26.03.2026
Thou shalt not criticise Karie
CEC members may not ‘misrepresent’ or ‘publicly oppose or undermine a decision’. Nor may they pass on ‘confidential’ information or ‘personally attack’ officers. The CEC’s code of conduct is a bureaucrat’s dream. It is designed to silence all and every opposition. Carla Roberts reports
We must admit that we thought meetings of Your Party’s central executive committee would be few and far between. But no - they now take place every two weeks. Instead of sidelining the CEC, Karie Murphy (de facto general secretary) has chosen another avenue: stuff the agenda of the two-hour meetings with so much business that only minutes can be spent on each item. The real decisions have been delegated to the ‘officers’ group’ - all members of Corbyn’s leadership faction.
The CEC is there to give the mere illusion of democracy. Crucially, CEC members have now been muzzled with a draconian ‘code of conduct’ (more below). It remains to be seen if Grassroots Left supporters on the CEC will submit. In the meantime, we are pleased to see that GL comrades have started to publish all motions and amendments.1 Full transparency and openness really are the best weapons they now have.
For example, at the latest, March 22, CEC meeting, chair, Jenn Forbes, decided to simply not table the six motions submitted by GL supporters, including one that would have initiated a process to quickly recognise branches - officially for reasons of “capacity and governance”. According to the standing orders pushed through in the previous meeting on March 8, Forbes alone is in charge of the agenda. Most of the amendments submitted were brushed aside too. And, since the chair’s ruling cannot be overturned without a two-thirds majority, that was the end of that.
All this took some truly bizarre forms. For example, we hear that a YP member had emailed all CEC comrades with a serious complaint involving a staff member, and requesting an investigation. As Forbes had not put the item on the agenda, this was brought up as a point of order. But, instead of discussing how to deal with the actual complaint, Forbes immediately went on the attack - against the CEC member who had allegedly passed on the CEC’s email addresses to the complainant! A classic case of diversion.
Of course, there is actually no other method for members to contact the YP leadership - all communication has to go through the official email address, which is monitored by Murphy and her sidekicks, among them press officer Angus Satow (both present at the latest meeting). However, the CEC was told there was “no way” that YP staff could answer all (any?) emails - or, for that matter, put events up on the website portal. Apparently, there are “capacity and technical issues”. But we are very relieved to hear that there is now a full-blown “action plan” to deal with both issues!
The complaint by the YP member itself was brushed aside as “inappropriate” and full of “unsubstantiated allegations” by Forbes, who announced that she would not be taking “any questions or discussion from anybody”. Case closed!
And in this undemocratic vein it went on. Maria Carroll Donnellan presented a “paper” about Wales, which, like all documents, is pretty boring (though we hear she was very worried about it “appearing in the Weekly Worker” - not if it’s boring, it won’t!). More worrying was the fact that Forbes simply decided not to table an amendment presented by Niall Christie, CEC member in Scotland. We do not agree with the comrade’s politics at all, of course: he is a self-declared Scottish nationalist and wants YP Scotland to be “independent” from the rest of the party too. He proposed to delete references to Your Party being “federal” in Donnellan’s paper. Not that we believe Your Party should be “federal” either. It is a nonsense to split up our forces into smaller and smaller sections, considering that we are fighting against the British state - and, of course, the global system of capitalism.
Branches
YP political officer Louise Regan gave a very short update on the May local elections. Apparently, of the 22 groups previously pre-selected for possible endorsement, only 15 are still in the running. We know that a number of additional local groups have applied, but - surprise, surprise - have not heard back. Forty individual candidates are being considered, too. Whether an official Your Party endorsement would actually help or hinder their candidacy is another matter.
As an aside, we hear that Regan is still a member of the secretive, brown-nosing sect, Socialist Action, which latches onto Bonapartist leaders like Corbyn and Ken Livingstone, often acting as their praetorian guard and being rewarded with lucrative jobs in return (pretty much Livingstone’s entire operation as mayor of London was run by well-renumerated SA members - chief among them Simon Fletcher, Redmond O’Neill and John Ross). We suspect Regan would be the person in charge of deciding which organisations could apply for ‘dual membership’. A clear conflict of interest there, one would presume - but this issue, like so many others, has been parked.
For now, the witch-hunt against the organised left has cooled down a bit. If members of left groups keep their head down and do not stand for any positions, they will be left alone. But the witch-hunt has already had the desired effect, with the Socialist Workers Party in effect walking out of YP (though individual members still turn up to meetings with copies of Socialist Worker).
Things might well heat up again, when it comes to ‘official’ branches being formed. Not that this will happen any time soon. The issue was - again - the last item on the agenda and less than 10 minutes were dedicated to it. The motion by the Corbyn clique outlined that “self-organised groups of members, sometimes called ‘proto-branches’, have in many instances done great work”, but they “will not be recognised as official branches”. You see, the new, shiny, official branches will be very different from “the exclusionary and managerial culture of older party models”.
We have seen in action over the last two years what the Corbyn clique wants instead: randomly sortitioned conference attendees instead of accountable delegates; online voting instead of real collective decision-making and branches entirely sidelined: a tame and easily controllable formation like Momentum or Podemos to suit Corbyn’s twilight years - not the kind of vibrant, mass working class party we actually need.
Obviously, ignoring the structures that our working class movement has developed over hundreds of years and coming up with new nonsense takes time: “It is proposed to explore innovative organisational forms to establish branches as organising hubs embedded in their communities.” The meeting elected two “co-leads”, Sam Gorst and Cath Davis, to help membership officer Cassi Bellingham kick the can further down the road. There will be “consultations”, which will include “surveys” and holding more dreaded “regional assemblies”.2 No doubt they will once again be non-voting, because voting, accountability, delegates - all of that is so very old-fashioned and boring.
To make matters worse, we are told that treasurer Fadel Takrouri announced that before any branch structures could be decided upon, there would also need to be a “financial structure that is approved by the electoral commission” and that “there is not much we can do before then about recognising branches”. A question on the “proposed timeline” of this plan was (very rudely) brushed aside.
The most worrying section of the meeting was the proposed code of conduct for CEC members. The alleged purpose is to “protect the reputation and integrity of Your Party”. But, unsurprisingly, most of the formulations have clearly been designed to protect those in charge from being criticised. This is, of course, the point of the vast majority of codes of conduct, which is why communists reject them.
Forbidden
There is the usual waffle that “members must treat all individuals with dignity and professionalism. Members must act in a professional, respectful and collegiate manner.” Forbidden are bad things like “harassment, bullying, discrimination or personal attacks”.
The question, as with all such codes, is who decides? Is it really “respectful” for example, to not table any of the motions presented by more than a third of CEC members? Is it “professional” for the chair to simply rule that she would “not be taking any questions or discussion”? What about forcibly muting participants? We hear that Forbes’s behaviour could well be described as “bullying” - but, because there is an inbuilt majority for the Corbyn clique on the CEC, she will never be found guilty. But those complaining about her heavy-handed chairing might well now be accused of ‘harassment’. Young people call that ‘crybullying’: the bully plays the victim.
Another chunk is devoted to stopping “confidential information” from being published - a speciality of Murphy, of course, who regularly leaks stuff to bourgeois media outlets. Nobody else is allowed to share anything - not until they drop dead. “Confidential information must not be disclosed without express authorisation of the CEC. The obligation of confidentiality continues during and after a member’s term on the CEC.”
There might well be some information that should be marked as confidential - for example, to protect members from being wrongfully accused of something or other by the authorities. At the height of the anti-Semitism smear campaign in the Labour Party, there were regular briefings against members like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Chris Williamson. Of course, those leaks emanated from Corbyn’s office itself - in the futile hope that they might appease the right wing and the pro-Zionist lobby. To no avail (and, of course, in the end they came for Corbyn himself).
Needless to say, protecting ‘normal’ members is not what the Corbyn clique has in mind. For example, the entire agenda for the last CEC meeting on March 8 was marked “confidential”!
Another section is designed to stop any reports coming out before a sanitised version is published: “Chair’s report of CEC meetings will be shared within 48 hours of the meeting. To avoid misrepresentations, CEC members may not publicly disclose details of CEC meetings before the chair’s report is published.”
All these points are further detailed. CEC members may not “misrepresent” or “publicly oppose or undermine a decision of the CEC in a manner that frustrates implementation of that decision”. Again, who decides whether such implementation has been ‘frustrated’? Well, we know. Karie Murphy incidentally has got her own rule: “Public criticism of staff is prohibited” - this has already been dubbed the ‘Karie clause’.
There is also a section that bans CEC members from organising internal opposition: members may not “encourage, coordinate or facilitate internal disruption of the party’s democratic processes”. We would well imagine that normal democratic practices - for example, proposing a challenge to standing orders, as we saw at the launch conference - might be interpreted as “disruptive”. The penalties include suspension and removal from the CEC.
After it was voted through by The Many bloc, Forbes pointed out “that there have already been numerous breaches of this code of conduct” by CEC members, including “in the chat of this meeting”, which she thought was “incredibly disappointing”. We wonder when Murphy et al will start enforcing it - probably as soon as the GL CEC members present any sort of challenge.
We hope they do - and take some inspiration from groundbreaking radical MPs. Parliament used to treat its debates as ‘private’, prohibiting the publication of speeches and debates as a “breach of privilege”, as they did not want to be bothered by public scrutiny. Peter Wentworth MP was famously imprisoned in 1576 for defying these restrictions. When in 1771 several printers and publishers were imprisoned for the same ‘crime’, the radical MP, John Wilkes, protected these printers and challenged the House of Commons’ right to arrest them. This resulted in a major constitutional battle, in which transparency eventually won out.
In this spirit, we also hope that the GL CEC members who had proposed a - not entirely dissimilar - code of conduct for the ‘advisory committee’ of the Grassroots Left will now drop that plan. Thousands of members have already left YP, because they are so fed up with the secrecy and the lack of transparency imposed by the Corbyn clique. If we want to save anything from the wreckage, surely we have to discuss openly and in front of the members.