Young Speaker Champions Working Class at Conference

A student and former general election candidate from Reading spoke at the very first Your Party conference.

Reading student and former general election candidate Adam Gillman, 19, was among the first speakers at the inaugural Your Party conference at the Arena and Conference Centre in Liverpool on 29-30 November.

One of the first 15 speakers, he argued for explicitly including ‘the working class’ in the party’s political statement. “Why? Because the working class is the vast majority of society, and without the working class, no real turns!

He warned removing that language would open the door to “right-wing saboteurs” and said working people — not “the capitalists, the ruling class, the banks, the billionaires” — bore the brunt of austerity, cuts, war and climate change.

Members agreed to add the line to the party’s “evolved” Political Statement: “Our task is to build a mass party for the many, rooted in the broadest possible social alliance, with the working class at its heart.”

Mr Gillman, one of the youngest parliamentary candidates in the 2024 general election, stood for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in Reading Central and received 221 votes.

He backs members holding memberships of other left-wing organisations and is a member of Your Party and the Socialist Party. In a second speech he called for Your Party to back a No Cuts People’s Budget, saying: “[It’s] important that we stand on a no cuts platform, on a platform we’re fighting for a needs-based no cuts budget that’s the official position of the local authority unions of Unite, Unison and GMB.”

He told delegates Liverpool council had once pushed for £60 million from Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and quipped: “Let’s be honest, [Sir Keir] Starmer is not even an iron ingot!”

Mr Gillman also attended the inaugural meeting of the Reading branch of Your Party last month.

James Aldridge, Local Democracy Reporter