25.09.2025
Civil war continues
Stay well clear of efforts to ‘save’ Your Party’s launch conference by a self-appointed clique intent on staging their own coup, says Carla Roberts. Instead rely on members, branches, STV elections and democracy
It is difficult to keep up with the latest twists and turns in the saga that is Your Party. It looks like a shaky peace has been brokered between team Sultana and camp Corbyn, with Zarah Sultana withdrawing her daft legal threat for defamation and getting behind the ‘official’ membership launch that team Corbyn announced on the morning of September 24. Yes, it took her pretty much all day, but at 7pm, she announced: “I’m a member of Your Party - and if you haven’t joined yet, you should too. For those who joined the previous system, data and membership will be migrated across in due course.”1
That probably explains why Sultana also just re-enabled the separate membership portal that she unilaterally launched on September 18 and then took down. Corbyn’s public complaint that Sultana’s email was “unauthorised”2 has serious legal consequences. Such allegations of a breach of the Data Protection Act cannot be withdrawn, even if you wanted to, which is why camp Corbyn quickly referred their complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office: “Failure to notify” the ICO carries a possible fine of “up to £8.7 million” - not quite as high as for the kind of “serious breach” Sultana had been accused of, which carries a “maximum fine of £17.5 million”.3 It is unclear if Sultana herself or the company, MOU (which holds the membership fees), would be liable for any fine and if any potential rowing back by Corbyn would make any difference. Perhaps by relaunching the portal she wants to show ‘evidence’ that she did no worse than Corbyn, who has now also broken the existing ‘agreement’, according to which all six MPs are required to ‘sign off’ on the membership scheme. Be that as it may, two membership portals, both pointing to the same website, but with money flowing in different directions, is not exactly a good look.
Local party
And what about Corbyn’s email, which states: “To join, you must be over 16, resident in the UK, and you cannot be a member of another political party”? What exactly is meant by this? After all, Corbyn has encouraged the setting up of tiny little local parties everywhere - his trusted comrade, Pamela Fitzpatrick, for example, launched her Harrow-based party, Arise4; then there is Jamie Driscoll’s party, Majority UK, and former Momentum boss Alan Gibbons has made the Liverpool Community Independents into a party, too.5 Or are ‘local parties’ allowed?
Is this perhaps an attempt to keep the organised left out? We know that Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy, is very keen to keep the “Marxist sects” at arms length. Or perhaps it is just meant as a way to avoid Green Party or Labour Party members joining? Activists up and down the country were also quick to ask - will that ban include membership of Sultana’s Your Party? Over 20,000 had joined that one.
What an absolute mess - and over what exactly? There are now some real political differences emerging. Sultana complained that she had been frozen out by a “sexist boys’ club” - ie, the other five MPs of the Independent Alliance. However, the real power behind the throne is no ‘boy’ - it is Karie Murphy, who also happens to be the partner of Len McCluskey, former general secretary of Unite. She tightly controls the nascent structures of Your Party. Sultana’s accusation is a reflection of the identity politics rife on university campuses. But she is also rather rapidly moving away from the kind of Labourism (loyalty to the constitution) epitomised by Corbyn.
At a meeting in Sheffield on the evening of September 24, she said: “Yes of course we must get rid of the monarchy, I am a republican.” Later she stressed that, “the main difference between us and the Greens is that we are a class-based party, we recognise the power of the working class. We identity as a socialist party and proudly so. We are not pro-Nato, they are.” She also stressed that “we are an anti-Zionist party”. Corbyn might not agree with that one, but the 400 people in Sheffield certainly did.
She also apologised “for my role in the recent fights. I am sorry about the role I have played. But democracy is not something we can compromise on - when the train has left the station it is very difficult to turn it back. If we don’t democratise the party, how will we be able to democratise society?”
When pressed from the floor on how she would do that, she explained that “these fights we’ve had, they were all about democracy and empowering the grassroots members. I am critical of sortition, but now it has been announced, we have to make it as democratic as possible. And yes, I’m in favour of members and branches putting forward motions and amendments and that regional meetings should be autonomous and able to vote.” She also disagreed with the apparent proposed ban on dual membership: “I don’t agree with that; I think we need to unify the left. You have a voice, use your voice. We have to show that we are fighting for democracy, we are fighting to unify the left.” Good.
Later however she explained that she also “pushed for ‘one member one vote’ at conference and it is very important that we got that one through.” We would argue that she is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater by supporting OMOV - which is the most democratic decision-making mechanism locally and in smaller meetings, but turns into its opposite when it is applied to making national conference decisions by, say, 800,000 members. It isolates and atomises comrades who are watching and voting at home. Such a system clearly favours a bureaucracy which chooses the options, how they are presented, who gets to speak, etc.
Yes, Sultana is somewhat better than Corbyn, but we should be careful not to put our trust in either.
‘Our Party’
At least the new-found, if somewhat shaky, peace should have blown out of the water the opaque initiative by ‘Our Party’,6 which has for some unfathomable reason gathered the support not just of Novara Media and professional turncoat Owen Jones, but also quite a few socialists, including some of the people involved in the Ken Loach-fronted Platform for a Democratic Party,7 members of RS21, the Democratic Socialist Platform in YP8 and leading members of Jewish Voice for Labour.
‘Our Party’ got surprisingly quickly out of the starting blocks (its website was registered in August). The day after the Corbyn-Sultana fallout, it launched an open, unsigned letter, proposing that a mysterious “handover team”9 should take over the entire data, all social media, all funds and every company associated with Your Party - in order to start a new membership drive and organise the election of a “founding stewards’ committee”, which would be “mandated to organise the party’s founding conference and the process leading up to it, as previously laid out in Your Party communications”.10 There is nothing quite like proposing to overcome a lack of democracy and secrecy with, well, a lack of democracy and secrecy - no wonder many described it as a coup.
The main organiser, Josh Virasami, tried his best to explain his motives in an interview with Novara Media11 and during a networking Zoom meeting of YP branches.12 And this is where things actually got interesting - not because of Our Party’s misguided proposals (see below), but because it turns out that Virasami has been sitting on the “executive team of Your Party” for “several months” - a team that has been operating in total secrecy and without any kind of accountability. “I got brought in as a social movement person. I got carried along and got invited to do stuff, which is how I ended up on the executive team.”
We learn that: “Your Party was stewarded by about 20 people on this executive team, made up from a diversity of grassroots social movements, prominent candidates, former trade union secretaries, current and former mayors. But somewhere along the line these 20 people suddenly became the six MPs.”
Virasami has become the first person on that ‘team’ to answer questions publicly - and only because he just resigned from it (or perhaps he ‘was resigned’). He did not say a peep when he was part of the top bureaucracy - in fact, he still supports the same bureaucratic methods. He explains that he was in charge of organising the regional conferences, to which “I had already recruited 12,000 facilitators” (ie, people who answered the YP email), which are to be “trained” by Roger Hallam’s Assemble. These are going to be “great fun events”, with “horizontal breakout rooms of 10-12 people each”. Crucially, they will have - as we feared - no decision-making powers. He breathlessly explained:
These breakout meetings would be able to discuss and hear amendments to the four documents submitted by YP nationally and the facilitators in each of these meetings would take copious amounts of notes. All the notes would then be collated and sent to the compositing process, including all comments and amendments made on the documents via the online members’ portal. Members will be able to see all tracked changes on those documents.
He admitted that “the democratic process, however, is the brief of Karie Murphy and James Schneider” and that he did not know “how they would be able to go through what will be thousands and thousands of pages of notes”. We can take a very good guess though: they won’t. Most suggestions will end up in the bin.
Murphy played a huge role in Corbyn’s self-defeat over the anti-Semitism smear campaign and Schneider helped Jon Lansman shut down all democratic structures in Momentum. The fact that Corbyn is happy for these two to be put in charge of the ‘democratic process’ really says it all.
Schneider has, incidentally, just resigned his role in Your Party, because he was so fed up with the ongoing civil war - a setback for Murphy, who has used him to try and rebuild all the bridges that she burns down. He was also supposed to write the draft constitution for YP - perhaps he has already done that (or perhaps somebody should check if Jon Lansman is available …!).
Member’s party
Corbyn’s email of September 24 states that the launch conference has been booked to take place on November 29 and 30 in Liverpool - and it will be even worse than anticipated: “A total of 13,000 members will debate and amend the party's founding documents in person across two days, with 6,500 attending each day.” In other words, the randomly chosen participants cannot even properly participate in the whole conference. What a joke.
This is our main problem with ‘Our Party’ proposals. Yes, they want to hold an election to the conference arrangements committee, but otherwise, “we just want that to implement that roadmap. We just want to deliver that conference - that’s all this is.” Virasami’s motives are clear enough - he wants to become the saviour of Your Party, as leader of “a third pole in the YP leadership, which has been active for some time”.
What is less clear is why any socialist would think it is a good idea to support Virasami’s plans. It is understandable why Zarah Sultana supports them - she has been frozen out and is entirely powerless. But there is absolutely no chance of Corbyn’s advisors giving up power.
Instead of trying to save current plans, we should be arguing for democratic structures and a launch conference that empowers members: branches should elect regional committees and national conference delegates through a simple and straightforward STV system.
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harrowmonitoringgroup.uk/2025/08/28/new-political-party-arise-launched-in-harrow.↩︎
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docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfOR22eJ7yQcbljDicGpaNEZNrI_xcuqrhSWOw0TsQ6Cfp0-A/viewform.↩︎
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It took five days before Our Party published the proposed names of the proposed handover team: Sarah Woolley (general secretary, Bakers and Allied Food Workers Union), Kate Hudson (“former general secretary of CND” and still co-leader of Left Unity), Jeanine Hourani (Palestinian Youth Movement), Imran Khan KC and Louise Regan (National Education Union campaigner).↩︎
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docs.google.com/document/d/1XbQFJqlec6epph4Zv34tDJbxGLHJxTqnVEgugX0Mz8k/edit?tab=t.0.↩︎