A couple of months ago I tried to imagine what a first local meeting of Your Party would look like. I wasn’t that far off the mark even if what follows is an account of the second Tower Hamlets meeting.

It was attended by about forty people. The largest single group was a bunch of mostly students in their late teens who were studying politics but had to leave early due to a pesky curfew imposed by their parents. In a sign of changing times, when it came to the cash collection at the end some of the younger people reacted as if they had been handed a couple of stones and asked to make an arrowhead. Coins and banknotes are things olden days people used.

By my reckoning there were about half a dozen former Labour Corbynistas, maybe four or five SWP members, a similar number of Socialist Party members, a sprinkling of Counterfire and a garnish of RS21. Credit where it’s due, everyone declared their organisational affiliation. This is something of a first and someone who was keeping a tally said that there were twenty four organisations in the room.

Maybe I am reading too much into the fact that the posters I saw for this meeting tended to have been stuck up fairly close to posters advertising an SWP meeting the previous night. The meeting was chaired by an SWP member who said that it had been agreed to have a different chair at every meeting. That’s an admirable idea which will be fine when everyone is getting along but I would rather have my fingernails pulled out with pliers than sit through a fractious meeting with an incompetent chair. It is time for a new generation to learn the lessons of The Tyranny of Structurelessness. However, as I was there to deliver gold, frankincense and myrrh on behalf of the Green Party I refrained from commenting on internal matters.

The chair said that the aim was to minimise bureaucracy and maximise action. Perhaps that is why there wasn’t a structured introduction. My impression, and I am open to correction on this, is that the SWP have decided to fill the vacuum and set something up in areas where they can, freely admitting “no one has given us permission to do anything”. Who says punk is dead? It also turns out that they have no greater insight into the recent shenanigans between Corbyn and Sultana than anyone else does.

A general consensus quickly emerged that fascism is bad which allowed people to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about organising against an upcoming UKIP mobilisation in Whitechapel. There was an inability or unwillingness to discuss quite how Your Party intended to replace Labour. Setting aside their eternal insistence on federalism, the Socialist Party people did try and have a positive discussion on programme and structure. This was utterly impossible in a meeting which had not really been politically prepared and tended towards the improvisational.

I was rather surprised by the spirited defence of Aspire offered by a member of RS21. This soft left coterie of the mayor and his mates isn’t a political party in any conventional sense and a couple of people seemed keen on it merging with Your Party. Careful what you wish for, comrades.

It is proving virtually impossible to predict anything about Your Party. A significant portion of the people in the meeting either were too young to be part of Corbyn’s Labour or had abstained from it. What I saw was a fairly large group of people who want to be part of something bigger and at the moment are willing to cooperate with other currents. What isn’t immediately obvious is how tens of thousands of those 800 000 people who have entered their details on a website are going to be transformed into the mass membership of a party in which the pre-existing left groups will be a tiny minority. Recent events elsewhere in east London give some hint of how things might pan out as a politically coherent group walks out of Labour as a bloc.