22.01.2026

Yet another witch-hunt

Corbyn’s The Many list is stuffed full of careerists, acolytes and the slightly deranged. Meanwhile, using all the Labour Party techniques, left candidates are being barred from standing. A bad omen, warns Carla Roberts

A week after the Grassroots Left launched its slate of candidates for Your Party’s central executive committee, Jeremy Corbyn launched the leadership faction’s slate, The Many.

There has been a rather laughable attempt to present it as entirely independent of Your Party HQ and perhaps there really are a couple of candidates there who are not key players in the Corbyn clique. Hannah Hawkins, for example, seems like a nice person and has spoken out publicly against the attempt to bar at least Ian Spencer from standing in the North East region.¹ She is, however, keeping quiet about all the other disqualifications.

The most prominent person on the slate, apart from Corbyn himself, is Louise Regan, an executive member of the National Education Union - and she sticks out like a sore thumb. She is generally of the left, has spoken out against the witch-hunt in the Labour Party and was herself suspended.² We hear that she was flattered onto the slate by Corbyn and did not feel she could say no. Well, she should have.

She has now aligned herself with a slate that is made up chiefly of Corbyn acolytes and yes-sayers. There are careerist councillors and the two leftover MPs of the Independent Alliance, Ayoub Khan and Shockat Adam. There are also a few unpleasant witch-hunters: Jenn Forbes (South West), for example, was one of the more nasty chairs at the launch conference in Liverpool, where she revelled in treating members like children. Chelley Ryan (South East) is an unhinged Corbynite, who spends much of her day ranting on Twitter against dual membership and the left generally.³ There is also the eccentric anti-vaxxer, Terry Deans, in the South West⁴ and the unashamed Welsh nationalist, Maria Donnellan.⁵

A rather embarrassing list, all in all, that shows how tainted Corbyn has become - we know of numerous candidates who were approached by Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy, but who said ‘no, thanks’. The better ones applied to be on the Grassroots Left slate, while others preferred to stand as independents. This is really saying something: they would rather go solo than make use of the Corbyn slate’s ability to access the funds and database of YP, as well as whatever is left of Corbyn’s ‘good name’ (not much, clearly).

The iconography and the colour scheme of The Many are a rather obvious nod to the Labour Party and also Momentum - in fact, it looks as if they have used the same designer. That surely is no unfortunate mistake, as some on the left seem to think, but an attempt to connect to the ‘good old times’, when our Jeremy was the undisputed hero of the left.

Corbyn’s role

Alas, no such luck. Many people are certainly now making the link to the Labour Party - the witch-hunt in the Labour Party, that is. There can be absolutely no doubt any more that Corbyn, the victim of one of the biggest stitch-ups in British history, has turned witch-hunter himself.

In a speech in Bradford last week, he promised to campaign against collective leadership and dual membership⁶ - as is his right, of course. What is not his right, however, is using Your Party machinery (firmly under the control of Murphy) to expel members of the Socialist Workers Party, ban various attendees from the YP launch conference - and now disbar candidates.

We should remember that, unfortunately, Corbyn has form: As leader of the Labour Party, he entirely capitulated to the orchestrated smear campaign equating anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism. In a futile attempt to appease the right, he threw many of his own allies to the wolves. His appointed general secretary, Jennie Formby, went out of her way to publicly smear Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Tony Greenstein, amongst others, to deliver evidence that Corbyn was ‘taking anti-Semitism seriously’. Unsurprisingly, this did not stop the right - it strengthened it! This purge came to a logical climax when Corbyn himself was eventually suspended and then expelled from the Labour Party.

It is worse today. This time, the witch-hunt was started by him. Despite what some of his most die-hard loyalist followers might think, Karie Murphy is not some kind of evil puppeteer, controlling the naive and good-hearted Corbyn. This is his doing and he could easily stop it. But he does not want trouble-makers in his party: he wants to build an undemocratic election machine like Momentum. Online referendums, sortition, assemblies without voting rights, branches without any access to data - this is all part of this attempt to gut Your Party of any real democracy and any real life.

As we go to press, we know of at least a dozen candidates who have been barred from standing in the CEC elections. As in the Labour witch-hunt, there will be many more victims, some of whom will have decided not to publicise the fact or indeed will not fight against it. As an aside, Barbara Dorn of the International Bolshevik Tendency, who is standing in London, has not been barred. Perhaps too small a fish to fry. Michael Lavalette too, a member of Counterfire, seems to have escaped the cull and his candidacy was never challenged, we understand. Good for him, but the application of the rules is clearly inconsistent – and thereby unjust.

Altogether, 386 candidates are standing across the nine English regions, Scotland and Wales. Clearly everybody and their auntie has thrown their hat in the ring. Perhaps if the Grassroots Left slate had been more transparent about its negotiations - the only place you could find out about it is the Weekly Worker - we might have avoided some of the extra competition from ‘independent’ socialists. The vast number of candidates presents a potential problem for the GL candidates, thanks to the undemocratic requirement to gather 75 nominations - not much of a problem if you have access to the full database, but a serious disadvantage for the left.

Among those we know have been barred are:

Dave Nellist, former Labour MP and veteran member of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, who is standing for a regional seat in the West Midlands.
April Ashley, another SPEW member standing in London, was also barred. SPEW had repeatedly written to Your Party HQ asking for “clarification” on the rules⁷ - but has not received a reply. The comrades are appealing the decision.
Ian Drummond, who is standing for the single Scottish seat. He suspects he might have been barred because he stated in his nomination statement that he is a member of Roger Silverman’s Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party … which is, as it says on the tin, not a party!
Ruth Cashman, member of the pro-imperialist and pro-Zionist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, standing in London.
n Chris Williamson, who is standing in the East Midlands. In a rather amusing twist, it turns out he was actually expelled in the first wave of the witch-hunt, at the eve of the Liverpool launch conference - for being “a member of the SWP”. Anybody even vaguely familiar with the British left will have laughed out loud. Williamson is famously a leading member of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain - very much on the other side of the left milieu and not just over the ‘trans question’. The massive levels of bureaucracy and micro-management at HQ clearly do not protect those running the show from making stupid mistakes.

It gets weirder. After Williamson pointed out the mistake, HQ did in fact reinstate him and he was allowed to attend launch conference as a sortitioned attendee! Which is, to put it mildly, another strange decision: unlike the SWP, the WPB does stand in elections under its own name and is indeed registered with the electoral commission - those were the reasons given to explain the barring of SWP members from conference. Rational decision-making is often the first thing that goes in a witch-hunt.
A number of independent candidates like Deborah Foulkes and Raj Gill, who is standing in London. He believes his bar might have to do with his former brief membership of the WPB.
Ian Spencer, standing in the North East on the Grassroots Left slate. After GL went all out to protest against his and all other disbarments, he was reinstated after 24 hours. The comrade’s chances of getting the required 75 endorsements will have massively increased thanks to his temporary ban! Ruth Cashman, Ian Drummond and Raj Gill too were readmitted a few hours later. HQ seems to have operated on the basis ‘ban first, ask questions later’.

The Many

All of those barred seem to have received the same letter, informing them that they are “ineligible to stand for election to the CEC” because of “item 2 in the CEC election rules” - a bureaucrat’s dream. Yes, conference voted for the most democratic ‘option’, when it came to the proposed ban on the left - but, as we warned, it is still a ban:

For the avoidance of doubt, members of other national political parties shall not be permitted to stand for election. Per the constitutional amendment passed at Your Party’s founding conference, dual membership of Your Party and any other national political party is not permitted until the CEC approves specific national political parties as aligning with the party’s values, before ratification by conference.

The letter is signed by “Andrew Jordan, Returning Officer”. As an aside, we wonder how he was chosen? Is he really the “suitably neutral” person promised in the CEC election rules?⁸ A quick Google search shows that he is the YP nomination officer and at the founding conference was in fact the appointed chair of the standing orders committee (the committee that ruled any challenges and amendments out of order and made sure that conference was stopped from exercising its sovereignty). You can’t get much more neutral than that!

His copy-and-paste letter does not go into any troublesome detail about, for example, which “national political party” the candidate is supposed to be a member of. Comrade Drummond, for example (now reinstated), has been wondering if maybe HQ thought he might be a member of the Workers Party of Britain, because he once was “a member of Respect and argued in favour of George Galloway being allowed to join the Labour Party”. How can members prove a negative? This is a clear violation of any kind of natural justice or due process.

There is also, for that matter, no definition of what constitutes such a party. Standing in elections? Being registered with the electoral commission? Having the word ‘party’ in the name? And if a campaign for a party is classified as a party, what about the Peace and Justice Project? Or the Independent Alliance of MPs? Or the Transform Party for that matter?

Actually, we hear that, yes, even members of Transform, a lukewarm nothing of an organisation, were approached by Jordan (a former member himself!) - this time on the phone - to clarify if they were still members (turns out the organisation was recently dissolved anyway). Funnily enough, in a meeting of the YP Connections Network on November 6, Karie Murphy explicitly ruled out Transform from the kind of treatment she had in mind for members of the “Marxist sects” (“I think we should absolutely have Transform in”), as opposed to groups like the SWP, SPEW, etc: “You may feel that it’s a great idea to have them all on board, and I personally feel that it’s not.” So a clear example of double standards.

The barring of candidates - clearly orchestrated by the people behind The Many’s slate - will have done serious damage to its electoral chances. But, considering that voting takes place online, via atomised clicks on a keyboard, it is possible that many YP members simply will not be aware of the shenanigans. And, as HQ firmly controls the database, the left cannot openly contact them either. An utter charade. The full CEC should be elected democratically and transparently at annual conference, by elected delegates from the branches rather in depoliticised beauty contests.

It remains to be seen if HQ is able to manipulate the majority of members sufficiently to get a majority of their slate onto the CEC. There can be no doubt that, in that case, Your Party would be lost as any kind of useful vehicle for the working class. Such a CEC would start off no doubt by declaring all left groups ineligible for YP membership. A party that starts with a witch-hunt is doomed to fail. It might hang on for a couple of years, but its days would soon be numbered. This election is therefore a very much last chance saloon for Your Party.

We urge readers and supporters to get actively involved in the Grassroots Left. Join the WhatsApp Community⁹ to discuss local and regional activity and endorse/vote for the following candidates:

London: Anahita Zardoshti and Mel Mullings.
South East: Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Max Shanly.
North West: Haifa Alkhanshali and Chloe Braddock.
South West: Mark Gage and Candi Williams.
Yorkshire: Sophie Wilson and Chris Saltmarsh.
West Midlands: Megan Clarke and Graham Jones.
East of England: Ricardo la Torre and Solma Ahmed.
East Midlands: Anwarul Khan and Anjona Roy.
North East: Ian Spencer and Myra Shoko.
Public office holders: Zarah Sultana MP, Cllr Grace Lewis, Cllr Michael Lavalette, Jeremy Corbyn MP.