11.12.2025

James Giles (Democratic Bloc) and Zarah Sultana

Rough guide to personalities and platforms

Your Party launch conference might not have been allowed to discuss amendments that sought to enshrine the right of members to form platforms and factions - but there are plenty of them already operating and most of them openly. Carla Roberts takes a look

Archie Woodrow has written extensively both on the process leading up to the founding of Your Party¹ and about those controlling the proceedings² - both articles are well worth reading, although, as comrades will know, the tectonic plates at the top of Your Party have been shifting rather rapidly in the last few months, with alliances forming, then falling apart, while other working arrangements were set up, before those were smashed to pieces too.

Six months ago, an overview such as this would have looked quite different and would have included people like Pamela Fitzpatrick, Salma Yaqoob, Jamie Driscoll, Mark Serwotka and Andrew Feinstein, for example. But that all changed when the secret Organising Group of around 30 people voted in favour a co-leadership structure, with both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana leading the ‘founding process’ of the new party - very much against the wishes of Team Corbyn.

Karie Murphy

It was Karie Murphy who closed down the OG after that vote, handing over the ‘founding process’ to the six MPs of the Independence Alliance instead. In reality, they never did lead anything, which has become clear enough from the frustrated resignation statements by Adnan Hussein and Iqbal Mohamed. Sultana was pushed out pretty quickly too, leaving Team Corbyn firmly in charge.

Murphy was Jeremy Corbyn’s chief of staff when he was leader of the Labour Party and is the partner of Len McCluskey, former general secretary of Unite the Union. She makes no secret of her hatred of the “Marxist sects”, as she calls them, and will have played a key role in convincing Corbyn to try and ban them from Your Party.

The New Statesman reports that “Murphy plans to leave the project in the new year, once the party’s central executive committee is in place”.³ Murphy has taken much blame, when it comes to the tight bureaucratic control and the total lack of democracy in YP - and no doubt, she could teach TED classes on the subject, having been trained in the Labour Party for decades. But clearly she has been acting on behalf of Corbyn. Her departure could signal a much-needed ‘fresh start’, but would be unlikely to change the culture of manipulation and bureaucracy at HQ.
Amy Jackson

If Murphy really departs, she might well hand things over to her close ally, Amy Jackson - one of the handful of people who have been running the show behind the scenes in the last few months (another key player is Artin Giles, but he is less talented). She was former Unite political director under McCluskey, acted as former political secretary to Corbyn and currently works as chief of staff for Lutfur Rahman. She has less of a toxic image than Murphy, though, by all accounts, she is no less shrewd and has been rumoured to be going for the position of first YP general secretary.
Laura Alvarez

Corbyn’s wife has been playing an increasingly large role in the leadership faction. She is, we hear, mostly concerned about the “legacy” of Corbyn - and therefore argued strongly against a co-leadership. In the run-up to the launch conference, she somehow managed to bag herself the title of ‘YP international director’, sending out invites to some groups to set up stalls in the hall.

Team Zarah

Sultana’s chief advisor and - some jest - “manager”, is husband Craig Lloyd, who works full-time as research and policy officer for the Fire Brigades Union. He was seconded to Momentum throughout 2011 and was listed as ‘staff’ in the FBU minutes⁴ - and it does show.

Although Sultana seems to have sharply moved to the left in recent months (we will have to see how much of that sticks), she continues to cling to some extremely undemocratic, Momentum-style forms of organisation. Yes, she supported ‘collective leadership’ at conference, but we would be very naive to imagine that she did so out of some late-discovered principle - after all, ‘collective leadership’ stops Corbyn from becoming The Leader too. She is a rising star, no doubt, but she will be very aware that this is still the Corbyn Party. A straight leadership contest between the two could have ended disastrously for her. Going for collective leadership was an astute move.

She continues to push for online ‘one member, one vote’ voting (OMOV) and insists on US-style ‘open primaries’ to find a set of leftwing candidates she might support in the forthcoming elections to the Central Executive Committee (CEC). It is worrying that both the Democratic Bloc and a section of the Democratic Socialists (DSYP) seem to be scrambling to get onto ‘her’ slate.

Socialists reject such primaries, because they quickly turn into ‘beauty contests’, with those with the biggest social media presence and the most well-known names winning out. We would favour a (much) more democratic, transparent and politically principled version of the Grassroots Centre-Left Alliance in Labour - with left organisations and platforms getting together to calmly discuss and agree on a set of candidates who commit themselves to a joint platform of principled policies. Such a slate - agreed and then actively supported by a large number of groups and platforms within YP - actually has a chance of winning at least a few seats. Of course, Sultana would probably feature on such a list - but we should be very careful not to follow her blindly or treat her as the next messiah.

As a smart politician, Sultana surrounds herself with various circles of ‘advisors’ and keeps close contact with people like Salma Yaqoob, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (Jewish Voice for Liberation) and Max Shanly of the DSYP, from the days when Shanly and Sultana were both leading members of Young Labour.

More recently, she has also grown close to James Giles, a supporter of the Democratic Bloc and a councillor in Kingston, who chaired her pre-conference rally. She demonstratively sat next to him on the second day of conference, after he was initially denied access to the launch conference on Saturday, because of a “private matter” around his (unknown) role in the “data misuse” of MOU Limited.

This arose when Sultana unilaterally launched a membership portal on September 18 - in this, we understand, she acted on the urging only of her husband. All other friends, advisors and colleagues argued quite rightly against such a move, including the then MOU directors Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll and Beth Winter. All three seem to have taken ‘time off’ from actively supporting Sultana after this move, with Driscoll leaving YP altogether to concentrate on his dead-end ‘party’, Majority UK.

We hear that HQ was planning on expelling Sultana over this episode, but after her triumphant performance at conference, they might well have decided to put a pin on that move. However, there is still a chance they might bar her as a candidate in the CEC elections, using a section in the ‘interim membership rules’ they published on the eve of conference: “Members must declare that they have no pending or past legal issues (criminal, civil or regulatory) that could cause reputational or financial harm to the Party.”⁵ She certainly has a bunch of “legal issues”, thanks to Team Corbyn shopping her to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Democratic Bloc

The Democratic Bloc claims 750 “members” - because it counts everybody who has ever signed up to its set of demands. In reality, it has about a dozen activists. It does excellent social media and publicity work and manages to put its glossy leaflets on most seats at most of the important YP events.

Funnily enough, most of its demands won at conference. This is not down to the DB being oh so popular (it is not). No, it has to do with the simple fact that many of its leading members were involved in the secretive Organising Group before Karie Murphy closed it down. They are now reinventing themselves as ‘democrats’ - though were very quiet on the issue when they were part of the inner circle. They knew exactly what kind of ‘options’ conference would be presented with and so just took the slightly less crap options and ran with those:

They argued against branch delegates and demanded that conferences should be run entirely via online OMOV voting. They’ve got their wish.
They proposed that all positions on the CEC too should be elected via OMOV. Another wish that came true.
The constitution’s witch-hunting rule requiring left organisations to apply for ‘dual membership’ was, as Max Shanly has pointed out, almost identical to what DB had initially proposed: “It is literally lifted direct from your own proposals! It’s on your website!!!”⁶ If anything, it is even worse than what the YP constitution now states, because DB demanded that ‘approved parties’ also have to “share their books with the new party’s NPC - so that we can understand the size of their membership, their finances, their GDPR compliance and their disciplinary procedures.”⁷

The Democratic Bloc has recently tweaked its position on that question a bit and now only opposes members of parties who stand against YP. But in a public Zoom meeting on October 14, its leader, Mish Rahman, was very open that he wants dual membership only for Green Party members, because he wants to “prevent entryism”. He will be no ally of the left, should he get onto the CEC (and there is absolutely no doubt that he will stand). This is what this whole campaign is about - to build themselves an electoral vehicle akin to Momentum.

Rahman has with him various other careerists, including the above-mentioned, very ambitious young councillor, James Giles, who used to be campaign manager for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain before he was hired in 2024 by the independent MP, Ayoub Khan, to become his chief of staff, and was then employed as advisor by the other MPs of Corbyn’s Independent Alliance. This is no opposition platform: it is a platform of people who are preparing to get (back) into the inner circle.

Like a few others in DB (for example Mick Moore), Rahman sat on the leadership of Momentum - after the Lansman coup. As vice-chair, he implemented the Lansman constitution, which, we should remember, was put in place via an OMOV coup, and abolished all democratic structures. It also barred from Momentum membership anybody who was expelled from Labour as part of the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Corbyn and his supporters.

As a member of Labour’s NEC, Rahman kept his mouth firmly shut about the witch-hunt in the Labour Party, only making mealy-mouthed statements against the second wave of exclusions. He left Labour and Momentum just a few months ago, and voluntarily so - clearly, the bureaucracy saw no reason to get rid of him.

DB’s departure from the Socialist Unity Platform over a tweet by comrade Shanly is no great loss - quite the opposite. It had played the role of leading the rightwing in the SUP. In order to make it seem like it was the main democratic opposition, it stopped SUP initiatives from going forward and, crucially, led the campaign against SUP presenting an emergency motion in Liverpool, which was calling for a reconstituted conference and the election of an emergency leadership. DB was not the only group worried about an active rebellion being seen as “wrecking the process”, but it was certainly the best at convincing others that SUP should stick to playing by the rules.

DB supporters are big proponents of decision-making by ‘consensus’ and have indeed forced this through in, for example, the discussions around the hurriedly produced ‘unity’ discussions at this year’s The World Transformed. The ‘consensus’ method meant they were able to veto a proposal to demand that conferences should be made up of delegates only. We hear they are trying similar tricks in the scramble over Zarah Sultana’s ‘open primaries’.

We reject decision-making by consensus: it is well known for being one of the best ways to shut up minorities (or even, as in this case, majorities) and to enshrine existing leadership structures. Unless it is obvious that everybody agrees, socialists decide matters by simple majority votes, which is absolutely necessary for transparent decision-making.

DSYP

Democratic Socialists in Your Party really took off after Max Shanly merged his loose campaign for a ‘Party Republic’ into the organisation in mid-2025. Its politics are a breath of fresh air, taking inspiration from the Marxist Unity Group in the Democratic Socialists of America (who in turn have taken inspiration from the CPGB and in particular Mike Macnair’s book, Revolutionary strategy).

DSYP fights for the “party republic, in which all are equal”, because “democracy is when the governed govern themselves”, as comrade Shanly has put it.⁸ The document Points of unity, produced as part of the merger, defines socialism not just in the usual economistic terms, but also as follows: “We strive for a total restructuring of society, recognising that the interests of our class can only be secured on a global scale and through the closest cooperation between workers of all countries.” It defines itself as anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist.

It fights for YP to become a “multi-tendency party”: “From radical social democrats leftwards, with all members having the right to organise into open factions, be they temporary or permanent, at all levels of the party.” Ideally, of course, we fight for a united Communist Party, but in the here and now, the fight for open platforms and tendencies is obviously correct.

Unlike most of the left, it also recognises the importance of fighting for free speech: “Members must have the right to freedom of information, association, discussion, dissent and the freedom to critique the party’s programme and organise to change it, provided they also accept fighting for it as the democratically determined expression of the party’s goals.”

However, these very worthy aims are not always fought for in, shall we say, the most coherent manner possible. For a start, DSYP still suffers from a ‘movementist’ refusal to implement proper membership and leadership structures - a hangover from before the merger. The 700 or so people who have signed up to its aims have to be ‘onboarded’ first, before they can become more active - ie, they have to sit through a Zoom meeting, in which they are being told about the aims of the organisation. Depending on your age and political experience, you may find this quite interesting or laughably patronising. You then become a ‘local organiser’ and are added to a very large and busy WhatsApp community.

In order to get properly involved in the running of the organisation, you then have to ask (or be asked) to join the higher echelons of the ‘national organisers’, which gets you onto a Discord server, where you can then join one of the various working groups. There are over 100 national organisers, though only 30 or so show up to the weekly meetings.

The DSYP executive committee plays mainly the role of admin - convenors of the various working groups are not allowed to be members. Max Shanly, for example, is without a doubt the intellectual leader - but is not a member of the EC. This structure often leads to entirely avoidable clashes: working groups do not know what the EC has decided and vice versa. Or, worse: they do know and do not like it - a dual power situation. The recent expansion of the EC and the correct attempt to make it into a political leadership has not alleviated the problem, but exacerbated it. Clearly, these convoluted structures have to change if the group is to become more serious.

The internal structure leads to a very busy internal life and you could easily attend a meeting every night of the week. Burn-out is rife in the organisation. The comrades have spent extraordinary amounts of time and effort drafting, amending and re-amending a whole set of (very long) alternatives to the four YP founding documents, taking large parts of it out to submit as amendments to conference.

This has made them on occasion a bit rigid and inflexible: for example, when their demands varied - sometimes very slightly - from SUP’s ‘Sheffield Demands’. There was, for example, an argument that the group should support SUP’s demand for elected representatives only being paid the “average wage of a skilled worker” rather than the DSYP’s aim of “the median wage of a worker”. In the end, DSYP submitted its own amendment on the issue, which, in a real democratic conference, could have become a problem, with potentially neither version gathering enough support to go through. As it turns out, both amendments were ruled out of order by Team Corbyn anyway, because HQ disagrees with both versions.

When it came to voting on the four founding documents, the EC at first correctly issued a call to vote against the constitution - but then Zarah Sultana’s husband, Craig Lloyd, shared the bizarre and obviously fake story, according to which Corbyn had asked his supporters to vote against the constitution. The EC got spooked and changed its advice mid-election to vote in favour. We understand that a majority on the EC has now changed its view again, but will not say so publicly, unfortunately. That is a shame. We all make mistakes, but we can only learn from them if we are able to admit to them.

This episode highlighted a particular danger for the DSYP - the leading comrades are quite young and inexperienced and, perhaps understandably, are a bit too easily flattered by the attention that, for example, Zarah Sultana has given them. It would be a shame if they end up playing the role of her entourage. She clearly has ambitions that go way beyond the ‘party republic’.

SWP

The largest of a myriad of what we would call “confessional sects” is the Socialist Workers Party - the members are expected to follow the line put out by the leadership, no questions asked. The SWP allows temporary factions for three months before its annual conference - only then are you allowed to try and change the organisation’s position, and only in the internal ‘pre-conference bulletin’. It has about 1,500 more or less active members.

It is much despised on the left - and not just for its attempt to cover up the rape allegations against its then leading member, Martin Smith (the ‘comrade Delta’ affair). This is no doubt why Team Corbyn expelled some of its members first - to test what happens if you cut the weakest link on the left.

The origins of the SWP (and many Trotskyist groups) lie in faction fights and expulsions from its forerunner in the 1970s, the International Socialists. In contrast to the much smaller Socialist Party in England and Wales, it has been incapable of developing genuinely mass working class leaders. It has the reputation of converting the bulk of its recruits, whatever their particular talents or potentials, into paper-selling dolts. The membership is prodded from one campaign to another, from one priority to the next - currently it is Together Against the Far Right (uniting its Stand Up to Racism with Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Trades Union Congress, Show Racism the Red Card, Friends of the Earth and many more).

The membership is further disenfranchised by the fact that the SWP leadership has made it a ‘point of principle’ in the past that the organisation does not have a programme. But a programme for a Marxist party is not an optional extra: it is the means by which we test our day-to-day practice against our overall strategic aims, our fundamental political principles. The SWP line has performed some pretty spectacular somersaults over the years, yet there is no political compass in the organisation, no collective means of gauging how far the leadership has strayed off course.

In addition to running and controlling Stand Up to Racism, the SWP has thrown its weight entirely uncritically behind trans activists - probably in the hope of rebuilding its reputation with younger generations. It very much relies on the influx of such young members, because it has perhaps the highest membership turnover on the British left.

Counterfire

Counterfire was born after the Respect popular front between the SWP, George Galloway and the Muslim Association of Britain (a British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) descended into acrimony in 2007. For good reason, John Rees got the blame. He then found himself toppled as SWP top dog and walked, along with Lindsey German, Chris Nineham, Michael Lavalette and their allies to set up Counterfire in 2010. It has spent much of its time in existence trying to recapture the glory days of the anti-war movement that Rees and German put together in the early 2000s, with little success. It replicates many of the SWP’s political problems - but on a smaller and much looser level. We are guessing it has about 300 members - they are quite well organised in some parts of the country and entirely invisible in others.

On a couple of issues, they have taken the opposite side to their former comrades - for example, they are very much on the side of the ‘gender critics’ and very friendly with Mark Serwotka. They are also keen to distance themselves from Zarah Sultana’s attempt to sideline “socially conservative views” - with Rees seemingly replaying some of the dynamics in Respect, when SWP members subordinated one principle after another to what they thought their Muslim allies wanted to hear.

In general, they are more willing to talk to the rest of the left than either the SWP or SPEW are, and there is talk that they might support a set of candidates in the CEC elections on the basis of ‘neither Corbyn nor Sultana’, which could do quite well.

SPEW

The most harmless of the Trotskyist groups in Britain and somewhat struggling to keep up is the Socialist Party in England and Wales. In Your Party, it continues to push, increasingly bizarrely, for a federal structure with special privileges for “the trade unions” - ie, the union bureaucracy. A Labour Party mark two! Unsurprisingly, hardly anybody supports this outlook: its much touted-campaign, ‘Time for trade unions to take the lead in forming a new working class party’, managed to gather barely over 2,000 signatories.

It has about 400 or so members and the glory days are long behind it. Its forerunner, the Militant Tendency, originated in the primeval swamp of British Trotskyism in the 1930s, associated with the South African, Ted Grant. For 40 years, Militant and its forerunner, the Revolutionary Socialist League, existed inside the Labour Party as ‘deep entryists’. It progressively dropped its revolutionary politics and became Labourised. By 1990 it was rubbishing the idea that it stood for revolution. Socialism would come through “an enabling bill in parliament”, which would nationalise “the top 200 monopolies”.⁹ Political issues such as the fight for women’s and gay rights or the national question in the UK were dismissed as “diversions” and a narrow ‘workerist’ approach to politics systematically cultivated.

Throughout the “red 90s” SPEW in its various manifestations suffered loss after loss - just about its whole Scottish section around Tommy Sheridan (which went on to form the core of the Scottish Socialist Party, now merely a left nationalist rump), most of its organisation in Liverpool, its section in Pakistan, etc. There were numerous walkouts and expulsions.

It walked out of the Socialist Alliance in 2001, when it could not manage to win a federal structure with veto rights for itself. Since then it has been clinging on to its front organisation, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc), which, since the departure of the RMT union, looks increasingly sad and pointless. We hear that Jeremy Corbyn has promised to spare Tusc from the witch-hunt, as long as it uses that particular hat.

Some of the rest

Platform for a Democratic Party: Initiated by Ken Loach, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Ben Sellers and a couple of other people, it advances many entirely supportable aims (a delegate-based conference, etc¹⁰). It is not a membership organisation and therefore a bit slow-moving, with its statements on occasion feeling rather out of date. In the negotiations with the Socialist Unity Platform, it started out on the left, supporting calls to at least try to overturn the agenda of the launch conference. But, like many other groups, it got cold feet and ended up warning of being “seen as wreckers”. its alternative political statement could be summed up with the tame slogan, “Defend the welfare state” (as Ken Loach has done).¹¹
Revolutionary Communist Party: Fiona Lali’s lot. A group that is known for how ‘nice’ their members are - they will take all your leaflets and are happy to chat, which is very unusual on the Trotskyist left. Until last year the RCP was known as Socialist Appeal, whose main area of work was entryism in the Labour Party.

The RCP has gone from auto-Labourism to auto-anti-Labourism. Just like with the old Militant in the 1980s, the dramatic change in its political perspective is not down to any change in political reality - but the fact that it was kicked out of the Labour Party. The RCP reinvented itself with its enviable poster campaign, ‘Are you a communist?’ - but without going through the trouble of having a sustained debate or a conference vote (that happened post facto).

It was a PR campaign mainly, garnished with some rather bizarre proclamations to keep the troops happy: “Given the accumulated anger in society, a Starmer government will face an avalanche of struggle, and will become one of the most hated governments in recent history … Class war will be on the order of the day … Our relatively untested party will, within the next five or 10 years, be hurled into the turmoil of the British revolution.”¹² Better keep your boots on!

It has not managed to grow beyond 1,000 members and has probably lost quite a few of them since. While Fiona Lali was invited to sit in on the secretive Organising Group, the comrades have now turned their back on YP - no doubt in order to preserve their own fragile organisation.
Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21): a split from the SWP after the ‘Comrade Delta’ scandal. It tries to avoid the sect structure of its mothership - but has gone entirely the opposite way: it has developed a swamp culture, where disagreements are not discussed and just fester, no doubt to avoid the fragile organisation imploding. Instead of arguing these things out, the leadership often decides not to take a position on disputed issues, including involvement in Your Party. In practice, this means it has played no discernible role in YP, because a large minority does not want to get involved. Those who have gotten involved have submerged themselves entirely into the DSYP.
n Organising for Popular Power (O4PP): The only reason this tiny group has achieved any kind of ‘prominence' is because the DSYP and Democratic Bloc invited it to their joint talks at the 2025 gathering of The World Transformed, which produced a hurriedly put-together mish-mash of a statement, which is mostly nonsense: it commits the groups to a “socialist horizon”, wants to “weaken imperialism”, while sowing illusions that the climate catastrophe could be overcome by combining “standing in elections” with “mass mobilisations on the streets”.

Like many groups before them, O4PP emphasises “base building” in working class communities. In an interview with Prometheus, it openly admits: “We’re not primarily interested in fighting for perfect positions or questions of policy … but the key goal will always be the advancement of practical organising work that builds class power and moves us towards socialism.”¹³

In practice, this means the group tends to tack right. Don’t argue for what you know is needed: only for what you think is possible (definitely not the overthrow of capitalism!).
Eco-Socialist Horizons: Two men and a dog (though it might have run away), both members of DSYP and again part of the TWT talks.
Trans Liberation Group: Does what it says on the tin. Most of its dozen or so members are also involved in the DSYP and were part of the TWT talks. It convinced a majority in the DSYP to fight for quotas, when it comes to leadership elections.
Nothing About Us: An attempt to cohere people with disabilities in YP.