06.08.2026

Aping Harvey Weinstein

Demanding that elected members of the central executive committee sign non-disclosure agreements is surely a sign of complete political, moral and organisational bankruptcy, says Carla Roberts. Jeremy Corbyn and Karie Murphy ought to hang their heads in shame

You have got to hand it to Karie Murphy - Jeremy Corbyn’s right-hand woman always has a surprise up her sleeve. On July 23, all members of the Your Party central executive committee received an email from secretary Dawn Aspinall, informing them that they would finally be issued with their own Your Party email addresses - a staggering six months after their election in February 2026. Needless to say, the seven CEC officers (all elected on Corbyn’s leadership slate, The Many) already had official YP email addresses.

Why are ‘normal’ CEC members suddenly being issued with them? Are they finally able to engage in “correspondence with members, staff, volunteers and external organisations”, as Aspinall’s email states? Will they at last be given access to the membership data? Will they be able to see how many members YP actually has? Get an overview of the party’s finances, perhaps?

Of course not. No, this is a classic move by Murphy, the de facto general secretary of Your Party. You see, all future CEC correspondence will be sent to this official YP email address - and this email address only: “Meeting papers, notices, governance documents, confidential correspondence, voting information and other official party business will be issued to this account. CEC members are therefore asked to check their party email regularly to ensure they do not miss important communications.”

Oh, and in order to get access to the email account, all that CEC members have to do is sign a three-page ‘non-disclosure agreement’! So, if you want to continue in your role on the CEC, you basically need to sign it, otherwise you will not receive the agenda items, the CEC documents or even the invitation. This is, of course, packaged in terms of “protecting members’ data”, but there is no question of the seven Grassroots Left members on the CEC suddenly being given access to that kind of information.

No, this is very much about neutering the opposition. As readers of the Weekly Worker will know, there has been something of a mini-rebellion on the CEC, after Mel Mullings, Solma Ahmed and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (all three elected on the Grassroots Left slate) were suspended on July 4 for attending a meeting of the Socialist Federation (which has now imploded, see below). This made absolutely no sense. For a start, SF is not banned by Your Party - unlike the Socialist Workers Party, whose ‘Marxism 2026’ event Jeremy Corbyn attended the day after the three suspensions. To make matters worse, Naomi had not even attended the SF meeting.

This botched suspension was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for seven CEC members elected on the slate of Corbyn’s leadership faction, The Many, who joined the seven GL members in a ‘special CEC meeting’ on July 12 to successfully issue motions of no confidence against YP chair Jenn Forbes, secretary Dawn Aspinall and membership officer Cassi Bellingham.

Unfortunately, this rebellion is not based on a position of strength or a suddenly discovered political cohesion. It is based on a shared sense of YP having become a real embarrassment, nothing more. YP is staggeringly unsuccessful, the ‘branches rollout’ is a slow-motion joke, the organisation makes no impact in any election and it remains solidly at 0% in opinion polls. Some CEC members clearly do not want to continue carrying the responsibility for this failing project, especially as most of them have been kept firmly out of the decision-making process.

It is telling that there are three CEC officers among those rebelling: political officer Louise Regan, spokesperson Noor Jahan Begum and treasurer Fadel Takrouri. The latter two have resigned their officer posts and, while Takrouri remains a member of the CEC, we are hearing that Begum might have resigned from the CEC, too. We do not know, because she has not actually told other members - neither has Your Party. She has written a resignation statement, over three weeks ago, which has only just been leaked to the Canary.¹ Independent Sam Gorst resigned from the CEC just after the ‘special’ meeting on July 12; national co-chair Laura Smith a couple of weeks before that.

It is no surprise that this kind of ‘opposition’ has not been able to achieve very much. Due to the lack of a shared political perspective, there is no obvious joint way forward. While there is - on paper - a majority of CEC members who now disagree with the trajectory of the party and who want to depose Forbes, Aspinall and Bellingham, they have no mechanisms to enforce that majority. All decisions have - for many months - been taken by the CEC officers, where the Corbyn clique still retains a majority (of one!). Some CEC rebels want to boycott future meetings and make them inquorate - but, then, would the Corbyn clique really care? They have ignored the CEC for months, and would happily continue to do so.

Of course, at the heart of this dilemma is a simple fact: when The Many CEC members were still acting as a loyal bloc, they supported the bureaucratic takeover of YP by the Corbyn clique and simply waved through documents like the dire CEC standing orders,² which are now being used to sideline them.

Gagging orders

Trying to force CEC members to sign NDAs is a rather thinly-veiled attempt to get the opposition to just quit. Which is what many of them are now considering, from what we hear. Very few of them will sign it, we suspect - which is, of course, exactly what Murphy is hoping for. The next YP ‘conference’ (date still unknown) will no doubt do away with ‘collective leadership’ and the CEC anyway.

Karie Murphy could not care less about the potential fallout from any ‘mass’ resignations on the CEC. Your Party was never supposed to be a mass party anyway. Having been bounced into launching YP by Zarah Sultana, the Corbyn clique has done its best to transform it into the most undemocratic organisation possible - some kind of ‘vanity’ project that can be easily controlled, just like Momentum (after the coup by Jon Lansman, which was supported by Corbyn, we should remember). Corbyn is and remains a Labourite, through and through. He would no doubt do a ‘Diane Abbott’ and creep back into the Labour Party, all the while apologising for his ‘anti-Semitism’ - a big lie which had his leadership suffering from Stockholm syndrome and witch-hunting thousands of good leftwingers, many of them, incidentally, Jewish. But Andy Burnham would not allow him back in any case, chiefly because it would not be worth it. Having Corbyn back in the Labour ‘family’ might get him a couple of percentage points from the Greens, but he would invite a shit storm of humongous proportions from the right and the pro-Zionist lobby.

Incredibly, Jeremy Corbyn has managed to retain some sort of ‘nice man’ reputation, despite the utter mess he and Murphy have made of YP. Issuing NDAs to his fellow socialists should go a long way to expose him for the control freak he is. If you were very generous, you could argue that political parties use NDAs to protect members’ data and such. But you would be wrong, as this is already covered by data protection laws.

No, NDAs are usually issued to stop (departing) staff from blowing the whistle. The Labour Party, for example, has used settlement agreements containing confidentiality clauses when parting ways with employees, including in cases involving complaints of bullying, racism and sexual harassment. Many trade unions do the same. It has become a common way to stop the bureaucracy from being exposed. Worse, the Harvey Weinsteins of this world use NDAs to hide their horrendous crimes. Signing it is usually linked with some kind of (extra) payout to the victim to keep shtum and stop them pressing legal charges.

In other words, NDAs are there to protect perpetrators, criminals and those with things to hide. Any socialist party worthy of the name should have absolutely nothing to do with such methods.

Getting the elected members of a leadership body (not just staff) to sign an NDA is taking things even further. We understand that the Labour Party at one stage tried to get members of its (elected) national executive to sign NDAs - but this did not go down well at all and they had to back off. Quite right too. CEC members should be accountable only to those who elected them. It is the staff who should be accountable to those elected, not the other way around! But then again, Your Party CEC members still have not even been told who actually is on the staff! Incredibly, the Corbyn Party is much, much less democratic than even the Labour Party - and that after the Keir Starmer regime had its way with it.

We do not know if YP staff too have been presented with NDAs - probably. Certainly not Karie Murphy herself though, who would quickly be found ‘in breach’ for constantly leaking to the bourgeois press. Needless to say, the NDA is packed with references to CEC members having to keep things “confidential”. They would have to commit themselves to “not share, disclose, copy or distribute information without permission” and to “protect confidential information”, which “includes information relating to members, supporters, internal activities and elections”.

Under point 2, “What is Confidential Information?”, we read that, next to things like ‘membership records’, this also includes “any information marked or reasonably understood to be confidential”. In the past, that has included things like whole CEC agendas, and pretty much all documents and reports produced by the officers’ group, including the CEC standing orders. Everything, in other words.

Openness

You might wonder why you have to read the Weekly Worker to find out about these NDAs. We are wondering, too. In fact, we have been waiting for some kind of public statement from the opposition, telling Karie Murphy to shove her NDAs where the sun don’t shine. Alas, there is only silence. This is, unfortunately, not just down to the fact that the opposition is politically incoherent. Most CEC members are subordinating themselves to the NDA - without having signed it. In fact, they have been enforcing Murphy’s requests for confidentiality without as much as a peep, for many months.

Unfortunately, that very much includes the majority of the Grassroots Left supporters on the CEC. They produce factual, pretty dull reports of CEC meetings, but these are being published less and less frequently. Anything marked ‘confidential’ has been kept from the members, leaving it to the Weekly Worker to publish all the CEC documents that we can get hold of - very much against the wishes of most GL members, we should say. In fact, we have been vilified as “toxic bullies” for arguing that everything should be out in the open and have been accused of “sabotage” when we did publish documents. Our fight for transparency has been dismissed as a “cheap way to try and increase the Weekly Worker circulation”.

No, we insist on transparency and openness because they are quite clearly the main methods with which to build an actual, democratic mass party, where the members are in charge, not the bureaucracy. Surely, members must be able to see what their elected leaders are up to, who is arguing what on the leadership body and who is moving which policy document forward. Anything else places the power in the hands of the bureaucrats, not the members.

We would have much preferred it if GL had published all these papers. After all, that might have given GL a fighting chance to become a worthwhile opposition in Your Party, which would have been much better for the left (and us). Instead, most GL CEC members supported holding Grassroots Left meetings in closed sessions, having a ban on reporting on them - and there was even a proposal for an entirely bizarre code of conduct (written by Candi Williams)³ that would have made the organisations which initially made up the GL accountable to the elected CEC members - rather than the other way around!⁴ No wonder GL has imploded. The GL CEC members are doing their own thing now, as individuals, without any mechanism for those who elected them to hold them to account.

For example, we would take serious issue with the decision by Mel Mullings, Solma Ahmed and Candi Williams to continue to pursue a “round-table discussion on anti-racism” - with YP secretary Dawn Aspinall (the person who sent out the NDA!) in the lead. We understand some fellow CEC members advised against that - quite right. GL CEC members claim correctly that after the no-confidence vote against her, Aspinall is in the post illegitimately. Surely it is pretty daft to then confirm her legitimacy by helping her to organise such an event! The three GL comrades would no doubt claim that the need to fight against racism trumps all of that. This is the kind of serious political mistake that happens when you subscribe to identity politics. The comrades are signposting that they are not a serious opposition at all and can be easily incorporated into the YP bureaucracy, with the smallest of crumbs.

Socialist Federation

One of those driving this campaign against transparency and openness was Richard Gerrard, former leader of the small Trotskyist sect, Workers Power. He was acting as a sort of legal adviser/attack dog for the GL CEC members for a while and went on to set up the Socialist Federation.

He was also very keen to jump on the anti-CPGB bandwagon in the wake of the ‘N-word affair’, pretending to be unable to distinguish between discussing racism and being racist. He enforced speech controls on the various WhatsApp groups he controls, deleting a number of Weekly Worker articles, for example. In the group of the Grassroots Left, he organised a poll that asked, “Should we prohibit racial slurs and articles containing racial slurs?” 34 out of the 222 people still in the group bothered to click ‘yes’ to his daft leading question. In other words, in his campaign against the Weekly Worker, he fully embraced identity politics, speech controls and banning people for thinking or saying the wrong thing. He was also the first to call us “toxic bullies”.

We did point out, repeatedly, not just how wrong this campaign against an open culture of debate and transparency was generally - but that it was, in Gerrard’s case, also rather hypocritical, seeing as he holds a so-called “materialist” view on the trans question that is entirely out of step with the majority of the members of the Socialist Federation, who are steeped deeply in identity politics. All too predictably, chickens have now come home to roost. It is only a matter of time until the speech controls you support against others bite you yourself in the bum.

On the morning of August 3, all SF supporters received a personal email from Gerrard, who informed them that he has “decided to stand down as an officer of the Socialist Federation”. He goes on to explain:

Our weekly volunteers’ meeting last Thursday took it upon itself to ban our volunteers from expressing disagreement, publicly or internally within the volunteers’ team, on a question of personal belief that sits outside the Points of Unity … As you know, our Points of Unity include a shared commitment to transgender liberation. The interim platform of the Socialist Federation, which I drafted, reiterates that commitment.

However, a majority of our volunteer group now interpret that commitment as imposing a specific view - beyond anything in the Points of Unity - about the nature of biological sex, its mutability, and its relation to gender. What is more, at Thursday’s volunteers meeting - which I was unable to attend - a majority decided to ban volunteers from expressing any differing opinion to theirs on the nature and mutability of biological sex. I believe it is inappropriate and self-defeating for the volunteers to dictate what members of the team can or can’t say on such questions.

He is a bit vague on the details, but we think we have been able to cobble together what happened. There have been arguments over the ‘trans question’ brewing for many weeks. It appears that the issue finally exploded when Will McMahon (who many Weekly Worker readers will know - he was involved in the Socialist Alliance and for a while worked with Nick Wrack in Talking about Socialism) attended an ‘onboarding call’ in order to be allowed to help out as a ‘volunteer’ for the SF. Such volunteers basically make up the highest decision-making body of SF and there are currently a grand total of 22 of them, we understand. In that meeting, the two interviewers seem to have veered rather off script, asking comrade McMahon some leading questions about his views on the trans question - it appears they knew that he too shares a “gender-critical viewpoint”.

Trans question

James Kulmar has since explained in a WhatsApp group that Will McMahon “responded with two statements: 1.⁠ People can’t change their sex. 2.⁠ Trans women aren’t women. This was flagged (rightly so) because of the unprompted nature of the comments and severity of them in light of the question posed.”

We have reached out to comrade McMahon to ask him if these statements were correctly relayed and if he really made them “unprompted” - which seems rather unlikely (we are still waiting for a reply). Kulmar goes on to explain that a volunteers’ meeting then decided:

… we should not onboard that individual as a volunteer, not because of their particular views on sex or gender, but because of the nature of the interjection and the risk of creating an unsafe work environment. In the meeting, which was impassioned, but honestly very comradely, a proposal was put forward that had two components: 1.⁠ We should require onboarded volunteers to respect pronouns. 2.⁠ We should require onboarded volunteers to not proclaim, ‘trans women are not women’ in public or at SF events.

This was agreed. On the evening of Monday August 3 then, after Richard Gerrard sent out his personal email, there was an ‘emergency volunteers meeting’, which was attended by 15 of the 22 volunteers. Nine of them voted to expel Gerrard from the Socialist Federation altogether - its founder and leading member. The meeting also voted to suspend June Tobin, who had been elected to run the SF ‘oversight committee’ and who dared to point out that there are no complaints procedures in place that she and Gerrard could appeal to. She too has been labelled a transphobe in the process and is subject to an investigation. Unlike Gerrard, she will not resign: “Let the fuckers vote me out”, she told us.

Red lines

Of course, you can have terribly bureaucratic organisations that do not officially subscribe to identity politics - and SF was definitely one of those. Focusing on ‘action, action, action’ (with nobody actually doing anything about the ‘mass campaigns’ they had decided upon), there was a real lack of discussion on the politics or the programme of the ‘organisation’, with speeches limited to three minutes at its grandly-titled ‘conferences’ and the forced merging of entirely different political position papers into, well, utter nonsense. Important political differences have been simply brushed under the carpet, as we have just seen.

But, now that a commitment to identity politics has been made and a particular view on the trans question expressed, this requires a whole other level of bureaucracy, with mechanisms to ensure that nobody does or says anything that somebody else might feel is ‘wrong’ or ‘offensive’. There will have to be speech controls, no-platforming and surely more expulsions for having the wrong viewpoint. There will need to be committees to decide what happens when somebody commits such a thought crime and says the wrong thing. There will need to be appeals committees, codes of conduct etc, etc. A bureaucratic nightmare - especially for an organisation with 22 volunteers. The SF conference, scheduled for early September, has already been “postponed”, indefinitely for now.⁵ We would be very surprised if it ever takes place. Good riddance.

While we do not agree with the attitude of Gerrard and McMahon on the trans question, enforcing a particular viewpoint on such a contested question can only build you a sect - if that. Whole organisations on the left have been split apart by the issue, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of long-standing socialists who share the view of Gerrard and McMahon. To simply say that ‘the issue is not up for debate’, as many trans activists and their supporters do, is just simply idiotic - for the simple reason that it is very much being debated.

It should therefore not be the kind of ‘red line’ that, for example, the question of pro-imperialism is. A real, principled party of the working class has to be able to firmly oppose any form of state loyalism, which, say, includes support for what the UK and US governments are doing in Ukraine and the Middle East. That clearly is a class question, which pits the interests of the working class very clearly against those of the ruling class. Any organisation that calls on the British state to send more weapons or tax money to Volodymyr Zelensky is actively siding with our own bourgeoisie.

However, the trans question is a rather different category. For a start, it is not a clear-cut ‘class question’, as both the ruling class and the working class are split on the issue. Of course, we are obliged to oppose the April 2025 Supreme Court landmark ruling stating that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer strictly to biological sex, meaning trans women do not legally qualify as women under those specific statutory protections. This was a frontal assault on transexual men and women and an essentially biblical judgement: god created men and women. But sex is not only biological, it is social. Therefore someone born ‘female’ can indeed become ‘male’ because they are socially accepted as male (surgery and drugs are modern innovations).

To celebrate the Supreme Court ruling, as does the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, is to cross a class line. But there is room for debate on a number of issues around the ‘trans question’.

Either way, most of the left, including so-called ‘terfs’, are pretty much united in the need to show active solidarity: we defend and seek to advance the rights of trans people, we oppose bigoted attacks on them and also surely oppose the policing of toilets in the wake of the code published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which came into force on August 5.

Also, it is worth adding - contrary to what some trans activists claim - that people like Gerrard and McMahon do not ‘deny the existence of trans people’. This is just hyperbolic nonsense.

As it says in the introduction to our theses on the question, when it comes to our organisations, we should concentrate on practical acts of solidarity. This means we must:

stand unequivocally against the fraudulent rightwing witch-hunt of trans people, and campaign for the liberation of trans people from their present-day oppression, without accepting the framework of ‘intersectionalist’, tail-endist politics. Equally, and connected to this, it is not necessary to commit to arguments for the social construction of biology, which logically entail the truth of subjective marginal utility economics (and thus that unemployment is caused by workers’ unreasonable refusal to accept below-subsistence wages). Nor is it necessary to believe that gender non-conformity is in itself revolutionary. Nor to commit to the psycho-babble language of ‘transphobia’ (or homophobia or Islamophobia), which, precisely by their over-psychiatrising character, destroy the space for rational disagreement. Nor to imagine that no-platforming ‘terfs’ is a productive policy.⁶

If we are serious about building a real mass working class party, we have to be able to allow discussion and debate on this question (and many others) - not enforce speech controls for thinking or saying the wrong thing. We do not need moral condemnation and bureaucratic censure, but candid and open discussion that seeks to defeat wrong ideas, such as transphobia and the dead-end sectionalism of identity politics.

1. www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/08/04/your-party-noor-jahan-begum-leaves.↩︎

2. docs.google.com/document/d/14F5EXEnhQCy36KUBcVKqqGanmwgjivumDuVTEpHTW18/edit?usp=sharing.↩︎

3. docs.google.com/document/d/1KrUNTgAJZSDldRpmjztjh9-jRYfQQmspLphmrGvgNCU/edit?usp=sharing.↩︎

4. ‘We need light and air’ Weekly Worker March 19 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1577/we-need-light-and-air.↩︎

5. docs.zoom.us/doc/3YnsY9kaRdSLdaOqRJNhYQ.↩︎

6. ‘Communism and trans liberation’ Weekly Worker November 13 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1561/communism-and-trans-liberation.↩︎