19.02.2026
Drag towards bureaucracy
Grassroots Left is discussing how the party can be run democratically and what to do to ensure that CEC members are properly held to account. Carla Roberts explains
Your Party leadership elections are coming to a close. February 23 is the last day to vote for the central executive committee.
The unelected YP bureaucracy - led by Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy - has certainly done everything in its power to rig the election in favour of the leadership faction, The Many. Not only are the CEC elections run, overseen and managed by the same people who are administering Corbyn’s slate. They are barring and expelling candidates and they will be the ones who will count the votes. As if that was not bad enough, there is a three-day delay between the end of voting and the announcement of the results on February 26 - what has been dubbed the ‘72-hour fuckery period’. Some have commented in jest that it will probably take them that long to shred everything at the Fonthill Road HQ!
According to predictions based on candidate endorsements, Grassroots Left can expect a majority of between one and four seats - which would be quite a feat under these conditions. No third party has been hired to oversee the election, despite this being announced by HQ itself in its ‘First year organisational strategy’ document. HQ has opted for the most undemocratic version of the single transferable vote possible: ‘Imperiali’ does exactly what it sounds like - it favours big players and voting blocs. Of course, that also favours Grassroots Left, but HQ has judged that it would minimise the losses for The Many, because it makes it almost impossible for independent candidates to get elected.
A clear left majority would certainly help to start pushing Your Party to become the kind of party we actually need: unashamedly socialist, with thoroughly democratic structures, openness and transparency on all matters and with the members and branches actually in control.
It is a huge task to undo all the damage that the Corbyn clique has done - and not just when it comes to the constitution. Grassroots Left promises that a democratic refounding conference will take place within six months, where everything in the constitution can be revisited and changed by a simple majority (the constitution states that after 12 months, constitutional changes require a “two-thirds super-majority” - that is certainly one of the things that needs changing!). All proto-branches will be immediately recognised and tasked with organising inaugural meetings, details of which will be forwarded to all members living in the locality.
Should The Many win, however, not only will they entirely ignore most of the over 200 proto-branches. The Many candidate Hannah Hawkins has spelt out that they will also try to disqualify all those who are currently running proto-branches from standing in elections when “real” branches are set up. This is to protect us from ‘sectarianism’, you see.
A purge of the entire organised left (‘the sects’) under a Corbyn leadership is also guaranteed. He has already expressed his desire to constitutionally “revisit” both the rules on “collective leadership” and “dual membership”. Already HQ is interpreting the rules in the most biased way possible: until the new CEC produces a white list of those organisations whose members are ‘allowed’ to join, every member of a left group is considered illegitimate. Not that HQ is implementing the rule with any rationality: While three SPEW members were barred from standing in the CEC elections, Rob Rooney slipped through the net and gathered enough endorsements to stand in the South East - before he was expelled from the party altogether! The other three are still YP members. Try and make sense of that.
If the Grassroots Left wins a majority, it has promised not just to overturn all the expulsions (including those enacted just before the launch conference) - but also welcome all working class, socialist and communist organisations to openly participate in Your Party, with the right to form open factions and tendencies.
Plebiscites?
Clearly the left needs a solid CEC majority in order to have any chance of bringing Your Party back from the brink. It is far from guaranteed that this is even possible. A massive opportunity has already been lost because the Corbyn clique did not strike when the iron was hot. Instead of launching a democratic party when 800,000 people begged for it, they dithered, delayed and thought of how to control the whole process in the most undemocratic way possible. Left members on the CEC will have their work cut out getting those people back on board.
It is therefore absolutely crucial that the left shows that it will be entirely different from the unelected bureaucrats currently running HQ. That it will use the most democratic and transparent methods possible to change things around. That it really does want the members and branches in charge. That will be a real challenge and there will be an urge to quickly ‘fix’ things with short cuts.
Take, for example, the constitutional requirement that 20% of all local members have to attend an inaugural meeting to launch a branch. This was the most democratic ‘option’ available at the launch conference and is, of course, a mechanism to stop branches from forming. How could a left majority on the CEC get around such an undemocratic stipulation?
Worryingly, some GL candidates have argued that the CEC should launch an email plebiscite to abolish the quorum. Apparently, the ‘end justifies any means’. Does it? Not only has GL spent much of the last few months quite rightly arguing against online voting and email referendums, because they atomise members, take away power from the branches and, worst of all, are hugely skewed towards those asking the questions. Using this tool would immediately make GL look untrustworthy.
Plus, the means absolutely and inevitably influence the ends. Of course, the proposal was to use email voting only once! But there is the real danger of the slippery slope: if it works well on that occasion, can we not just use it one more time? It is not as if there are no examples from even our recent history to illustrate the danger here: eg, there is a good chance that not even Karie Murphy started out as the horrid bureaucrat she has become.
No, we should always act as democratically as possible. Sometimes, of course, we might have to use methods that leave a lot to be desired - if there is no other way around it. But there are certainly better and more democratic ways to deal with the 20% quorum and we are glad to hear that a GL working group has come up with a far superior proposal. This episode does point to a real danger that GL CEC members will face: the bureaucratic rot could well spread.
Max Shanly (a leading member of the Democratic Socialists in YP and a CEC candidate in the South East) has taken the initiative to draw up various proposals on how the GL programme could be implemented. That is to be welcomed and he has written some very good motions: for example, on how GL could build a party of the whole left. Other proposals, however, are more problematic. For instance, that the “workers’ commission” (agreed at the launch conference) should be made up of rank-and-file trade union members “appointed” by the CEC. This surely is the wrong approach. The CEC should facilitate members getting together in trade union caucuses - and then allow them to elect their own convenors. Should these caucuses not just get on with it and report to the CEC directly? Call that a commission, if the constitution demands it.
Then there is the “democracy commission” - again something that the Corbyn clique pushed into the constitution, without the membership being able to discuss or amend it. Instead of scrambling around for ways to implement the outsourcing of democracy to a commission, should we not seek to put the members and branches in charge? Does it really need a separate commission - presumably again with appointed members?
Stymied
Comrade Shanly and his supporters also want to instruct all branches to operate meetings on the basis of Roberts’ rules - something he has picked up from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). There are very many good things about the DSA - but the fact that many of their chapters are stymied by three-minute speech limits, endless points of order and procedural votes is no secret.
Roberts’ rules is the American version of Walter Citrine’s ABC of chairmanship - but more lengthy, far more complex and written for bureaucrats running non-legislative organisations. It would be bizarre to start forcing branches to use an enormously elaborate US model (even in its short version) which requires procedural experts. It is a non-starter and the proposal should be dropped.
The accountability of leftwing CEC members will clearly be very important. How this could be done, however, is now subject to quite a bit of debate. Of course, GL is not a party within a party or even a politically cohesive faction. As we have previously reported, it almost did not even happen, because the constituent groups were unable to agree on a joint programme. It was only when the Socialist Unity Platform and Ken Loach’s Platform for a Democratic Party called a last-minute meeting and Zarah Sultana presented a 15-point platform (written “with the help of Max Shanly”), that the groups finally agreed to work together. Even that did not last very long - Counterfire and the Platform were unhappy with the way the campaign was run and walked out a few days later.
The rest of the groups have continued by sending one rep each to the ‘slate committee’, which meets every Sunday morning. Current members are: DSYP, Trans Liberation Group, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Eco-Socialist Horizon, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, CPGB, Workers Power, Social Justice Party, Sheffield Left, Socialist Unity Platform and the disability platform, Nothing About Us.
Many of the candidates on the GL slate, however, are not members of the constituent groups: there are the five members of the DSYP, Myra Shoko is in TLG and Sophie Wilson is a member of Sheffield Left. The rest of the candidates are, in reality, independents. How can they be held accountable - and to what? Or, for that matter, by whom?
The GL programme, which all candidates were required to sign up to, has this to say on the matter: “All elected members of this slate will sit on an advisory committee with representatives of all the grassroots factions supporting this platform. The committee will meet monthly to hold elected members to account.”1
It is rather vague and none of this had been properly discussed when GL was set up. There is a proposal that the current slate committee should become the advisory committee. This makes sense, of course: it was the slate committee, after all, that decided on the programme, elected the GL candidates and has helped to set up the campaign financially. Sunday meetings oversee the campaign, they have voted on who should be running which aspect of the campaign and basically hold the campaign team to account.
Funnily enough, some DSYP candidates are arguing against this proposal, despite the fact that it is very much part of the DSYP’s programme - there are committees for everything. Some have argued that “grassroot factions” should only mean groups that have sprung up with the formation of Your Party - but exclude what they call the “sects”. Thankfully, this attitude has been opposed by others in the DSYP.
An all-day meeting of all GL ‘stakeholders’ on Sunday February 22 will hopefully be able to agree a way forward. Obviously, GL CEC members cannot be held accountable along the lines of democratic centralism (yet). On the other hand, GL should not see comrades just ‘follow their own conscience’. As a minimum, they should give regular reports to the constituent groups, who should make sure that they implement the common programme they ran on.