20.11.2025

All out for Liverpool!

With fractures and splits at the top, conference, as the party’s sovereign body, ought to seize control and elect an emergency leadership. There is every reason to believe that such a bold initiative will be heartily welcomed by branches and members, says Carla Roberts

Another week, another scandal (or four) rocking the nascent Your Party. There is one positive side effect stemming from the utterly chaotic and untransparent way that the launch conference in particular has been organised: in the first round of sortition, (into which all members were automatically entered), suspiciously few leftwingers were picked. But a huge number of those selected seem to have said ‘no thanks’ to the golden ticket - probably because they did not fancy splashing out hundreds of pounds for transport and accommodation costs to attend a conference where they do not even know what they will discuss or how they could meaningfully intervene. We still have no idea if there will be a way to move amendments or if HQ will simply present participants with a pre-written set of ‘options’, to which attendees must say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

So perhaps it is not really surprising that, after the second round of sortition, for which members had to apply, things are looking very, very different. Hundreds of members of leftwing groups have now been picked, possibly because they are among the only ones who actually want to go. Dozens of supporters of the Democratic Socialists in Your Party have been sortitioned, along with, we hear, about 70 members of the Socialist Workers Party, with probably similar numbers from Counterfire and the Socialist Party in England and Wales. Even Socialist Alternative has managed to get 20 members selected and a dozen Weekly Worker supporters will be at the conference too. In fact, it seems only a small minority of those who applied in the second round did not get in. But among those not chosen are, interestingly enough, many cadres from those left groups with, shall we say, more recognisable names. Is there a blacklist of some sort?

Among those sortitioned, however, are also a few familiar names, who, we suspect, were not even on the radar of HQ as potential troublemakers: Tony Greenstein, former ambassador Craig Murray¹ and, in a truly bizarre twist, Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP - the same Chris Williamson who was hounded out of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, because he stood up to the anti-Semitism smear campaign, defending comrades like Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker. He is also, rather famously, a deputy leader of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. Somebody will probably get in a bit of trouble for that particular oversight. But as dual membership is not banned (yet), they will struggle to find a way to exclude him now. Ditto Craig Murry, who might or might not still be a member of the Alba party and/or the Workers Party.

We suspect that among those who will actually turn up in Liverpool, members of organised left groups might well constitute something like 50% of all participants, especially as the total number of attendees seems to have been reduced from the original 13,000 to 3-4,000.² Add to that the fact that HQ left it so late informing ‘sortitioned’ participants that hotel and train prices have now further rocketed, making it likely that quite a few of those with a golden or silver ticket will simply not show up.

As an aside, we also know now that some participants have been invited to attend both days, but others just for one day - presumably this is to fill certain ‘quotas’ for each day. The even more bizarre version previously discussed, where conference was to be split into quarters, with different sets of delegates attending for a few hours each, is off the table. Oh and those not sortitioned will be able to vote at home, at the same time, making the whole sortition process look even more pointless.

On the YP website, members can now see all other members’ names and locations (looks a bit like an ‘unauthorised use of data’ to us), though you cannot actually contact them, which makes it also pretty pointless. Nevertheless, it shows that there are exactly 53,503 members - not a bad figure on paper, but a large portion of them seem pretty passive. It will be interesting to see how many will actually vote at conference and how many used the incredibly clunky crowd editing tool copied from Yanis Varoufakis’s organisation, Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 - if we ever get to see any of those figures. There is an interesting article by Cambridge YP member Inacio Invita explaining the many technical problems with the software that prevent it from allowing any kind of democratic, transparent process.³ We would add that the obvious solution is not another piece of (better) software, but democratic and transparent decision-making in the branches, with elected branch delegates moving amendments at conference. Just because this is an old way of doing things does not mean it is a bad way of doing things.

In any case, we now know that hundreds of members of the organised left will be in Liverpool - this means the left has a very realistic chance of strongly influencing conference proceedings. The newly launched Socialist Unity Platform can now actually hope not just to make a splash at conference, but maybe even turn things around in Your Party more generally. Perhaps it does not have to become the stillborn mess that it looked like even a few short days ago. Conference will be ‘make or break’ time, in other words. More on the SUP below.

Second thoughts

Certainly, the people currently running Your Party cannot be left in charge. They have messed things up so thoroughly that even those nominally running things - the five male MPs of the Independence Alliance - are barely hanging on.

On November 14, Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, announced that he has “stepped out of the steering process for Your Party. I wish those who continue to work on this endeavour the very best of luck and hope their hard work achieves the results they desire.” Speculation as to whether he has also resigned from Your Party might be the wrong question: we hear he never joined in the first place! Hussain complained of the “pattern of clique-like behaviour and gatekeeping”⁴ - a thinly veiled dig at Karie Murphy, right-hand woman of Jeremy Corbyn, whose brilliant idea it was to hand over the party to the five MPs in the first place. They were supposed to ‘steer’ the ship until the election of a leadership in February or March. We hardly needed any more proof, but Hussain’s post certainly confirms it never was those five who were leading the party or who composed the dreadful founding documents. It was all the work of Karie Murphy and those working under her direction, including James Schneider (who since has also become so fed up with the incompetence at HQ that he left a few months ago, though there are rumours he might have snuck back in).

Judging by a rather ill-tempered post by Iqbal Mohamed (MP for Dewsbury & Batley), he might follow his AI colleague, Hussain, out of the door before long. On November 15, Mohamed took to Twitter to explain:

… no member decisions have been made by us and the allegations that we have tried to freeze Zarah out of Your Party or anything else are false. All four of us voted for Zarah as co-leader against Jeremy’s wishes and advice. Being co-leader was a condition/prerequisite for Zarah before she would resign from the Labour Party … If Your Party cannot unite the members and supporters, then how will it ever be able to unite the country to stand up to those who are exploiting us and failing us?⁵

He is clearly unhappy about being blamed for a mess he had no say in. Funnily enough, he references a meeting of the now-abolished YP Organising Group, where Corbyn did not have the bottle to speak or vote against the motion that proposed the co-leadership with Sultana. He and his supporters simply abstained. Another piece of evidence that shows how badly suited to any leadership position Corbyn really is.

Then there is Jamie Driscoll, the former mayor of North of Tyne, who just announced that he has decided to remove himself from the project altogether. He has just let it be known that “I’m not a member of Your Party, and won’t be joining.”⁶ He is continuing to build his dead-end party, Majority UK, whose only distinguishing feature is that it can boast of having no politics whatsoever - simply a set of vague platitudes.

Even previously loyal supporters, Mark Serwotka and Beth Winter, who were both, we believe, former members of the secret Organising Group, are now openly rebelling. They were put in charge of leading Your Party in Wales and have largely done so in the top-down manner requested of them, with Serwotka using a recent article in the Morning Star to rant against the organised left, as we reported in last week’s Weekly Worker.⁷

But now, even he and Winter have broken ranks and accuse YP HQ publicly of “shameful” behaviour for not releasing the data of local members: This “flies in the face of any commitment by YP UK to autonomy and self-determination for the people of Wales. We will not allow Wales to be treated with contempt and it is beyond shameful that the actions of a few at the centre at a UK level risk hindering what we are trying to achieve here in Wales. We cannot and will not allow this to happen.”⁸

Obviously, this post has also more than a whiff of nationalism about it. Those two clearly know that no branches and no regions have been given any local data. Do they seriously demand special treatment just for Wales? While they are both not hardened Welsh nationalists, they are certainly of the ‘soft’ variety, when it comes to calls for Welsh independence. We suspect the real reason for the ‘outrage’ has more to do with them planning to split away from YP altogether. They have been busily collating their own data, we hear.

Communists argue for the closest unity of the working class. In the face of global capitalism, should we really split up our forces into smaller and smaller sections? When there is a real national question and a democratic deficit, we argue for self-determination and federal structures as a way to keep the working class as united as possible. Yes, Scotland and Wales should have the right to secede - but, as communists, we argue strongly against the working class exercising that right here. That would weaken the historically constituted British working class. Rather than toying with the dead end of nationalism, we should oppose it. Branches and regions of Your Party should have autonomy, but we should be clear that our fight against the British state can only hope to be successful with a strong Britain-wide party of the working class.

Next messiah?

Clearly, things are falling apart rapidly at the top of Your Party. It is not the rightwing media making it all up, as naive loyalists still seem to believe. As we have seen, this is also not really a straight ‘faction fight’ between Camp Corbyn and Team Sultana any more. It now goes much further than that. Still, Sultana is clearly planning on standing against Corbyn in any leadership contest. She has been touring the country and has organised a ‘pro-democracy’ rally in Liverpool on the eve of the launch conference.

HQ is really not helping matters by continuously and publicly attacking Zarah Sultana - it is, in fact, pushing her into the role of the obvious anti-shambles, pro-democracy candidate. Just minutes before she appeared on BBC Question time on November 15, an official Your Party statement accused her of withholding funds collected by MOU Ltd, the company that was previously used by all sides to collect donations. She had made an initial transfer of £200,000 and has announced that for legal reasons she would be sending money in “tranches”, but that was not good enough for Karie Murphy, who let it be known that YP is “frustrated” that the bulk of the money was “beyond its reach” and that it was pursuing the full amount immediately. Nothing new there, of course, but Sultana was not wrong to claim that the timing amounted to an attempt at “sabotage”.

We also hear that the organisers of a Your Party rally in Manchester have been put under immense pressure - by “an intermediary acting for Jeremy Corbyn” - to de-invite Salma Yaqoob, an ally of Sultana’s. HQ also seems to think it is a good idea to brief journalists that Sultana probably will not be allowed into conference, According to The Times, “A Your Party source said Sultana would need to be on speaking terms with those organising the conference to have any clarity about when and whether she would speak. ‘The problem is she isn’t on anything approaching speaking terms,’ the source said.”⁹ And, in addition to having reported Sultana to the Information Commissioner’s Office for launching the “unauthorised” membership portal, we hear that she has now also been reported to the Parliamentary Standards Committee and that the person HQ got to do the report has apparently been promised a parliamentary seat in return! You cannot sink much lower than using the bourgeois state to attack a fellow socialist.¹⁰

Top lot

Yes, Corbyn still has the name recognition, nationally and in polls. But this is looking very different among the YP membership - the shine really has come off the man. Should there be a straight leadership contest between Corbyn and Sultana, it is looking more and more possible that he could actually lose. We can only guess what manoeuvres HQ would adopt to prevent that - expel Sultana, perhaps? Pull the plug on the whole project? Smash it all up? Neither would surprise us, judging by the many self-destructive moves in the last few months.

Communists can support many of Sultana’s pro-democracy demands, quite a few of which she has borrowed from the ‘Sheffield Demands’ and the Democratic Socialists (who in turn have borrowed many of their demands from the Democratic Socialists in America and the CPGB).

She openly calls for “dual membership” (“let all socialists unite”) and against a ban on left groups; that “future conferences should have delegates elected by all members meeting”, that “CEC positions must all be ordinary seats that everyone can contest (none reserved for MPs)” and “only members should decide who represents them: open selection, mandatory reselection and the right to recall. We cannot have Labour 2.0: no backroom deals, no fiefdoms, no coronations.” This is also in reference to the role of “local assemblies”, which, according to the draft constitution, may “initiate” and even decide on YP policy, as well as the party’s candidates. Of course, a real party of the working class would engage with people who are not members - but letting anybody decide on Your Party matters (which might include Tories or Reform members) is an obviously ludicrous idea and must be rejected.

As an important aside in this context, it is worth quoting Karie Murphy’s remarks at the end of a meeting organised by Your Party Connections (the full transcript is published online¹¹). When asked how existing YP branches could “register” with HQ, she replied that, basically they cannot, because “that type of structure will be determined” by the newly elected CEC:

I guess what the challenge will be for them, and it’s not for me to say, but I guess the challenge will be for them is, how we stop this automatic replication of brand structure that lots of other organisations have got, where there’s an obsession on the chair, on the minute secretary, on … whatever, that doesn’t … actually work in communities, where we would like to see these communities focused on community organising rather than on … um, you know, bureaucracy and election period only. So the structure of the branches, whilst it’s important, it is a new structure, rather than just, you know, an acknowledgement of an old-fashioned way of doing things.

Apparently, “That’s been the demand.” However, she managed to contradict herself in the very next sentence: “You know, literally within weeks of the party being been established, we were getting emails saying, ‘We had a branch, this is our secretary, we are now moving towards nominating names for elections’ and stuff like that. That’s not how we feel that this organisation should develop.”

So the “demand” from the branches is clearly entirely different to what she and Corbyn ‘demand’. Just like Sultana, communists reject the proposal for opaque local assemblies. They are not new, shiny methods of making politics more accessible or interesting: they are a rather blatant attempt to take the power away from Your Party members and make the bureaucracy even more powerful.

We are glad that Sultana also seems to have given up on the undemocratic demand for a Zoomocracy (with ‘one member, one vote’ on everything online). This atomises and depoliticises members. She has clearly moved to the left rather rapidly and has taken to quoting Lenin (depending on the audience). We have yet to see if this is a permanent conversion or if it is chiefly designed to attract the support of groups like the SWP and the Democratic Socialists for the forthcoming leadership contest.

Needless to say, communists do not want to switch from an old messiah to a younger version. We might well consider calling for a vote for Sultana in any straightforward contest - but we argue against such powerful, Bonapartist leadership roles in the first place. That is not a contradiction: a certain Karl Marx supported Abraham Lincoln’s election campaign, while opposing the monarchical powers the president of the USA holds.

Sultana has opted for a cop-out on that issue, demanding that it should be up to “conference to decide on the leadership structure”, which might be “sole leader, co-leadership or a collective leadership”. That shows her political weakness and, quite probably, her own ambitions. We have no way of verifying if she really “approached the Green Party, asking for a guaranteed leadership position before she left Labour. Several sources allege she did - and that she was told she would need to stand for election like anyone else”,¹² but the rumours are certainly there and Sultana has not denied them.

Socialist unity

Will Sultana try to lead a democratic rebellion at conference? Who knows. Her pro-democracy rally on Friday November 28 in Liverpool features Max Shanly from the Democratic Socialists, SWP national secretary Lewis Nielsen (wearing his lovely Stand up to Racism hat), but also two speakers from the Democratic Bloc. The rally is chaired by the ambitious councillor, James Giles, and features Mish Rahman - former member of Labour’s national executive committee and vice-chair of Momentum. In both roles, he was not exactly known for campaigning for democracy or standing up to the witch-hunt. In fact, in Momentum he loyally implemented the constitution of Jon Lansman, which barred from membership anyone expelled from Labour in the campaign against Corbyn and his supporters.

Both Giles and Rahman were members of the secretive Organising Group and only discovered their love for democracy when Karie Murphy shut it down and they lost their seats next to the source of power. They continue to campaign for a Zoomocracy, where all decisions and elections are conducted via online votes - no doubt they hope that, with their snazzy social media presence, they can bamboozle enough naive, isolated members at home to vote for them. We understand that they have recently changed their view on dual membership and now only want to bar members of parties who stand candidates against Your Party. But their website still features their former demand for the CEC to keep a list of ‘acceptable’ left groups, which have to “open their books”.¹³ In a Zoom meeting on October 14, Rahman openly said that he “wants to prevent entryism” and opposes left groups joining. We should be more than wary of the Democratic Bloc.

It is (still) part of the Socialist Unity Platform (SUP), which was launched in an online meeting on November 15, where members and representatives from a large number of left organisations and Your Party branches agreed on a set of key amendments to the main founding documents, previously known as the ‘Sheffield Demands’.¹⁴ The meeting also agreed on a ‘battle plan’, which includes the decision to publish a voting guide, organise a Zoom meeting to brief all conference participants who support SUP, organise an all-day fringe event in Liverpool and attempt to present an emergency motion at the launch conference in Liverpool. The precise wording of the latter is still being discussed, but basically focuses on the proposal to organise a ‘reconstituted conference’ in June/July 2026, with elected delegates from the branches, where all decisions of the launch conference can be revisited and, if necessary, changed by a simple majority.

A smaller working group is still discussing if it also wants to include the proposal to elect an interim steering group in Liverpool that could lead the party until the reconstituted conference. Clearly, those currently in charge are heading fast towards a potential crisis. On a purely technical level, such an unscheduled election would not be an insurmountable problem - however, not only are we against the election of national leaders via an atomised membership. Concretely, we want the Liverpool conference to take control. Despite being chosen by a bizarre form of sortition it is the legitimate sovereign body of YP. It should overthrow the self-appointed, incompetent, Murphy regime and elect an emergency, a temporary leadership tasked with preparing and organising a democratic conference in 2026. There is every reason to believe that this would have widespread support in Liverpool and amongst the membership as a whole. In any case, our call for conference to take control is clearly not a wrecking attempt, to stop it in its tracks - rather it is trying to spell out and rectify the huge democratic deficit of every single aspect of the launch conference.

Ken Loach has expressed his “enthusiastic support” for such an emergency motion, but might be unable to speak on it in Liverpool because of health reasons. HQ would have found it difficult to gag him, but we suspect they will not have quite the same hesitation, when it comes to more ‘normal’ members of Your Party.

Groups in support of the SUP include the Democratic Socialists in Your Party (DSYP), Ken Loach's Platform for a Democratic Party, the SWP, Democratic Bloc, CPGB, Socialist Alternative and many reps and members of YP branches. Funnily enough, the most conservative views at the three meetings held so far were expressed by the Spartacist League and the International Bolshevik Tendency. While the latter has now withdrawn from the SUP altogether, comrade Eibhlin McDonald has joined the smaller working group (as a silent member) and the Spartacist League has donated £100 to the fringe meeting. However, it has shown that it comes from the same Trotskyist stable that dismisses anything that is not part of the mighty ‘transitional programme’ as a diversion. The fight for democratic space in Your Party, for example, is perceived as not really important and our emergency motion “is counterproductive and could discredit the left”, as comrade Vincent David put it at a recent Communist Forum. Instead, the Sparts claim that they want to focus on “politics” - as if fighting against the proposed ban of the organised left, against bureaucratic stitch-ups and in favour of a democratic constitution is ‘unpolitical’. It hardly needs saying, but if there is no democratic space for the left to organise, none of us will be able to effectively fight for our politics.

As a rather obvious aside, the most well-known split in working class history, between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, was - on the surface - about structure: specifically a formulation about the membership requirements of the RSDLP. The disagreement, however, reflected two very different political perspectives about how revolution could and should be made - and by which forces. A hugely important question, obviously, which first found reflection in a disagreement about organisational matters.

Even more bizarre

Even more bizarre are the reasons over which Steve Freeman’s mini-campaign, the Republican Labour Education Forum, has left the SUP: “First, a preamble was introduced along the lines of the YP Political Statement. The RLEF majority had already agreed to boycott the YP statement and it was inconsistent to support this version. Both RLEF representatives voted against this. Second, at the last meeting it was agreed to choose a name for the Platform. This became a choice between ‘Platform for a Democratic YP’, which we supported, and ‘Socialist Unity Platform’.”

So Freeman, a self-declared communist, decides to leave an initiative of the socialist left, because the preamble contains politics (the context of which he does not seem to actually disagree with) and the word ‘socialist’ in the title! This is perhaps the most ridiculous example of Freeman’s long-standing conviction that socialists should always fight for “republican” halfway houses and against, well, socialism. An obvious dead end.

Talking of dead ends, the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain have both given up on the fight in Your Party - both are instead concentrating on building their own confessional sect.

The Socialist Party in England and Wales is still involved in YP, but has been boycotting the SUP so far, despite being invited to all the meetings. Its opposition seems to centre on the fact that the SUP does not fight for YP to adopt a federal structure, with special rights for the trade unions and their bureaucracies. That really is looking like an increasingly weird hobby horse, considering the state of the unions. The comrades insist on the futile attempt to rerun Labourism and the organisational principle of federalism. We, of course want a mass Communist Party built on the organisational principle of democratic centralism.

As an important aside, the proposal to include a demand for ‘quotas’ in leadership elections was rather roundly defeated after a comradely discussion at the November 15 SUP meeting. Those voting against made it clear that, of course, they recognise that there is a lack of women, trans people and ethnic minorities on the left, including in leadership positions and that this is a problem we should seek to overcome. CPGB comrades and others argued that technical solutions that effectively strengthen the bureaucracy were, however, the wrong way to go about it. There is also the problem of who to include in such quotas.

Ellie Vincent from the Democratic Bloc rather neatly symbolised that issue when she argued that we should also include “people from low-income backgrounds”. Would we have to show our bank accounts to Karie Murphy for that one? What about disabled people? Which disabilities count? No, this is an obvious, never-ending list that would divide us into smaller and smaller sections, which are then supposed to be brought back together by the magic of intersectionality.

Jack Conrad made the point that we are not looking to “hold up a mirror to society”, but to put together the “best fighters for communism”. And those might well come from ‘higher income’ backgrounds, as they did in the Bolsheviks (which also had a much higher proportion of Jewish members). Friedrich Engels is another good example. He was a full blown capitalist. We recognise that some sections of society suffer double and triple oppressions. That does not make those oppressed automatically into the best advocates of “correct politics” and, indeed the communist programme that lays out the plan for the liberation of all of humanity.

Needless to say, different representatives might have voted against the proposals for other reasons. The SUP represents a useful fighting agreement, but does not imply programmatic unity. Depending on how the launch conference goes, it might also be a good vehicle to fight around the programme of the new party. It is certainly a very positive development and we are urging all supporters and readers of the Weekly Worker to sign up.

Support Socialist Unity Platform

There is now a webpage with all relevant information: dsyp.org/sup.

Come to Liverpool on November 29-30 to help us hand out leaflets with our key demands, lobby delegates, attend our fringe event - and get to know each other! Please fill in this form to tell us you are coming.¹⁵
Join our WhatsApp Community to coordinate SUP’s intervention at conference and beyond. You receive the link when you have filled in the Google form above.
Help us in putting on an all-day fringe event during the YP founding conference in Liverpool on Saturday November 29: Join us from 12 noon in the Roddick Rooms, 54 St James Street. Programme tbc. Send proposals for speakers and sessions to democraticunityyp@gmail.com.
Get your organisation or local Your Party branch to sign up to the Socialist Unity Platform - you can also sign up as an individual! We are asking national organisations to make a donation of £100, YP branches and other groups £25 or £50 and individuals £2.50 or £5: opencollective.com/socialist-unity-platform.
Attend the pro-democracy rally organised by Zarah Sultana on the evening of Friday November 27 and help us hand out leaflets. We are there from 7pm.¹⁶
Please donate towards the printing costs and the room hire (total of around £1,500): opencollective.com/socialist-unity-platform.