15.01.2026
Off to a bumpy start
Carla Roberts urges the Grassroots Left slate to change track, open up and reject calls for confidentiality and secrecy. Transparency is not a weakness, but a strength
On January 11, the Grassroots Left slate was officially launched1, presenting a joint programme and a set of candidates for the Your Party central executive committee elections. We support the slate and urge readers and supporters to endorse and then vote for the GL candidates in their regions … and get involved in local and regional campaign activities.
Without a joint left challenge, there is a real danger that very few socialists will get onto the leadership body. This is in part because of the requirement to get 75 regional nominations. Each member is able to endorse two candidates in their region. We also suspect that the chosen single transferable (STV) system will not allow for a real transfer of votes between candidates. For this reason, we also call on any socialists who are standing as ‘independents’ to withdraw their candidacy and to get behind the GL slate.
We are not without criticisms of both the programme and the campaign. For example, the fact that the manifesto does not commit to campaign for MPs on a worker’s wage is worrying. As was Zarah Sultana’s answer, when asked about it - not once, but twice, at a recent public meeting: “This is ultimately a decision that the members should be taking at the party’s next conference.”2 (Roger Silverman responded quite correctly from the floor: “With all due comradeship and respect, this is a cop-out.”) This remains a tell-tale weakness in comrade Sultana’s programme. A workers’ MP on a skilled workers’ wage remains an important principle of the workers’ movement. It is no empty slogan, but goes to the heart of the kind of party - and future society - we want to build. One without special privileges for special members. With elected representatives who actually know what those they represent are going through. We suspect this argument will be revisited.
There are other problems. It is fair to say that the campaign had a slightly rocky start. And we are not talking about the eight hours delay, when it came to the launch of the website and the release of a first video introducing some of the candidates. Such technical issues are unavoidable. But there were - and remain - a number of entirely avoidable problems. These might look like organisational issues, but they are, when it comes down to it, very much political questions.
It is excellent that the launch video was watched over 400,000 times in the first 24 hours - there clearly is an appetite for a radical, democratic and socialist trend in YP. But it is also true that many members were entirely surprised by the existence of the slate and still have no idea how it came about, how the candidates were selected or how Jeremy Corbyn ended up on it, featuring at the top of a webpage entitled ‘Our candidates’.
We had a wild 20 hours, where Corbyn’s right hand woman Karie Murphy feverishly phoning some of the candidates on the GL slate, pleading and threatening them to remove themselves. She also informed that bulwark of socialism, the New Statesman, that “Corbyn didn’t give permission for his name to be used on this slate and a specific request was put in that his name was not included. Sources said Corbyn is ‘very upset’ that this was done without his consent.”3 The website was eventually changed to reflect that Corbyn is just one of the candidates that the platform endorses, but is not a part of the slate.
The same ‘special treatment’ now unfortunately also goes for Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (Platform for a Democratic Party, standing in the South East) as well as Counterfire member and Preston councillor, Michael Lavalette, who is standing for the ‘public officers section’ on the CEC. Both have agreed to be endorsed by the slate, but do not stand on its political platform and do not endorse all candidates in it.
Many YP members will wonder how we got to this point. Some - most of them readers of the Weekly Worker - will at least know that both used to be involved in the attempts to cohere a joint slate, but they will have no idea that they exited the negotiations.
Unfortunately, there is no explanation coming from the slate itself. A mistake. We should be open and frank about disagreements. For a start, it is almost impossible to stop these things from coming out anyway. After both were featured as ‘Our candidates’, comrades Wimborne-Idrissi and Lavalette issued public statements distancing themselves from the slate - not a good turn, to put it mildly: an avoidable own goal.
Confidentiality
The Grassroots Left campaign has been dominated by an admirable attempt to look as professional and snazzy as possible. Nothing wrong with that. Much of the left in Britain seems to revel in its amateurishness. Where things do go wrong, though, is when a form of ‘professionalism’ is implemented that takes inspiration from bourgeois political campaigns. Yes, for those kinds of campaigns, running an extremely tight ship with strict hierarchical structures and sharply defined posts, like ‘head of strategy’, ‘head of field operations’, ‘head of comms’, etc, makes sense. Such campaigns come, naturally, with media embargoes, and soft and hard launches when the programme or candidates are eventually ‘revealed’ to the lucky members. Such a campaign certainly would see no need to report openly about disagreements, or, for that matter, feel under any obligation to explain how the slate even came about.
The eagle-eyed reader will have picked up that we disagree with this approach, but it has been adopted by the Grassroots Left. For a start, we are dealing with a YP membership that has been hugely alienated by the control-freakery and strict firewalls enforced by Karie Murphy. Copying that approach, but on a lower level, seems to us entirely the wrong way to go about things - and obviously self-defeating. No wonder the launch of the GL slate has been met with what can only be described as ‘muted’ levels of enthusiasm. Clearly, something is not going right and we have to be frank and open about where the problem might be.
But we were repeatedly ‘asked’ not to report about the problems and even the negotiations. We have been told that we have already “broken confidentiality” and “discipline” by “leaking” the political platform and the names of the chosen candidates before the ‘big launch’ on January 11. We are not surprised about councillor James Giles (head of communications) making such demands - he is an ambitious young man, who previously worked for George Galloway, then for Ayoub Khan MP and has now switched to Zarah Sultana.
Information
Appeals for confidentiality and secrecy from an organisation like the Democratic Socialists of Your Party, however, are another matter. For a start, this flatly contradict their own stated views. It argues, in its ‘Points of unity’, for exa Information ctly the opposite approach: “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”.4 It quite rightly emphasises issues like accountability, transparency and, as they put it, the need for a “party republic”.
Excellent points - which correctly oppose what much of the left hold as ‘common sense’: secrecy, confidentiality and keeping things from the membership (or the wider working class for that matter), supposedly because they would just get too confused. That goes not only for ‘the sects’, that the DSYP derides: the same was a huge problem, for example, in Left Unity, which quickly enough turned into yet another useless broad front.5 Karie Murphy too operated on that basis in Collective (the forerunner of YP), throwing out a rep of the Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party, for example, after the Weekly Worker reported about her being bullied by Murphy.6 She still operates like that at YP headquarters, of course.
We applaud efforts to consciously work against that culture - as exemplified, for example, by Anwarul Khan, a former participant in the secret Collective meetings on behalf of the recently dissolved party, Transform. He now publishes the full transcripts of all meetings organised by the Your Party Connections Network he has set up - including, funnily enough, one in which guest speaker Karie Murphy repeatedly asked not to be quoted (we are happily linking once again to the full amusing transcript here, in which she also outlines her desire to keep out “the Marxist sects”7). Comrade Khan, incidentally, is a candidate on the Grassroots Left slate in the East Midlands. He might be no Marxist, but clearly deserves praise for his ongoing campaign for transparency, which we hope he will continue if elected onto the CEC.
The reason the Weekly Worker publishes critical reports of such disputes is not because we want to satisfy gossip-hungry readers; nor, as has been claimed, because we want to “harm” either the GL slate or DSYP. Quite the opposite: we are absolutely certain that, if they do not practise what they preach, both will eventually fail.
Transparency, openness, account-ability - these are not just fine words. They are absolutely crucial tools that we need in the fight for socialism. And it is not enough to demand that the state, the BBC, the council, etc, adhere to openness. We must do so ourselves: there is not just the small matter of Stalinism hanging over our movement; real accountability of our leaders is of the utmost importance in the fight for a truly democratic, socialist society. If the working class is to become the ruling class of society in order to liberate all of humanity, then we really have to stop treating people like children. The mass of the working class is not going to join a party or a campaign that views them as incapable of understanding our arguments or disagreements. And real accountability cannot be achieved without real transparency and openness.
There is another issue: without openly discussing not just our disagreements, but also the mistakes we have made, they are bound to be repeated. And there have, yes, been quite a few mistakes. None of them are irreversible and none of them are fatal, but, unless we are open about them, they could well become so. When it comes to politics and political differences, confidentiality and secrecy are weapons of the bosses and bureaucrats - and we should have nothing to do with them.
It is in this spirit of comradely criticism that we are covering developments in the Grassroots Left slate and Your Party in general. No doubt we make mistakes too, none on purpose - and all easily corrected by sending a letter to the Weekly Worker (editor@weeklyworker.co.uk).
More departures
Last week, we reported the departure of the small Organising for Popular Power (O4PP) and the Democratic Bloc from Grassroots Left. Neither will be standing candidates in the elections, but they may end up endorsing this or that candidate from either slate, and perhaps some independents too. Luckily, the departure of neither group nor their voting recommendations will make much of a difference.
The Democratic Bloc - until five short weeks ago a relatively important and certainly a very glossy player in Your Party - has all but dissolved. As we predicted last week, their leading member, Mish Rahman, has joined the Green Party - Zack Polanksi is very welcome to this arch opportunist and careerist, who made no impact at all as a member of Labour’s NEC, where he was more than keen to keep his head down. As vice-chair of Momentum, he loyally implemented the witch-hunting constitution of Jon Lansman. The same goes, incidentally, for Hilary Schan, another loyal vice-chair of Momentum, who resigned in April 2024. She is standing for the CEC in the South East, probably on the Corbyn slate (if there is one). We will be looking at all candidates in future editions.
The Democratic Bloc has now started a ‘consultation’, asking its members how they “wish for the Democratic Bloc to progress”. Option 1 - carry on to “function as a campaigning organisation within the context of Your Party”. Option 2 - do it “within Your Party, the Green Party and other relevant sites of struggle”. Option 3 - “The Democratic Bloc will transition into a period of strategic pause”. Brilliant. It does not take a genius to predict that option 3 will win, whichever option gets the most votes, and that the DemBloc will be strategically ‘pausing’ itself into oblivion. Good riddance. It was always just a holding group for a select number of unprincipled Momentum-type careerists, who happily participated in Karie Murphy’s secretive Organising Group. Rahman and co only discovered their love for democracy after Murphy closed it down last year.
The departure of Counterfire, and Ken Loach’s Platform for a Democratic Party, however, are more serious matters. Both were avoidable, in our view. So, why did they leave Grassroots Left? Neither group has published an official statement (yet), but we have been in contact with a number of participants in the GLS negotiations.
No doubt, both groups did not much like the political platform of the campaign.8 But, because it was drafted by Zarah Sultana (with “input” from Max Shanly) and because time was running out, they reluctantly signed up, when it was presented to the GLS working group on January 2. Both had previously presented their own short platforms, which were altogether inferior to the Sultana-Shanly one. But, contrary to reports circulating - in the DSYP in particular - we don’t believe that this is the only or even the main reason why they left.
After all, both attended the meeting on January 4 (ie, after the programme had been agreed), which voted on a set of joint candidates, including comrades Wimborne-Idrissi and Lavalette. However, neither organisation’s second candidate won: in the North East, Counterfire member Alex Snowdon, proposed by John Rees only on the morning of the meeting, lost out to Ian Spencer. The Platform’s Mike Forster lost out to Chris Saltmarsh in Yorkshire, after Zarah Sultana backed the controversial former Kirklees councillor, Fazila Loonat,9 thereby splitting the vote. Loonat received three votes, Saltmarsh four and Mike Forster five. The proposal by the representative from the Socialist Unity Platform, Tina Becker, to do a run-off between Saltmarsh and Forster, was not supported by anybody else. These decisions certainly played a role too.
However, a key reason for their departure, we understand, was the presentation of a detailed ‘logistics plan’ in the middle of the stuffed January 4 meeting, which had the various posts on the ‘campaign team’ firmly sewn up: most of them members of the DSYP, plus James Giles as head of comms, and Zarah Sultana’s husband Craig Lloyd and Max Shanly as joint ‘campaign directors’. No doubt, all of these comrades have excellent skills and should be involved in the campaign. But, added to the problems above, this ‘surprise’ plan managed to alienate members of all the other groups not in the know.
There was no need to railroad the meeting in such a way. Most of the names in the plan would probably have been agreed to by the others anyway. Counterfire’s John Rees was clearly annoyed and said he would not be able to vote on this, but would have to consult his EC. It decided to withdraw a couple of days later. And, although the slightly bamboozled rep from the Platform for a Democratic Party voted in favour of the plan, the group then followed Counterfire out the door on December 10.
In slightly prickly negotiations with both, it was agreed that their two candidates would continue to be listed as ‘endorsed’ on the slate, but without standing on the programme and without them endorsing the other candidates. In return, both organisations agreed not to stand anybody against the slate and not to argue against it.
A rather unsatisfactory non-aggression pact. Now both candidates, if elected, will not be accountable to the rest of the GL slate and have no reason to adhere to its programme. It was a mistake to let them go. Mistakes do happen, of course - we are all human. The problem arises, however, when we try to cover them up - or, worse, attempt to rewrite history.
We are glad to see that the DSYP has since moved to ‘rebalance’ some of the secrecy and lack of accountability in the campaign in order to “embed transparency as a core operating principle” in future negotiations.
Jeremy Corbyn
It is worth looking at why Jeremy Corbyn is being ‘endorsed’ by the slate. It is not just the Corbyn clique that is complaining about this endorsement: there has been a fair amount of criticism from within the left about it too. The slate should distance itself from him, chiefly because he put Karie Murphy (“the Murphia”) in charge. And isn’t she implementing the opposite of the kind of programme that the slate is fighting for?
That is all certainly true. He is no doubt the main reason that Your Party is in such dire straits: the lack of any transparency and democracy, the rampant bureaucracy, the sham that was the launch conference, the withholding of membership data from the branches, the witch-hunt of the Socialist Workers Party and the rest of the left, etc. All this is not just Karie Murphy’s doing - she is very much acting on behalf of and with the explicit agreement of Corbyn.
He proved that much at an event in Bradford on January 10, where he announced that he would be campaigning to overturn the ‘collective leadership’ agreed at the launch conference in Liverpool, as well as enforce a ban on any dual membership:
I think we need to look at some of the structural issues. I think we need a leadership that is elected directly by its members and accountable to its members: that’s a change we can make later on. And I think we need to have the loyalty of members directly to Your Party in the future. These are issues that can come within debate in the party. Let us get together to get our party back on track.10
He is referring, of course, to having a single, directly elected leader (like, oh, maybe himself?). Such a Bonapartist leader would be utterly unaccountable to the rest of the leadership, let alone to the atomised membership. A travesty, which was - quite rightly, if narrowly - rejected at conference (by an online vote by the members).
Of course, he should have the right to campaign for conference to change the constitution on this question - or any other, for that matter. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had that right - instead of the charade we saw at the launch conference, where members were only allowed to ‘vote’ on a few measly ‘options’ presented by HQ? It is, however, very noteworthy that, despite the very best efforts of HQ to minimise democracy to a bare minimum, members still managed to vote for collective leadership and against a witch-hunt. The fact that Corbyn wants to roll back both these gains is indeed worrying, though not exactly surprising. What is new is that he started to come out publicly on such issues. Good. We are starting to see an open clash of ideas.
The Grassroots Left endorsement of Corbyn does not mean that it supports him politically. That much is clear from the political platform of the campaign. But he remains (for now) a central figure in Your Party, which would not have come into existence without him (leaving aside the sorry state of said ‘existence’). But he is not just the party’s biggest asset - he is also its biggest problem. The more he exposes his anti-democratic leanings, the more the shine will come off the man and the less important he will become. By featuring him on the slate, the GL acknowledges a certain reality - and also underlines that, apart from Corbyn himself, none of the careerist acolytes promoted by HQ should be on the leadership.
Candidate trouble
We are hearing, incidentally, that Murphy is having great trouble finding decent candidates to stand on the prospective ‘Corbyn slate’ - which is not surprising, really, considering how much HQ has alienated members and branches up and down the country. Even a couple of candidates now standing on the GL slate were approached. We hear that Murphy even had to ask the infamous ‘Kika from Cambridge’ if she would be up for it. In the tame YP Connections Network (which now consists of reps from almost 80 YP branches), Kika Pye became well known for her consistent anti-left sectarian rantings and anti-democratic manoeuvres. An excuse to expel her was finally found, when it transpired that she was actually never elected to be the rep, despite claiming otherwise. There is no chance she would be elected either, we hear - most active YP members in Cambridge loathe her.
However, because voting will be done online by an atomised membership, people like her - if backed by Corbyn - have a chance to get on the CEC. We will do our best to expose the likes of her.
So, despite the clear efforts of Murphy to create a Corbyn slate,11 we will not be surprised if there actually is not a full one. He might just end up ‘endorsing’ this or that independent candidate - and there are certainly a lot of them throwing their hats into the ring: another reason why the Grassroots Left should have openly reported about its efforts. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry has convinced themselves that their name must absolutely be on the ballot paper. Some candidacies will be more serious than others. Crispin Flintoff, for example, will make things hard for the DSYP’s Max Shanly in the South East. Ditto Liverpool councillor Sam Gorst, who is standing as an independent in the North West, after having first been asked to go onto the Corbyn slate, before being ceremoniously dumped in favour of Mohammed Azam in Manchester.
Corbyn’s side has great advantages though. Besides the Corbyn persona, of course. HQ controls not just the money, but also the membership data. This puts the left at a distinct disadvantage. It cannot hope to equal any snazzy campaign that Corbyn’s side will be able to finance and spread far and wide. Our only hope is to be as open and democratic as possible, in a transparently-run campaign: for example, by honestly reporting, by getting branch endorsements, by running open hustings, by facilitating real political debate.
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docs.google.com/document/d/1AdRoRdnzWBYZO8KRZ-IwFR5jUV4DpQPRu6FltZu0hcg/edit.↩︎
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‘Confidentiality is a bosses tool’: Weekly Worker July 20 2014: www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1016/confidentiality-is-a-bosses-tool.↩︎
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‘New year, new left party?’: Weekly Worker January 9 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1520/new-year-new-left-party.↩︎
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docs.google.com/document/d/1rxLzlbj2FV8FpC36wiFeRp6M1j1qvYEm1yDMa_tuuBc/edit.↩︎
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cdn.grassrootsleft.org/Grassroots Left Slate full programme.pdf.↩︎
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news.sky.com/story/your-party-hit-by-new-split-as-corbyn-and-sultana-battle-for-control-13493414.↩︎