Comments by SSP Co-Spokesperson Colin Fox carried in The National – 02/12/2025 – on Your Party and the 2026 Holyrood Elections. Article by Hamish Morrison.
ONE of Scotland’s most prominent socialist parties has ruled out working with Your Party for the Holyrood elections after a stormy founding conference.
Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) co-spokesperson Colin Fox told The National there were “no plans” to work with the party, co-founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, for next year’s poll.
It comes after members met in Liverpool at the weekend for Your Party’s founding conference, which was defined in the eyes of many observers by the open warfare between Corbyn and Sultana’s rival camps.
Sultana’s faction won out in key votes on having a collective leadership model and allowing people from other parties to join Your Party.
In dramatic scenes on the opening day of the event, she walked up to the venue before refusing to enter in protest over the exclusion of some members, particularly those who were also members of the Socialist Workers’ Party.
Fox, who said he watched the weekend’s events “with interest”, told the National: “There are no plans from our point of view to stand as joint candidates or anything like that.
“The SSP announced at our conference that we’re standing, our aim and our objective is to stand in all eight regions of the Scottish Parliament elections next year and I’ve already been selected along with other comrades in the Lothians to be the candidates there. We’re getting on with that job.”
But the former Lothians MSP left the door open to future cooperation between the two parties.
Fox added: “The SSP treats all socialists with respect and we obviously share a lot of common ground but we contacted Your Party some months ago for clarification about what they would stand for and what their attitude would be towards joint working and we’ve not had any reply, so that’s the first thing we’d say.
“Second thing is, the SSP continues after 25 years to be Scotland’s socialist party. Our aim is to establish an independent, socialist Scotland, we’re clear about that and a modern, democratic republic and we’re happy to work with anybody and everybody who shares those objectives and that remains our position.
“I think generally speaking, socialists like ourselves are not yet clear what Your Party stands for and when that becomes the case, we’ll obviously draw our conclusion about what our relationship we’d have and where there’s common ground and where there isn’t.”
He said there remained questions over Your Party’s stance on Scottish independence.
This, among other areas of policy, will be decided at the party’s founding Scottish conference on January 10 and 11 in Dundee.
At that event, the party will also decide on its approach to the Holyrood elections.
A Your Party spokesperson said: “In the coming weeks our members in Scotland will democratically determine the party’s Scottish structures and approach to the upcoming Holyrood elections. In line with our principles of member democracy and self-determination, this decision is for Scottish members, not the Britain-wide party. We are doing politics differently: from the bottom-up, not the top-down.”
In response to Fox’s claim he did not know what Your Party stood for, the spokesperson added: “Our principles are clear from the political statement overwhelmingly agreed by members this weekend: we stand for social justice, peace and international solidarity.
“We stand for democracy: in our politics and the economy too, so our society is run for the common good, not private profit.”