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Paper short abstract

I examine recent developments on the British Left - Your Party's chaotic emergence and the Green Party's new surge - against a backdrop of anti-genocide and anti-racist protest. I weave autoethnography with research on left-wing activism to bridge the realist/idealist dreaming binary.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on the developments in left-wing politics in the UK during the summer in 2025. The fraught emergence of Your Party alongside the newly galvanised Green Party under Zack Polanski occurred against a backdrop of national and global turmoil that spilled out into British streets. Protests against Israel's genocide in Gaza and counterprotests against the far-right brought together a wide range of actors with varied dreams and fears for the future. I weave autoethnography from this febrile period with excerpts from longer term research on British left-wing, and other related activism to muddy the waters between realist and idealist dreaming. Being attentive to the varied dreams expressed by my participants with regard to their personal futures, the future of the country and the future of the planet, I argue that they all slip constantly between ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ modes, and that both modes are mutually generative. Likewise, the dreams invoked in protest movements and the dreams being collectively fashioned within political party structures are equally hard to categorise as real or ideal.