponential population growth and tend to harvest all accessible resources as rapidly as their technology allows. Unfortunately, for the past 200 years—thanks largely to improved population health (falling death rates) and fossil fuels (making rapid growth possible)—our species has been embracing our expansionary potential, Rees said.

Unlike other species, we create complex stories and behavioral norms that guide both individual and group behavior. These social constructs are powerful enough to obscure ecological reality and encourage self-destructive behaviors.

Almost all humans now live in social arrangements dramatically different from the smaller, more cooperative groups in which we evolved, when we inhabited limited territory and extracted far less energy from the landscape, Rees said. With the rise of competitive and hierarchical civilization, humanity expanded over the entire Earth. Here are a few more evolved human characteristics that he said keep us from facing overshoot.

+ Most people are temporal, social, and spatial discounters, favoring the here-and-now, close relatives, and friends—to the detriment of the future, foreign places, and strangers.

+ Most nations are reluctant to share their wealth or sacrifice comfortable lifestyles for the general welfare, present or future, particularly if they think few others will do the same.

+ Because human societies are competitive, open-access resources such as deep-sea fisheries or the atmosphere that are “rivalrous and nonexcludable” (not owned by anyone and accessible to everyone) can be overexploited.

Rees said the reason to be honest about today’s “genetically induced cultural lethargy” is not to promote apathy but to be clear about impediments. There is little immediate incentive for individuals or nations to act alone in ways that are consistent with sustainability science, and insufficient agreement and mutual trust to motivate collective action to reduce the human footprint.

What’s Left to Do?

Given what Rees knows from more than a half-century of research, why does he still spend so much time advocating change that seems unlikely?

“I suppose it’s what I do to keep my internal fires burning,” he said. “And there is some small reward in hearing from former students, some from decades ago, who say they were skeptical about issues we studied in class but now see it all unfolding just as we discussed way back then.”

Does he resent being ignored by colleagues for so long, or by the public even today?

“I got used to being ignored, mostly by traditionally trained economists, geographers, and planners,” he said. “For many years, I was barely tolerated by certain colleagues, maybe because students who took my courses started asking difficult questions in courses taught by growth- and development-oriented colleagues.” Change came only as it became harder for even conventional scholars to ignore ecological degradation.

Rees said he is grateful for the recognition that eventually came his way—the Blue Planet Prize with Wackernagel, along with other awards in the field of ecological economics, and being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

“The success of the ecological footprint concept meant that students who worked with me could find good jobs, which is a personal boost”, he said. “But policy wonks, politicians, and other major decision-makers give no more credence to findings based on EFA documentation of gross eco-overshoot than they did to The Limits to Growth report [a presciently accurate account of overshoot published in 1972]. Fifty-four years later, the human enterprise is on track for significant contraction later in this century, just as Donella and Dennis Meadows and their coauthors projected and our work affirmed.”

Rees hasn’t slowed down, continuing to publish in scholarly journals, write for popular publications, update his Substack, speak on countless podcasts, and advise advocacy groups.

“I suppose I have to admit to a minor human failing,” Rees said, “one articulated by an ecologist friend who told me that he took pleasure in being able to say to former doubters, ‘I told you so!’”

Given the stakes, Rees would love to be proved wrong. But an honest conversation requires that we set aside fantasies such as colonizing Mars and work to get it right here, Rees said.  “Earth is likely the only home H. sapiens will ever know.”

We also have to recognize that our relationship to Earth is asymmetrical.

“The ecosphere is totally indifferent to whether human civilization, or even our species, survives,” Rees said. “On the other hand, humans cannot be indifferent to maintaining the functional integrity of the ecosphere. Without that, we’re toast.”

Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with New Perennials Publishingand the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to https://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw