19.03.2026

Theo van Doesburg ‘Composition in gray’ (1919)

We need light and air

Real power is being exercised behind the backs of the elected committee members. The aim is clear: a politically pliant membership which votes in the approved way in occasional referendums and does the donkey work in elections. Meanwhile demands for closed sessions, secrecy and codes of conduct are threatening to paralyse Grassroots Left, reports Carla Roberts

The second meeting of Your Party’s central executive committee is due to take place on Sunday March 22, from 3-5pm. The agenda circulated by YP chair Jenn Forbes is yet again so crowded that a short meeting cannot possibly discuss any of the issues in any detail. In addition to the “standing items” and various “reports”, there will be “updates on local elections”, “devolved nations election planning”, a discussion on the “full CEC code of conduct”, YP’s “support for the Together march against racism”, how to “operationalise internal CEC communications”. Oh, and the question of “branch formations” is tabled yet again.

As is apparent, the CEC is not actually supposed to make any real decisions - it is there to rubberstamp and to give the mere illusion of democracy. All key decisions have been delegated to the officers’ group. And in reality, it is not even that group that runs the party - it still is very much Karie Murphy who is really in charge. We are unsure if she has an official position (yet), but, if there was any transparency or democracy in YP, she would have to be given the title of ‘general secretary’. We suspect, however, she knows that this would not go down too well with many members, even the thousands who remain loyal to Corbyn.

There still remains a false perception that the decent Corbyn has been led astray by this female Machiavelli. And, while he is certainly averse to conflict and a hippie at heart, there can be no doubt that he is fully and actively in support of what Murphy is doing and has been doing for years.

Key question

Branch formation remains the key question. No proposal has been circulated yet as to how the Corbyn clique envisages official branches being set up. However, there can be no doubt that it will not just recognise the 150 or so real existing branches. We hope that the Grassroots Left members on the CEC will bring their own proposal (GL had produced a good proposal during the election, which could be tweaked). Publishing such a motion in advance would go a long way to revive the GL and the left in YP (more on that below).

One of the key hurdles is the constitutional requirement that inaugural meetings require a 20% quorum of all local members - that was the least bad “option” available at the stage-managed launch conference in Liverpool. That would have been difficult enough last year, when YP was still growing. But the way the Corbyn clique has run the CEC elections - in the most undemocratic way possible, with expulsions, the barring of candidates, stage-managed hustings, the worst form of single transferable voting and hostile leaks to the bourgeois press (Murphy’s speciality) - has alienated many. We know that thousands have left already - some towards Green pastures. Numbers at most branch meetings have dwindled to about a third from what they were in the summer. And some people never actually joined YP in the first place, as it turns out. Andrew Feinstein has just explained that, “even though I was very involved in the initial discussions, I eventually never actually joined as a consequence of the factionalism and a number of other issues”.¹ As the comrade actively supported the Grassroots Left, we presume he means the factionalism of the Corbyn clique.

Not that these departures worry HQ - quite the opposite. A passive membership that occasionally clicks in email referendums suits them perfectly. Corbyn has no desire to build an active, mass working class party, let alone a revolutionary one. Something like Momentum or Podemos, that is what he and his supporters envisage.

We hear that the proposal the leadership clique will put forward is likely to contain various delaying tactics: apparently there is a plan to hold, yet again, regional assemblies first, where members may discuss ways in which a modern party can engage in community organising, activists’ assemblies, networking circles, etc - anything but real, decision-making branches (that is so “old-fashioned”, you see). Judging by the comments by membership officer Cassie Bellingham at a meeting in Oxford, they also seem to want to do away with local branch officers altogether (see Letters page).

That will be combined with massive bureaucratic hoops that those wishing to organise ‘official’ branches would have to jump through. The March 8 CEC meeting already heard that HQ demands all branches be set up as “accounting units in accordance with the requirements of the electoral commission”. If that is indeed the plan, then local branches would not just have to appoint a proper treasurer: they would have to submit detailed, annual accounts to the electoral commission² - a hugely bureaucratic and time-consuming task. The commission does not actually require such units - a national party can choose to register as a whole unit. But that is not what HQ wants. It wants to prevent active branches forming.

And, as Podemos shows, you do not need to give members real power to get them to occasionally go out to canvas in elections. For the May 2026 elections, this has mainly been outsourced to a list of 22 “local community groups” anyway. But an email by Forbes informs these groups that, even though they have been ‘pre-chosen’, they would still have to properly apply to YP:

Should Your Party decide to officially support your group, you will be designated as an Affiliate Local Group of Your Party. This will not alter your local identity and will apply on a temporary basis. We will also ask each individual candidate standing for election with your group to complete a separate form for administrative and due diligence purposes.

Delay, delay, delay.

In theory, ‘normal’ YP members can also apply to stand in the elections under the YP banner. But there are a number of hoops to jump through. Eg: “All individual candidates standing under the Your Party banner will need to be selected democratically by members. And they will need to pass due diligence checks and demonstrate they are able to mount a credible campaign”, as Louise Regan writes in an email on March 17.³ How can they be selected “democratically” by local members if HQ does not recognise any branches? We could well imagine that this will be done via email, requiring perhaps a certain ‘quorum’ of positive replies. Perhaps 50%? An utter impossibility. Which is the point, of course.

Further proof, if it was needed, is the refusal by HQ to send out an email to all members in Scotland, drafted by the Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC), which wanted to ascertain which members might consider standing. Good on the ISEC for publishing the reply it received from Jenn Forbes⁴ - after four weeks. She claims that there are “legal and regulatory matters”, which, very sadly, stop the party from sending out the email. Some believe that shows “incompetence” by HQ. Not so - it is exactly the opposite. After all, there were no such “legal and regulatory” problems when HQ sent out tens of thousands of postcards during the CEC elections to all those who had not voted in the first few days. No, this is very much part and parcel of HQ’s conscious strategy to stop YP becoming anything but a tightly controlled, top-down, online organisation.

Grassroots Left

Can the left oppose this? And how would it have to go about it to be successful? The Grassroots Left had scheduled a meeting of its Advisory Committee⁵ on Sunday March 15 to discuss just that. The AC is made up of what was previously called the GL slate committee (one representative from each of the constituent organisations involved in GL), plus all elected CEC members. A couple of days before the meeting, Socialist Worker carried an article that - if you know how to read it - announces that the Socialist Workers Party is about to withdraw from Your Party. This was followed by SWP national secretary Lewis Nielsen leaving GL. The Socialist Unity Platform has also withdrawn its rep, on the understanding that, having helped to launch GL, SUP had not met since.

Most of the remaining constituent groups in the GL did not show up at the meeting. This unfortunately reflects the demoralisation that has set in. It is extremely hard to build after a defeat: it requires patient stock-taking and honest discussion on the way forward - neither of which are particular strengths of today’s left.

Four motions had been submitted to the AC in advance. The only one submitted with more than 12 hours’ notice was on transparency, from the Democratic Socialists of Your Party, which “encourages” members of the CEC to organise public feedback sessions directly in the aftermath of CEC meetings; prepare and publish motions on branch recognition and a democratic recall conference for the next CEC meeting; and to publish all CEC documents, “including the agenda, before and after CEC meetings, including anything marked ‘confidential’ (apart from disciplinary matters, individual membership and certain financial information).”⁶

The reason: while the GL CEC members have produced a long, very detailed report of the March 8 CEC meeting, this only occasionally quotes from those reports and documents. The comrades have shied away from publishing anything marked ‘confidential’ - because the word appeared once on top of the agenda, it has been taken as meaning ‘everything’. A mistake in our view. The CPGB’s rep certainly would have supported the DSYP motion.

On the other hand, we would have opposed the overly detailed and bureaucratic ‘GL structure proposal’ produced by two individual DSYP members who attended as observers. It entirely misunderstands where GL is currently at. It assigns voting powers to a list of 30 or so individuals, but makes no proposal on how ‘normal’ GL members could get involved. It is a non-starter. It is also very unlikely that the DSYP would have endorsed the motion. To make matters worse, this proposal at first contained a terrible ‘code of conduct’ written by a GL CEC member (more on that below), but it has since been taken out and presented separately.

Workers Power and its former leading member, Richard Brenner (who was there as an observer), put forward a proposal to basically drop GL and set up ‘Your Party Organise’ “as a constructive coordinating body - not a faction”.⁷ Which seems to come down to relaunching GL by ditching the constituent groups, but instead focussing on the proto-branches - and all that under a different, ‘non-factional’ name, which happily enough would also appeal to the thousands of socialists who - don’t you know it? - are about to leave the Green Party (and Greens Organise) when it “starts enforcing cuts”. To join Your Party? Really? This has more than a hint of wishful thinking about it.

There are a number of further problems with this proposal, aside from the rather dishonest attempt to pretend that it has nothing to do with the ‘factional’ GL. For a start, the comrades have specifically rejected to link such an initiative with a political programme of any kind. And it is clear that they would certainly oppose GL’s programme,⁸ which comrade Brenner rather memorably ridiculed as being “full of weird Weekly Worker obsessions”, before backtracking spectacularly, when it was pointed out to him that Zarah Sultana had played a leading role in writing it.⁹

This anti-programme attitude is explained by the so-called ‘transitional method’, which means opposing anything that goes beyond the most basic economistic demands. “The full programme for socialism develops organically”, we have been told, in defence of the apolitical proposal. When has that ever been true? Producing a full programme for socialism is a very complex and time-consuming task. Marx and Engels, for example, were commissioned to produce the most famous party programme of them all, the Communist manifesto. Marx also helped to write the programme of the Parti Ouvrier in France. Then there are critiques of the Gotha and Erfurt programmes, the latter serving as the model for the foundational programme of Russian social democracy.

Worse, there already is a body in existence that is coordinating the YP proto-branches and which also does not have a clear political programme - YP Connections Network. What would be the point of duplicating its efforts? It might have been an idea for GL to get together with that network and try to sharpen and politicise it. And perhaps GL can still play that role - but Sunday’s meeting has made that a lot harder.

Transparency

As the keen reader will have worked out by now, the March 15 meeting of the GL advisory committee (AC) did not actually get to any of those motions. It descended into what a couple of attendees told us was “one of the worst meetings” they ever sat through. As it got very heated and quite a few people lost their composure, we will refrain from quoting anybody directly.

But we do make an exception for Richard Brenner. Not only because he is somebody who has played a leading role in the Trotskyist sect, Workers Power, for over 40 years and very much knows what he is doing. But also because he is chiefly to blame for the meeting descending into chaos.

Although he only attended as an observer - he was invited at the request of a couple of CEC members - Richard presented the first motion: to hold the meeting in “closed session”, as a “private” event that “no individual should be reporting about”. He demanded that only a collectively agreed report (if such a report should even be produced) should see the light of day.

Naturally, the CPGB rep strongly disagreed - as did the delegates from DSYP, Socialist Alternative and Sheffield Left. Considering what was at stake (the future of GL, no less), comrades argued in favour of transparent reporting - not just internally, to the members of the constituent groups, but also to GL supporters, the YP membership and the wider working class. If we want to take any YP members with us, we should - at the very least - feel obliged to tell them where we think we should go next. That is particularly important, considering how undemocratic and untransparent YP HQ has been running things. “How can we claim to build something more transparent if we don’t actually behave any more transparently?”, as one comrade asked. Brenner’s motion also goes against the agreed remit of the AC: “Transparency, democratic accountability and collective ownership will be central to the AC’s functioning.”

The meeting got increasingly fraught and soon enough the real target became clear - the Weekly Worker. Brenner and Workers Power have always disagreed with the Weekly Worker’s open reporting - which he rather unoriginally calls a “gossip sheet”, though he usually adds adjectives like “insignificant” or “toxic”. The culture of our paper goes entirely against the modus operandi of bureaucratic centralist sects, including, of course comrade Brenner himself, who is a member of a sect of one: we understand that a couple of years ago, he presented a set of theses on what he calls his “gender-critical” views to WP - and walked after he lost the vote.

Workers Power - nowadays to be counted in the social-imperialist camp over the Ukraine war - cannot contain differing views on any substantial question for long. Why? Because members are not allowed to publicly disagree with the leadership line. Therefore, instead of gagging himself, he felt he had no option but to leave. Naturally, none of the discussions on this issue have been published. One day, he just vanished from an organisation he had been leading for decades. Funnily enough, he recently deactivated his Facebook account, where he published many of his “gender-critical” views. For anybody who is wondering, there is nothing original about them. They are very similar to the biological determinist line of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain.

In the March 15 meeting, he charged the CPGB rep in particular with “being a nasty bully” who had created a “toxic atmosphere” in GL and wanted to “wreck” and “destroy” GL and Your Party. He repeatedly claimed that both Lee Rock and Chris Strafford (of DSYP) are members of the CPGB. When it was pointed out that both had left a good few years ago, he called them “liars”. The intention is clear: red bait anybody who is calling for transparency and who argues against secret meetings.

Sadly, he seems to have had some (no doubt temporary) success with some in GL: a number a attendees have parroted his line about the “toxic atmosphere”, which had allegedly been created due to our “incessant calls for absolute transparency”.

Code of conduct

The proposed code of conduct reflects a similar approach to transparency - though we believe it does come from a different motivation. Comrade Brenner is hostile to transparency and “washing your dirty linen in public” as a principle, and has been egging on the CEC members on this question. Some of them are clearly feeling the strain. Requests to publish the full CEC documents or hold public Zoom sessions have been misinterpreted as “personal attacks”.

No doubt, some of our CEC members are still coming to terms with the fact that, rather than actually running the party, they are being pushed into a role of ‘controlled opposition’ by HQ - and rather rudely so. They are feeling under immense pressure and it was worrying to see a couple of them feeling so vulnerable that they burst into tears in the meeting. Not because anybody said anything rude, horrible or hostile to them, we should add, but because they have no power on the CEC. Anything they propose will be voted down, automatically. Which is, of course, exactly why we keep insisting that transparency and openness are now our key weapons.

The proposed code of conduct¹⁰ is very much a reflection of that sense of vulnerability. Take the point, ‘Confidentiality and consent’, which states: “Information that is not already public should not be shared externally without the explicit consent of the relevant CEC members or the body that owns that information. Requests for internal information should respect this principle.”

This is, we believe, partially as a result of the Weekly Worker Twitter account being the first to publish the names of the elected members of the YP officers’ group, a couple of hours after the event. We were scolded for being “irresponsible” and “spreading gossip”.

There is the appeal for communicating in a “respectful and comradely manner” and the claim that “hostile, dismissive or disrespectful language is not acceptable”. As always with this type of document, that leads straight to the obvious question: who exactly decides what is “hostile, dismissive or disrespectful language”, and what is an “acceptable” argument? Who makes those decisions?

Then there is this: “Disagreements should focus on political or strategic questions, not interpersonal arguments. Participants should avoid conducting extended one-to-one arguments in group channels” and “avoid escalating disagreements through social media or public channels without prior attempts to resolve them internally”. We have yet to see any “interpersonal arguments” on the GL channels that are not actually about politics.

The rest of the points are all designed to protect CEC members from being ‘badgered’ and/or criticised: “Participants should: avoid unreasonable pressuring or repeated demands; respect boundaries and avoid persistent messaging; avoid public attacks on any individuals on the committee and CEC; avoid misrepresentation of others’ positions.”

And, yes, there are penalties: “Breach of the code of conduct will lead to up to two warnings, followed by removal from the WhatsApp groups, a suspension of voting powers, and disinvitation from the following NC meeting. A motion will be raised to that meeting to discuss and vote on either the formal removal of membership or the conditions for reinstatement.”

Rather than elected CEC members being held accountable by the organisations that make up the Grassroots Left (or the 2,000 or so people who signed up to GL, for that matter), this proposal would give CEC members the power to discipline and remove GL supporters. It is hard to believe that three or four CEC members have apparently come out in support of it. The only CEC member we know who has openly opposed it is Sophie Wilson from Yorkshire. Good on her. We would also be very surprised if Zarah Sultana supports it. She has, understandably, kept her distance from these shenanigans.

Unsurprisingly, the March 15 meeting ended in total disarray. The rep from Socialist Alternative had proposed that perhaps we could agree on “not directly quoting anybody”. This was accepted by everybody, apart from Richard Brenner, who insisted on pushing his motion to a vote. It was eventually voted on and ‘sort of’ passed, by five votes to four. In addition to the CPGB, it was opposed by Socialist Alternative, DSYP and Sheffield Left. All three CEC members present voted in favour, as did Workers Power - and, controversially, the rep of Nothing About Us: they had walked out of the AC the previous week after somebody had questioned if this ‘disability network’ is actually in operation. Most AC members understood this to mean ‘no, it is not’ and the group was taken off the list of constituent organisations. In any case, even without this ‘problematic’ vote, the CPGB rep would have felt under no obligation to accept it. Just like our CEC members should feel under no obligation to adhere to the ‘confidentiality’ rules doled out by Karie Murphy.

Should this code of conduct - or further requests for private and secret meetings - be accepted by a majority in GL, then that would certainly spell the end of the organisation. But, then again, it remains to be seen if there even will be another meeting of the AC.

Some argued that secrecy is necessary, because it would amount to “sabotage” if the “Weekly Worker tells Karie Murphy what we’re doing”. Murphy actually knows perfectly well what we are doing: debating politics, trying to map out a viable alternative strategy and seeing what initiatives we can agree on. In the real world, that is what is called ‘politics’.

We have nothing to be ashamed of, we have nothing to hide. After all we are not engaged in some underhand, sinister plot, a conspiracy designed to damage or bring down YP. On the contrary we seek to rescue YP, an organisation that we believe has taken a badly wrong course with the top-down control freakery of HQ, the refusal to provide branches with membership lists and the complete lack of transparency about what is going on.

Yes, doubtless Karie Murphy reads the Weekly Worker. But so do thousands of others on the left, including YP members, who want to, need to, know what is happening. Murphy will find nothing in the Weekly Worker that endangers anyone’s security, that leaves anyone open to criminal charges. But she will find the truth ... and that can only but be pointed, frank and cutting. Yes, sometimes it can hurt. But without the unvarnished truth, we as a class can never hope to build a democratic party, let alone run society.

Only those who serve ulterior, hidden or privileged interests insist on the dull, sanitized, grey upon grey version of things. Grassroots Left should leave that to the Corbyn clique.