Across the four days of The World Transformed (TWT), two sentiments prevailed: an urgent need to organise, and a determination to lead the way from the grassroots. Held this October in Hulme, Manchester, and divorced for the first time from the annual Labour Party conference, the left-wing festival saw traditional progressive leaderships grapple with a reinvigorated and sceptical left.
The British left has occupied plenty of political discourse over the past few years. Waves of pro-Palestine protests have spotlit the anti-imperialist demands of the youth. Environmentalist and anti-war direct action groups have received record jail sentences and controversial terrorism proscriptions. Reactions and counter-protests to recent far-right activity have, at times, dwarfed the far-right themselves.
Yet it remains structurally unmoored. As popular support has grown or maintained, left organisations have lagged, or fallen behind entirely. Your Party’s preliminary signup form attracted 800,00 signups within weeks, and co-founder Zarah Sultana publicly announced that initial memberships reached 20,000 after two hours. After a public implosion, a make-up tour and another, now-official membership launch, the party has stayed oddly quiet on official numbers.
Beyond parliament, workers’ power has also experienced a staggered progression. Larger, weightier trade unions have maintained stronger industrial actions, but, unlike the workers they represent, have yet to detach themselves from Labour. With voting power at conferences weighted by membership size, it took a coalition of ten unions to outvote just three – Prospect, the GMB and Unite – in voting for a deprioritisation of defence spending at the 2025 TUC conference.
This contradiction – a mass movement with nowhere to go – has defined the left for the last few years. But recent months have suggested a left beginning to push from below against structural stagnation. Solidarity protests over Palestine Action’s prescription have swamped the Met police with time-consuming, demoralising arrests (often of elderly, disabled people) and revealed the weakness of the UK’s policing abilities when put under any significant test.
In addition, local unions have mobilised workers against far-right actions, such as Unison’s actions against UKIP’s rallies in Tower Hamlets. The “Our Party” initiative, an attempt to wrestle control of Your Party out of the hands of MPs and into local grassroots organisers, got enough traction to be commented on supportively by Sultana.
Tensions between traditional left leadership and an emerging, bolder generation were apparent at The World Transformed. Enthusiasm was reserved for newer prominent figures like Zack Polanski, recently elected leader of the Green Party and self-described “eco-populist”, and for grassroots organisers; longstanding figureheads like Jeremy Corbyn received more of a lukewarm reception.
“We have to do it ourselves,” a phrase used at multiple points throughout TWT, including the closing assembly, became a dominant theme of the long weekend. One achievement of the conference was the creation of a shared platform between participating organisations, proposing increased union involvement, class-based politics, and total right of MP recall. It’s a step towards a unified platform, and one that notably de-centres traditional leadership.
“It’s really exciting, this idea of the grassroots getting organised,” Hope Worsdale, TWT 2025’s Comms’ lead, told me. “Whether it’s through organisations, or tenant’s unions, or campaigns… all these different groups are coming together under a unified voice, and pushing up.”
But the left still has a way to go. All across Europe, strikes and collective worker-student action have impacted country after country, recently spreading to Spain and Belgium. So far, the British left has not matched these efforts. Large trade unions have yet to throw their support clearly behind anti-austerity, anti-militarisation, or even anti-capitalist movements. Student protests remain sectarian and isolated. Raw mobilisation is not the bottleneck – on 11 October, half a million people in London protested against the UK’s ties with Israel – but without organisation and unification, its impact remains limited.
TWT 2025 captured a left in transition, straining against its current organisational limits and trying to coalesce a shared platform. Whether it is successful in doing so remains to be seen. But at the end of the day, a start is a start.
