To offer hope for the politically homeless, 'Your Party' must build bridges
Adnan Hussain, Independent MP for Blackburn, Sep 2024 (Credit: Imageplotter/Alamy Live News)
4 min read
Political life in Britain has entered a moment of deep fragmentation.
For years now, public trust in institutions, whether Parliament, the media or the parties themselves, has been in steady decline. The old binaries of left and right are no longer adequate to capture the complexity of political identity in 21st-century Britain. A more fundamental rupture has taken place: between the political class and the communities it claims to represent.
It is from this rupture that Your Party has emerged, not as a rebranding exercise or a vanity project, but as an attempt to reconstitute a meaningful relationship between people and power. It aims to be a genuinely democratic political movement, one grounded in class struggle, solidarity and the idea that dignity should not be a luxury but a right.
What has been called the ‘parallel lives’ phenomenon in towns like Blackburn is not just a failure of integration but a failure of imagination
The launch of the party’s first official rally, held in Blackburn, was a moment of quiet significance. Those in attendance did not reflect a single demographic, ideology or political tradition. Instead, it was a cross-section of society rarely seen in mainstream political spaces: young and old; all creeds and none; disabled and able-bodied; working-class women seeking economic security; disenfranchised men seeking purpose and belonging; migrants and their descendants standing shoulder-to-shoulder with trade unionists and community organisers.
What brought them together was not a shared ideology but a shared disillusionment – with austerity, with war and genocide, with the failure of existing political parties to give voice to and address their struggles.
But beyond disillusionment, what was most striking was the hunger for hope. Not a vague sentiment but a clear desire for a new kind of politics – one grounded in participation, in place and in the possibility of healing wounded societies.
This is what Your Party represents to me, as someone who has lived in northern working-class towns my whole life. As an MP and as a neighbour, an active member of my local community, I have seen the way our communities have become atomised. Where once there was civic life, community halls, youth clubs, faith gatherings and local political organisation, there is now an absence. In its place: loneliness, racial segregation and fertile ground for far-right narratives.
What has been called the ‘parallel lives’ phenomenon in towns like Blackburn is not just a failure of integration but a failure of imagination on the part of a political system that has reduced social cohesion to soundbites, and multiculturalism to photo ops.
A new party built for these very disillusioned and overlooked communities must begin from a different premise: that healing must be deliberate. That community cannot be outsourced to charity or subcontracted to the voluntary sector.
It must be rebuilt through public investment, institutional reform and, above all, political will. This means restoring local infrastructure but also restoring dialogue. Bridge-building must be more than metaphorical – it must be structural.
The challenge before Your Party is not only to campaign effectively but to reimagine what political participation can look like in a fractured society. That means embracing complexity, refusing reductive narratives, and grounding policy in lived experience and not abstract doctrine.
The rally in Blackburn was not an end but a beginning. It offered a glimpse of what a movement could look like when it takes people seriously – as voters but also as thinkers, builders and participants. The work ahead will not be easy. But if we are to reverse the tide of alienation, if we are to re-enchant the political imagination, then this – building bridges, not walls – must be our starting point.
Your Party must do what it promises and be inclusive of all, especially communities currently marginalised by the left, such as the white working-class people of my constituency of Blackburn. A successful party will build a movement to excite the masses, and provide hope and a home for the politically homeless.
Adnan Hussain is Independent MP for Blackburn and a member of the Independent Alliance parliamentary group
