In British politics, collapses come slowly and then all at once. Sir Keir Starmer, elected on the promise of competence after the chaos of Johnson, Truss and Sunak, has now seen his credibility unravel in record time.

The Epstein-Mandelson scandal, the resignation of Angela Rayner and a series of tone-deaf responses have left his government adrift barely a year after its landslide win. What was meant to be Labour’s great restoration has instead become its terminal reckoning.

But perhaps the real story is not the fall of one man, but the exhaustion of a project. The social democracy that once rebuilt Europe after war has for 50 years tied itself tighter to neoliberal economics and US hegemony. By chasing markets, suppressing movements, and governing as custodians of decline, Labour parties across the West hollowed themselves out. Starmer’s implosion is not an accident – it is the endgame of that trajectory.

Against this backdrop, Jeremy Corbyn and his allies have stepped back into the breach. The launch of “Your Party” this week is more than just another vehicle for a sidelined politician. It is a deliberate attempt to reimagine political organisations in an age when trust in parties has collapsed. Membership is opened not as a subscription, but as a founding act. Draft founding documents will be debated line by line, amended by assemblies, revised by online forums. Delegates to the November conference will be chosen by lottery to ensure fairness and representation. The final decisions will be put to every member in a one-member-one-vote ballot.

This is an attempt to build a democratic culture from the ground up – one part social movement, one part political party, one part citizens’ assembly. It recalls the early energy of Podemos in Spain and the best of grassroots organising traditions, while trying to avoid the ossification that swallowed Momentum. Its language is sharp and unapologetic: against war, against falling wages, against austerity and division.

The contrast with Australia could not be starker. Here, the Labor Party has just delivered its first Left-majority caucus in half a century, but shows little appetite for systemic renewal. Its leadership clings to a narrowing middle ground between fossil fuel expansion, property speculation and defence dependence. The Greens, for all their breakthroughs, remain locked in a moral-politics frame without a clear class politics or organisational renewal strategy.

In Britain, Corbynism has found a second wind by pairing class with democracy and peace with ecology. In Australia, nothing comparable has yet taken root. But as global warming intensifies and inequality widens, the need for a new synthesis — red and green, class and climate — becomes ever more urgent.

The tragedy is that things may get worse before they get better. Social democracy’s half-century decline has created the vacuum in which oligarchs, authoritarian leaders and billionaires thrive. The coming age of trillionaires will sharpen that imbalance. But, as the British experiment shows, renewal is still possible – if we can rebuild not just policies, but movements, not just leaders, but cultures of participation.

Your Party’s founding process may not succeed. It may fracture under weight of factionalism, media hostility or simple exhaustion. But it at least attempts something the rest of us have not yet dared to do: give ordinary people the power to write, amend and own the rules of politics itself.

Australia needs its own version of this. A politics that takes democracy seriously, confronts capitalism honestly and brings together labour and ecology to chart a future worth living in.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.