11.06.2026

Zarah Sultana: pushed a dithering Corbyn into launch

Another fine mess

Corbyn’s Your Party has finally started to set up some tightly-controlled branches. Meanwhile most of the left and much of the membership has long gone. Carla Roberts reports

The May 7 meeting of Your Party’s central executive committee (CEC) was missing Jeremy Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy (who was “travelling”). No worries. We hear that the meeting followed, word for word, the four-page report produced by Murphy for the YP officers’ group. So there really was no need for her to be there in person. Though she is not a member of the CEC, Murphy usually plays a very active role, including sending messages to chair Jenn Forbes, telling her what to do about this or that.

Of course, this is how things have been done in YP ever since Corbyn’s leadership faction, The Many, won an outright majority in the CEC elections in February. Supporters of Grassroots Left are merely there to give the illusion of democracy. In reality, their votes are not needed - and not counted. Literally each and every decision has already been taken by the officers’ group, which is made up exclusively of supporters of The Many.

The latest officers’ report presented to the CEC is yet again full of the empty waffle which is characteristic of Murphy, with a lot of hot air and very few details. It includes, for example, a section on the

need to strengthen membership recruitment, supporter conversion and member retention as part of the next phase of party development. A conversion and retention strategy should proceed using email, text and telephone follow-up where appropriate. The framing should be positive: recruitment, supporter conversion and organising capacity, not internal weakness.

Heaven forbid YP should talk honestly about any of its weaknesses or problems - official optimism only, thank you very much.

CEC political officer Louise Regan (a member of the secretive sect, Socialist Action) announced that “a local government network will be established”, which is very explicitly not just aimed at YP and is likely to include politicians like Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman and his communalist group, Aspire, as well as other organisations, some of which were financially supported by YP in the recent local elections.

Regan also announced that a “by-election protocol” had been agreed by the officers, which was operating on the “principle that future decisions should be based on local capacity, campaign credibility, political usefulness and branch-building priorities”. Based on this rather obvious “protocol”, the officers decided that “the party should not stand in Hackney/Dalston. The local priority there is branch formation and resolving existing divisions.” There will also be no YP candidate in Makerfield, because the party “has limited local activist capacity”. This is apparently not a problem in Wrexham/Grosvenor, where “it was agreed that the party should support standing in this election and operational support should continue, as a candidate and campaign team are in place.”

Grassroots Left

The by-election protocol is supposed to “ensure transparency and consistency when determining Your Party support”, we read in the officers’ report. Funnily enough, we hear that when GL supporters asked during the CEC meeting where they could read the actual protocol, chair Jenn Forbes explained that, “it is an operational paper, so it would not have been circulated” and “would not be published”. Of course, secrecy is always the best way to ensure “transparency”!

In a similar vein, Dawn Aspinall read out, word for word, the section in the officers’ report mentioning “the conduct concerns involving CEC members, including behaviour in WhatsApp groups and meetings. A distinction should be maintained between political disagreement, disruptive conduct and matters requiring formal action.”

No details were presented on any of those “conduct concerns”. Who is supposed to have done which naughty thing remains a mystery. Also, there is no CEC WhatsApp group, so presumably some CEC members might get into trouble for having posted something in unrelated groups. GL supporters, against whom this is clearly directed, might or might not find out the charges against them, when “a conduct and complaints report” has been produced, which will include “possible standing orders action, where appropriate”.

Previous references to “conduct concerns” included the fact that “confidential” documents had been published, for example by the Weekly Worker. There is, as an aside, no coherence or logic to it. Sometimes, CEC meetings are being called with even the agenda tagged as ‘confidential’; then, at the next meeting, nothing is labelled secret. And it is not as if CEC meetings are getting to see anything that could be described as really requiring secrecy - complaints against a specific member, for example, or delicate financial matters. None of these things are even discussed by the CEC - they are all a matter for the organising group (which, unlike the CEC, does not publish minutes or reports).

No, the announcement of a “conduct and complaints report” is designed to further cow and to control the opposition. We cannot say it has not been successful. As we have reported, Grassroots Left has long stopped being any kind of coherent grouping, chiefly because of a refusal by a number of GL CEC members to simply ignore Murphy’s absurd demands for secrecy.¹ Surely, YP members should be able to find out, without censorship, what their elected leadership is up to. More than that: if we are serious about building a party of the whole working class, then we should be conducting our business openly and in front of that class, surely. Why on earth should members not see the full agenda or all documents sent to the CEC, for example?

To make matters worse, these GL CEC members seem to have entirely internalised this bureaucratic culture. They have been egged on in that by Richard Brenner, former leader of the Trotskyist sect, Workers Power (who is now playing a leading role in the Socialist Federation). They have been insisting on holding GL meetings in ‘closed sessions’, for example, with the demand that any reports would have to be ‘approved’ first. They also drafted an incredibly bureaucratic code of conduct for GL, which amounts to a thinly-veiled attempt to basically stop the elected GL CEC members from being criticised and “pestered”. Most codes of conduct are bad enough, but this one really took the biscuit: it would have made GL supporters accountable to their elected representatives, turning the idea of accountability entirely on its head.

This bureaucratic behaviour was strongly opposed by most of the other groups involved in GL, too, including Democratic Socialists and Socialist Alternative. The Trotskyist sect Workers Power was the only one in support. No decent opposition could have come out of such attempts to curb free speech, transparency and openness. Without learning some serious lessons from this disaster, the left is bound to fail, over and over again.

Branch rollout

The main item of the June 7 CEC meeting was the “branch rollout”. Membership officer Cassie Bellingham reported excitedly from the “pilot” branch launch on the Isle of Wight on June 6, “which had 70 people in the room and a bunch of people online”, which “went so well that I am buzzing!” Perhaps the latter explains why she seems to have had some serious trouble counting the number of people in the room. In fact, there were four members online and about 20 local members present - a figure which is supported by Bellingham’s own pictures² (there were also two people from HQ present). With YP claiming that there are 113 local members, a turnout of 24 is less than impressive - and it just about meets the 20% quorum required as per the YP constitution (a bureaucratic hurdle that HQ itself enforced on the organisation). No wonder Bellingham’s counting was rather ‘creative’.

She explained that “the vast majority of members should be in a branch by end of summer/beginning of autumn”. However, the branches listed on the YP website for launch in June and July is rather underwhelming, to put it mildly. A mere 21 branches are featured - among them such important centres of working class and leftwing strength as Bangor Conwy Môn, Ceredigion Penfro, Wolverhampton, Stoke on Trent and Dover. You get the drift.

Not a single branch in London is listed, despite the largest number of members living there. Nothing in Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow. In Yorkshire and the Humber, one of the most active regions in Your Party, only one branch will be launched - Hull. There are no plans yet for Sheffield, Leeds, York or Bradford, despite the fact that they all have at least similar numbers of members as Hull (with Sheffield and Leeds having three times as many!).

We hear that when GL supporters asked how the branches were chosen, they were told that the conscious focus was on “smaller places that often get left behind, because we want to do things differently”. It is different all right - and rather unusual - to ignore the majority of members.

The real reason is all too obvious: control. Larger branches are likely to contain more revolutionaries and ‘trouble-makers’, who might not simply accept that, for example, officers are elected online outside a meeting, as happened on the Isle of Wight. Or that the branches “will not operate in the old familiar model”, as it states on the YP website: “Many people have too much experience of torturous branch meetings that turn into endless arguments between a few key players over the wording of motions, with little impact on the world outside. It drains the life out of you.”³

The YP alternative is “assemblies”: gatherings which anybody can attend, where no votes are taken and nothing is decided - apart from “supporting the campaigns and struggles already happening on the ground where you live”. Doesn’t that just sound super-exciting?

No doubt, another reason for the delay is the hope that most leftwingers will have left YP by the time their local branch launches. And indeed, most left organisations have already departed, among them the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Counterfire, the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (which was not really involved in the first place). More on that below.

To make matters even more difficult for the branches, treasurer Fadel Takrouri announced that, “as required by the electoral commission”, Your Party will have “to amend our constitution and financial scheme”, because both are based on a “unitary structure”, but the commission requires “autonomous branches”. This is not true. Your Party could have chosen to submit one set of financial accounts, for HQ and the branches, which is what most political parties do. Instead, YP HQ has voluntarily chosen to split the party’s finances into “separate accounting units”.

This arrangement goes some way to make YP less of a party and more the kind network that Corbyn envisaged all along (had he not been bounced into launching a party by Zarah Sultana). It will also make life for branches a lot harder, which is no doubt why it has been chosen: “It was agreed that no branch should receive or control funds until spending limits, reporting rules, training and internal controls are agreed”, as it says in the officers’ report.

There will now be an “interim arrangement”, during which branches have to apply to the CEC (specifically a small group made up by Takrouri, Maria Donnellan and Hannah Hawkins) to have “permissible expenses” reimbursed - this could “last up to a year”. When GL supporters asked about what would, for example, constitute “permissible expenses”, they were fobbed off with yet “another report” that will be written and decided upon elsewhere.

In other words, branches will, of course, not be really autonomous, but tightly controlled by Corbyn’s leadership faction. GL supporters on the CEC voted in favour of this arrangement, apart from Sophie Wilson, who abstained.

Last item

The last item on the agenda - a discussion on the “trade unions and working people ‘commission’”, which was scheduled to last 20 minutes - seem to have simply been forgotten after Corbyn joined the meeting halfway through, giving one of his long and unfocused sermons, which was followed by equally waffly contributions from other CEC members. The CEC really is nothing but a charade.

Despite all of that, the CPGB argues that socialists should for the moment continue to use YP as an arena to fight for the kind of party we actually need - just like we should engage in trade unions and, where possible, the Labour Party. If we are kicked out, so be it - but, where we can engage with thousands of socialists and working class activists, we should and will do so.

Most of the left, however, has now withdrawn from YP: the SWP is back to doing its usual ‘broad front’ stuff - currently it is the campaign, Together (with the Greens, Labour left and centrists), against the far right. The RCP seems to have sent people into the Green Party, while SPEW has launched Trade Unionists for a New Party, which it rather cheekily claims was “launched at a thousand-plus strong meeting in July last year”.⁴ The reason that so many people attended was because Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were among the speakers - and there was no mention of such a campaign. We very much doubt this new campaign will go beyond SPEW’s spectacularly unsuccessful Tusc electoral front. Why? This new Party is just as limited politically as Tusc and organisationally the comrades are still pursuing a party with a “federal structure.” Worse, affiliates such as themselves and trade union bureaucrats would have a guaranteed veto. A total dead end.

Then there is the Socialist Federation, which was set up on May 31 in a Zoom meeting. In a rather strange turn of events, The Guardian has picked up on the small gathering - despite author Zoe Williams not having been present nor being in possession of any great knowledge about the British left. It appears she simply copied an equally ill-informed article in the New Statesman - and did not even bother to try and contact the organisers of the federation. Take the very first sentence of her ‘article’: “Last weekend, Your Party officially split, with 250 members voting to start a second leftwing party, the Socialist Federation.”⁵

Wrong, wrong and wrong again. There was a maximum of 120 people present at any one time - and just over 70 voted in favour of setting up a federation. It did not “split” and it did not commit to setting up a new party. But then, Williams does not really care about this meeting, which she uses as a cheap intro into her real target: the ‘stupid left’, which just cannot get its act together and keeps on splitting, for no discernible reason. For her, this latest ‘split’

looks like two things: first, a question of who, between the rivals and their hench people, deserves the blame for being so monumentally difficult as personalities that they squandered the goodwill (and data, and crowdfunding potential) of nearly a million people; second, the leftist infighting that onlookers have been mocking since the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front.

Amazing really that nobody has used that old Monty Python joke before Williams. Oh wait …! In reality, she says, the “political sticking points for Your Party - trans rights and the language around Israel and Gaza - read like they were handed to them by an antagonistic interviewer. They are issues upon which views diverge, but it should be possible for individuals to work out a common ground, rather than splitting into two parties.”

We agree with her last point - in theory. Of course, we need a party that can contain - and openly debate - different viewpoints. But in reality, this has absolutely nothing to do with why Your Party has failed. There are only slight political differences, with Sultana having moved to the left of Corbyn somewhat. These minor differences never really came to the fore and they certainly did not cause YP to implode.

The real issue was that Corbyn never wanted to set up a party in the first place. He had been resisting for close to two years. He is a thorough Labourite, currently in exile, and would be all too happy to rejoin Labour (if, for example, Andy Burnham becomes the new leader and offers him the chance). He was bounced into launching a party by Zarah Sultana. In fact, he is still trying to prevent YP becoming a real party, as he wants nothing more than a docile network - that is what the slow and bureaucratic branch rollout, the lash-ups with ‘independent’ groups and the focus on assemblies is all about. Ditto of course the micro-management of the launch conference, the witch-hunt against the organised left, the online referendums and the bureaucratic control over every aspect of the organisation. YP is not supposed to become anything real beyond a (possibly temporary) cushy retirement number for one Jeremy Corbyn, who can continue to travel the world, hobnobbing with other ‘socialist leaders’.

Back to the Socialist Federation. Despite the name, there are no local groups or campaigns involved and the 70 individuals in the meeting represent about 170 different political viewpoints! There were an incredible 32 written proposals, some very long and cumbersome. There was no time to discuss political differences or to even try to find out what those differences might be. No political clarity was achieved - it was not even an aim of the meeting, which simply rushed through the vastly differing proposals, produced by people with vastly different political backgrounds. Motions won when the speaker introducing them was particularly nice, particularly loud or known to the participants. There will now be an attempt to “composite” the three most popular proposals from both sections, on ‘structure’ and ‘programme’. What can possibly go wrong?

This is how a report by the Democratic Socialists sums up one of the key problems:

What was not resolved is the question of what a programme’s purpose and structure should be, with Raz O’Connor’s proposal, for instance, appearing to endorse the idea that a programme is essentially a series of theoretical interpretations of Marxism, while Richard Gerrard’s proposal, though clearly indicating the need for socialism, largely emphasising more immediate agitational demands over a longer-term strategic horizon for working class power.⁶

The next meeting takes place on June 28. We predict it will fizzle out pretty quickly. While there are a number of good comrades involved, this method of organising - brushing politics and differences under the carpet - is very unlikely to succeed.

Connections

The ‘Connections convention’, which took place on Saturday June 6, started off on a slightly better basis. It was originally set up as a network for elected representatives of around 100 Your Party proto-branches, but it now also accepts groups who have left YP. Some 150 travelled to Sheffield, with a few dozen more joining via Zoom. It certainly is a much better political experience to be physically in the same room with one another and comrades certainly made a few useful new ‘connections’.

Politically though, it is still as nebulous as the Socialist Federation (and some will have attended both). Yes, there were two interesting enough panel discussions, with the final one agreeing to an uncontroversial and broadly supportable ‘lead statement’ (see below), which seeks to

prepare the ground for the building of the kind of member-led party we actually need: with a clear programme for socialism, transparency, openness, accountability and thorough-going democracy. The conference [in 2026-27] should be a space for open and democratic debate, reflective of the need for a culture where differences are not brushed under the carpet, but are openly debated and discussed, in front of the working class.⁷

But most of the day’s focus was on ‘workshops’, which set out to have no specific outcome (and certainly delivered on that). Thanks to pressure from some of the Marxist groups involved, however, there was also a range of ‘self-organised spaces’, and CPGB members and supporters participated in three interesting joint sessions with the Democratic Socialists (which incidentally has finally adopted a proper membership structure⁸).

In the first session, Mike Macnair, Jon Benson (DS) and Claire Laker (Socialist Alternative) discussed the question of ‘What kind of programme’, which might not have produced a joint political outlook, but certainly served as an important step forward in at least understanding each other. In the second session, Yassamine Mather looked at ‘The world on fire: imperialism today’, with an interesting exploration of the situation in the Middle East, “which must be seen through the lens of the decline of the US imperialism and the rise of China”, as she explained.

The meeting also hosted the launch of the Socialist Education and Debating Association (Seda), which has the potential to become a useful avenue for comrades from different political backgrounds to openly discuss and debate various issues, including contentious questions - that would be a much needed step forward for the left. The videos will be uploaded later in the week.