Your Party is still in the process of developing its policies. If it is serious about addressing the climate emergency, it will have to produce genuinely radical policies for rapid cuts to carbon emissions — not vague aspirations or tweaks to current government policies.

The creation of a new party of the left in Great Britain is long overdue. The Labour Party has drifted steadily rightwards for decades and has now sunk well below even the Blair era. Its strategies and policies appear to be shaped by spin doctors whose political horizon extend no further than the latest opinion polls.

A Troubled Birth

Against that background, the emergence of Your Party raised real hopes. However, its formation has been marked by widely publicized difficulties. The two principal founders, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, both come from Labour and both clearly wanted to create a party to the left of what has become a thoroughly hollowed-out organization. But their very public conflicts and manoeuvering have been deeply disappointing for its supporters.

Your Party’s founding conference took place on 29–30 November 2025. The agenda was dominated by questions of membership, voting procedures, and leadership elections. There was no space for serious discussion of political priorities or program. As things stand, the party’s platform, including its climate agenda, will only begin to take shape after the election of a Central Executive Committee in February or March 2026.

The Climate Blind Spot of the Left

Few, if any, major left parties internationally have properly grappled with the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. Too often, climate policy is treated as an add-on, rather than as an organizing principle for economic and social transformation. If Your Party follows that pattern, it will be a huge wasted opportunity.

Urgent Action Is Now Unavoidable

Several leading climate scientists addressed a National Emergency Briefing in London on 27 November 2025. The meeting was organized by Simon and Nick Oldridge, described as “climate funders and communicators with a background in business.” More than 1,000 figures from politics, business, and civil society attended. The message was stark: the climate crisis is accelerating, and incremental action is no longer remotely sufficient.

The most compelling intervention came from Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Manchester. Anderson warned that global temperatures are rising faster than previously estimated, and that emissions cuts of around 13% per year are now required simply to hold warming to 2°C. This is far beyond anything currently being contemplated by governments.

Anderson argued that meeting this challenge would require:

• a profound shift in social norms
• a genuinely revolutionary rate of change
• urgent legislation to bring down overall energy use

Socialists may differ with Anderson on some points, particularly his emphasis on the emissions of the wealthy elite. For socialists, the elite are not the core problem but a symptom of an entire economic system organized around endless accumulation. The system itself has to change. However, Anderson is absolutely right about the scale and speed of transformation now required.

Unavoidable questions

By contrast, the existing approach of tweaking the IPCC’s “Nationally Determined Contributions” — voluntary national targets negotiated downward to suit political convenience — is hopelessly inadequate. It bears no relation to the climate realities described by scientists.

This raises unavoidable political questions. What would a realistic climate policy for the UK actually look like? How could emissions be reduced at anything like 13% per year?

Any serious answer must start from the fact that climate change is a global problem. Carbon emissions do not respect national borders. A credible UK policy therefore has to combine radical domestic action with an international strategy aimed at driving a wider global transition. But decisive action by the UK would itself be a powerful signal — and a material contribution — towards building that global program.

(For an outline of what such a global approach could look like, see: http://ecosocialist.net/global-transitional-ecosocialist-program.)

Declare a Climate State of Emergency

Kevin Anderson’s insistence that social norms will have to change is absolutely right. The starting point must be a clear and honest acknowledgement that the world is facing an existential global emergency — and that business as usual is no longer an option. Once that reality is accepted, it follows that many things cannot continue as they were.

The first step for any serious government would be to declare a formal state of climate emergency. That declaration would have to be frank. It would mean acknowledging that many aspects of everyday life will have to change. At the same time, it should be made explicit that huge taxes will have to be levied on the large corporations and the very rich: for the vast majority of people, any disruption must be minimized, while the burdens fall on the wealthy and on large corporate polluters.

Such a declaration would also need an explicitly international dimension. The UK would have to appeal strongly to other governments to take similar emergency action, both because a global solution is essential and because unilateral action must not leave the UK economically isolated or disproportionately exposed to transitional shocks.

What an Emergency Climate Program for the UK Would Require

A genuine emergency response would then have to be backed by a concrete national program. This would include, at a minimum:

• a legally binding timetable for rapidly reducing emissions, with penalties for breaches
• massive public investment in renewable energy, alongside participation by private firms willing to operate under strict climate rules
• a clear schedule for phasing gasoline- and diesel-powered private vehicles off the road
• urgent negotiations with industry to drive down emissions across all major sectors
• negotiations with farm owners to cut agricultural emissions, including the elimination of feedlots
• nationalization of industries or enterprises that are unable or unwilling to make the required changes
• iron-clad guarantees for workers’ jobs, wages, and pensions throughout the transition
• emergency taxation of extreme wealth and large corporations to raise billions of pounds
• legislation to bring capital hidden in tax havens back into the tax net
• tariffs and related measures to protect UK industry from
  • goods produced with high carbon emissions
  • goods produced through extreme labor exploitation
• direct intervention in the banking and finance sector to ensure these measures are fully funded, including the creation of a public bank if necessary

Few, if any, parties on the left internationally are willing to advance anything like this kind of program. And the prospects for a coherent and adequate climate policy from Your Party are not encouraging. The first draft of its political statement did not even mention the climate crisis.

As with left parties elsewhere, ecosocialists and climate activists within Your Party will have to organize and campaign for a policy that confronts the emergency honestly — at the scale and speed the science demands.

Photo: image from Your Party website homepage – delegates attending a political conference