14.05.2026

His Party ... will never be a mass party

Jeremy’s Potemkin village

Left election results were, in general, dismal - Your Party and YP-backed candidates being no exception. So the Corbyn clique has fallen back on official optimism, make-believe and self-deception, says Carla Roberts

Your Party’s central executive committee met on May 10. It proved to be a magnificent example of self-deception and make-believe. It started off with an ‘update’ by the dear leader himself. Jeremy spoke about the “tremendous successes” of the local elections and “how we’re all going to work together to make the world a better place” (as one CEC member summed it up). The meeting then moved to decide how to purge a fair chunk of its membership. You couldn’t make it up.

An upbeat email by YP political officer Louise Regan on May 9 had already set the tone of ‘official optimism’. There were 25 Your Party candidates and 22 “Your Party-backed candidates”. But Regan ignored all of them in her email, probably because none of them came anywhere close to winning a seat. Narendra Kandel in Greenwich (coming sixth with 720 votes), Laura Graham in Lambeth (470 votes) and Ron Cooper in West Lancashire (18%) are the best of the not very successful YP bunch - and have already been swept away under the Your Party carpet.

CEC member Grace Lewis came 11th with 14.9% of the vote in a Coventry ward where three Reform candidates won. She resigned from the CEC on May 9, because “her role on the CEC was as a public office holder, so she was unable to continue holding this position”¹, as the report of the Grassroots Left supporters on the CEC explains. We are not sure if she was pushed or if she jumped.

On one level, it does not matter - GL supporters are being entirely ignored on the CEC anyway. However, we would always urge comrades not to resign, but to go down fighting - and in the process further expose the bureaucratic shenanigans of the Corbyn clique. As an aside, the two proposals made by GL members for the agenda, including for YP to participate in the Notting Hill carnival, have left us more than a bit underwhelmed.

Celebrate

Still, Regan assures us that “there’s a lot for us to celebrate!” She means the fact that some of the ‘independent’ groups backed by YP did quite well. Her email focuses on the re-election of Tower Hamlets mayor, Lutfur Rahman of Aspire, “which Your Party is proud to have backed in these elections”. According to Regan, the local measures introduced by Aspire amount to a “shining light of municipal socialism”.

They boil down to a “winter fuel payment”, an “education maintenance allowance”, “free school meals” for all pupils and the provision of “free homecare for the [most vulnerable] elderly and disabled”. Those measures are all well and good, but it is not exactly Paris Commune territory.

At best, Rahman and Aspire could be described as communalist-populist. In 2015, Rahman was found guilty of “corrupt and illegal practices” in a previous election. Transport for London withheld £1 million of annual funding because Rahman ended the borough’s low traffic neighbourhood scheme to suit local businesses. And he famously refused to use public transport, instead insisting on being driven in a council-funded Mercedes.² Rahman is clearly no socialist and it is beyond bizarre to describe Tower Hamlets as ‘municipal socialism’ - which is, of course, a contradiction in terms anyway. You cannot possibly escape global capitalism in a single country, let alone a single borough in London - one of the epicentres of finance capitalism.

Treasurer Fadel Takrouri reported that YP had spent “a total of £17,500” on supporting local independent groups, “with the level of support given based on the number of candidates standing, the level of campaign activity and funding requests”. We suspect Aspire was very much top of the list.

Individual YP candidates, on the other hand, were offered a pre-designed, personalised leaflet with a print run of 5,000, a few posters and “access to canvassing software at reduced cost price”. Unsurprisingly, only 12 of the 47 candidates made use of the measly offer, according to Takrouri’s report.

A number of those candidates have since complained that communication with the centre was “extremely slow and bad” and that support was more than patchy. In an online meeting organised by CEC member Mel Mullings on May 10, for example, Ryan Richards - a young black candidate who stood under the YP moniker in Leeds - explained:

… it took over a week to approve our leaflet and then they wanted Zarah Sultana’s name taken off. The posters were delivered two days before the elections and I now have a whole bunch sitting in my living room. The YP social media didn’t mention local candidates at all and didn’t share our content - they just focused on the independent groups. I was always told to email the election team, but I never got a response. My messages to two staffers were usually left ‘unread’. I’ve felt really let down and alone.

This has been echoed by other candidates.

It is interesting that in her email, Regan ignored the election of former Corbyn collaborator Pamela Fitzpatrick, who won a seat from Labour in the Marlborough Ward, Harrow, standing under the YP-backed Arise banner. But, because she fell out with the Corbyn clique over the botched launch of the party, she is now being erased. The same goes for Andrew Feinstein, who is involved in the Camden People’s Alliance, whose candidate, Shah Abdul Majeed Bakth, won a seat (which Regan also does not mention).

When it comes to the rest of the left, only George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain had any kind of success, celebrating the election of five additional councillors³ - all in areas with a high Muslim population. A handful of SWP members stood as part of Haringey Socialist Alliance, Ealing Community Independents and as ‘independents’, getting generally bad results very similar to the 289 candidates who stood using SPEW’s Tusc moniker. Apart from a couple of odd exceptions (chief among them Nadia Noreen Ditta, who in the Bevoir ward in Southampton, managed to come second with 23.8%), the average vote for the left is under one percent.

Downplay

Perhaps in an attempt to downplay the desultory results, the Tusc website identifies “750 or so” candidates “who stood on an anti-austerity and anti-war platform” and claims that “the election of a number of anti-austerity and anti-war councillors under a variety of banners, including some of the Green victors, offers the chance of a fightback, combining council positions with a grassroots campaign”. Another piece of self-delusion and official optimism that is of absolutely no use to the working class. No, the reality is that the left did very badly, chiefly because there is no united, socialist political alternative that could inspire the working class.

Louise Regan claims in her email that “next time Your Party will be a force in every corner of the country”. Doubtful. We suspect the current arrangement - letting local independent groups do the real work and hang on to their coat tails - very much suits Corbyn. He does not want a real mass working class party. He remains at best a left Labourite, who still believes in Britain’s road to socialism along the lines of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. He has no interest in building a party that organises an active working class in vibrant branches and with a healthy culture of discussion and debate - that kind of party would hold its leader to account. And Corbyn certainly does not believe in the need to build a revolutionary party. He thinks that socialism can be introduced by a vote in parliament - and therefore you need another Labour-type party.

It is important to understand this when it comes to the so-called “summer of Your Party branch formation” announced at the May 10 CEC meeting. Membership officer Cassie Bellingham explained how the Corbyn clique will be kicking the can further down the road. There will be a “pilot launch” somewhere or other and “a branch formation report, which will have a community organising model at its heart, because we don’t want any more talking shops”. The “talking shops” refers to YP proto-branches, obviously. Though we cannot tell you what exactly a “community organising model” is. No doubt Karie Murphy will come up with some of her famous waffle.

There will be “a rolling timetable” with a “spiderweb formation”, which is supposed to lead to other branches in the area being formed (following “borough structures”). Each of the “planned 300 branches” have to register as an “accounting unit with the electoral commission”⁴ and then “organise an assembly, or listening circle”. Local members will receive an email with notice of a first meeting.

All of this will be news for the over 150 proto-branches that developed organically in the run-up to the launch conference in November 2025. Needless to say, they are all being entirely ignored in this process. We suspect HQ is currently busy picking local Corbyn loyalists who can be asked to set up tame meetings here and there.

There is also an “exciting summer schedule of events” being planned, which looks like a very hectic series of weekly actions, including an “event on trade unions” on July 11 in Durham (linked to the Miners Gala); the launch of an “international commission” on July 22; the launch of a “programme review and preparation commission” on July 27; the launch of a “local government network” on August 15 and an event around “marginalised communities” on August 22 in Blackburn. The first event, the “launch of a disability rights commission”, will supposedly take place on June 20 in Sheffield (“or Carlisle”).

This is certainly news to the proto-branch in Sheffield, which includes among its supporters CEC member Sophie Wilson. It very much remains to be seen if any of these events actually take off or in what shape. It looks to us very much like a rather shoddy and unstable Potemkin village.

Dual membership

The CEC was also presented with a ‘Dual membership integration framework and implementation of rules CEC operational paper’, which has Karie Murphy’s bureaucratic fingerprints all over it. On seven long pages, we can read all about ‘the operational model’, ‘standard case flow’, ‘case management models’, ‘key timelines’ and ‘implementation phases’. Thanks to the outright majority of Corbyn’s leadership faction, The Many, the previous CEC meeting on April 12 had already overturned the conference decision on dual membership, which, as an important reminder, read as follows:

Dual membership with aligned allied parties: Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties, where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the party’s values, to include those with whom the party cooperates electorally. The approved list shall be subject to ongoing CEC review and annual ratification by national conference.

No such “approved list” was ever produced - instead Murphy had drawn up a banned list of nine socialist groups (including the CPGB, Socialist Workers Party and SPEW), who are now deemed “ineligible”. The May 10 CEC meeting agreed (against the votes of the GL supporters), that “the integration pathway for external parties” sets out the “two routes” on how to avoid expulsion: “Route A - individual transition: resign and join YP normally”; or “Route B - organisational integration (dissolution model)”. In other words, there are no parties with which dual membership will ever be allowed (any such arrangements are only “temporary”) - it has simply been abolished by CEC diktat. This last point in the paper made us chuckle: “16. Conclusion: Ensures fairness, coherence and operational clarity.” For sure.

But there will be no ‘hot’ witch-hunt like in the Labour Party. This is mainly because YP has neither the staff nor the money to actively chase members of leftwing groups and, for example, trawl through social media profiles or leftwing papers. But we suspect there is a list of names ready to be processed, with more names being added by willing snitches and rightwingers.

Most left groups have made it quite easy for the YP bureaucrats and have effectively walked out. The Revolutionary Communist Party never really got involved, while the SWP declared in April that it will “not pursue a ‘deep entryism’, where we secretly maintain our own organisation inside Your Party. The key battles are outside the structures of Your Party”,⁵ explained Socialist Worker - all the while continuing to suck up to Corbyn and calling for a vote for the Greens in the local elections. Under its new leadership, the SWP really is moving to the right at record speed. Meanwhile, SPEW has staged a soft walkout, withdrawing its members from local steering committees.

We urge YP members to hold on to their membership for now, and to get involved in the new branches as and where they are being set up in order to openly fight for the kind of party we actually need.