North Devon Your Party’s ‘member-led’ vision for change gains traction

Ahead of the Your Party conference (29-30 November), we spoke to a few local Your Party groups about how things have been going and their hopes for conference and beyond. Watch this space for more #YourPartyLocal articles in the coming days.

North Devon Your Party chair Siobhán Ovey told the Canary that the local branch has around 200 members, and is full of enthusiasm. The organising process “has gone really well so far”, she said, and people are “really keen to get going”.

Members driving things forward

Covering two constituencies — North Devon, and Torridge and Tavistock — the group has harnessed the power of social media to encourage people to get active and join together. Building links was a challenge at first “as a newcomer to organisational politics”, Ovey noted. She added that reaching out to others in recent weeks has been beneficial in making connections from national organisers to different branches in the South West region.

Ovey highlighted that more “funding and communication” from national organisers would be a big help. But people’s energy has already pushed North Devon Your Party to a point where it has “started building local policy and what we expect from national policy”.

In particular, the hope of members being at the heart of Your Party is a driving factor for Ovey.

While she said the current membership surge in the Green Party is “a real encouraging indicator that people are crying out for something different”, she argued that “it’s still not truly grassroots or built by people on the ground”. And that’s where Your Party comes in, she insisted:

this is truly member-led, with all branches & members being allowed to give their input on amendments to the founding documents, at assemblies or on the membership portal, not top down.

Nonetheless, she noted:

I’m hopeful that we can form a left alliance & work with the Greens

Hope for a conference of unity

Speaking about the upcoming conference, Ovey asserted:

I hope for next week’s conference we can see a little bit of unity. Approaching this process with some positivity and acting in good faith, we’re trying to build something different, so we don’t need to play dirty politics to get our points across.

She would also like to see an amendment “on allowing dual membership providing they don’t stand candidates against Your Party”, “a commitment to branch autonomy in terms of how they form and how they define themselves”, and “funding for local branches”.

Your Party’s sortition process has selected a number of local members to attend conference, and the branch has been advertising a jamboree this Thursday at 7pm in Barnstaple to raise funds “so we can make the journey and sort accommodation”.

Water, bills, health, and housing

North Devon Your Party members already have ideas about campaigns they’d like to push, and Ovey highlighted some of the key issues locally that they would like Your Party support with:

The South West especially have had a troubling time with water companies making our bathing waters unusable, and their CEO recently had to resign after Ofwat found South West Water responsible for systemic failings from the cryptosporidium outbreak which put hundreds of people on a ‘boiling notice’ to a burst main in Plymouth that left people without water for days. On top of this, we think our priorities also ought to centre around combatting the increasing hateful rhetoric about immigration, pledging to hold energy and water companies to account for consistently rising bills, fighting against the closure of our local minor injuries unit in Ilfracombe and ending the ongoing housing crisis that has seen so many people in not just Devon but Cornwall as well in temporary accommodation or homelessness.

She added:

We’ll also continue to support events and turn up for any causes that stand against the continuing injustices we see not just nationally but internationally, not as politicians trying to get a vote, but as activists concerned about the gradual descent into fascism through capitulating to the far right’s demands.

North Devon isn’t the only local branch hoping Your Party will play a key role in building a fairer country and defeating the far right.

Across Britain, massive grassroots energy is bubbling with hope for positive change. And if that energy pulls in the same direction, the right-wing establishment will have a real challenge on its hands.

Featured image via Your Party