Councillor Michael Lavalette is standing as a candidate for Your Party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC). And he told the Canary the party urgently needs to ‘focus on what we have in common’, both with each other and with ordinary people around the country.

Lavalette has participated in left-wing alliances in Preston for over 20 years. With this experience behind him, he knows the value of actually building trust in the community by focusing not on what divides us but what unites us. And that’s why he wants Your Party to start:

speaking to the millions of people outside of your party’s ranks who are looking for an alternative

As he told us:

We should be a party which is focused on what we have in common, what unites us, and what addresses the common issues that the vast majority of working people in this country face.

Those are issues like addressing the cost of living crisis, renationalising utilities, building council houses, supporting a Green New Deal, and opposing war, oppression, and the privatisation of welfare.

Those kinds of slogans, in my opinion, unite us, deal with common problems, and allow us – as Your Party – to look outwards

He wants Your Party to be a broad party of the left, which can disagree respectfully on some things while uniting around the big issues above.

In Preston, he said, this has worked well. Uniting with others against war and austerity has built trust and a solid foundation for cooperation. And he added:

We might have slightly different ways of explaining the world or interpreting the world. But actually, at heart, we act in the same way.

He also stressed that:

I think that approach in Preston’s really served us well for 20 years. It’s a general approach which I think we should be adopting as Your Party nationally. And it’s for that reason that I’m not on any slate.

Your Party — unite, organise, and focus on connecting with ordinary people

With just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of original signups to Your Party transforming into members, one thing is clear. Internal disagreements out in the open impressed no one. And as this all happened, Lavalette stressed:

the social media, the control of the data, the setting up of branches, the engagement of ordinary people, has been secondary to the fight at the top.

That, he asserted, needs to change:

There’s too much concern with internal fights, rather than looking outwards.

Your Party can still grow, he believes, if it keeps its message clear, responds quickly online and offline, engages with movements on the ground, and actively listens to ordinary people.

He hopes that the coming weeks of the CEC election campaign don’t fill the news with stories of factionalism. Because that will do nothing good for the party, he said. In fact, he asserted:

I think an awful lot of people who voted for collective leadership was to try and stop the faction fighting.

He absolutely will champion “greater member democracy” and “accountability”. But he doesn’t want to feed into division.

Instead, he wants a focus on “what we have in common”. Then the party has to come out of the CEC elections, “move with great speed” in setting up branches and “profiling nationally what we’re about”, and “act in unison” to push things forward.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

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