Aims for Return of Labour Whip– Not a Real Challenge to Labour!
Opening the Road to Petit-Bourgeois Greens
The world, and the working class, are now in very dangerous circumstances thanks in large measure to a combination of two linked major questions: One is the decline of US world hegemony vis-à-vis Russia and China, two major states that, in different ways, owe their present power in the world to factors related to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The other is Israel and the Jewish question as manifested in the Middle East. The existence of Israel as a rogue, transplanted imperialist power with a major, factional base of support among the ruling classes of the older imperialist countries, and a project of attempting to dominate West Asia and North-East Africa, the area of the world usually known as the Middle East, complicates the world situation and has brought it to the brink of a major world confrontation – as manifested by the Israeli/US attack on Iran.
Your Party, in a way, is a product of these contradictions, of the activities of the dominant pro-Zionist element of the imperialist bourgeoisie. British imperialism will not tolerate any even reformist opposition to support for Israel, its oppression of the peoples of the Middle East, and sees that as a make-or-break issue for any party as to whether it will be tolerated, or not. Likewise, regarding support for NATO and its wars, particularly the proxy war in Ukraine. That is the reason why Your Party, much delayed, came into existence in the first place. Even though Corbyn’s opposition to Zionism and NATO was tepid, and he capitulated on both questions when he led the Labour Party in the late 2010s, it still put him, and more importantly the movement behind him, beyond the pale of what the ruling class is prepared to tolerate.
The Blairite infatuation with neoliberalism is also important, but the bourgeoisie would be more prepared to tolerate a fully social imperialist party, at least for a while, at variance with the neoliberal ethos to an extent. They realised in the past that such a Labour Party was useful if the masses threaten to escape their control. However, so disturbed was the bourgeoisie by the rise of a mass movement behind Corbyn that expressed popular discontent with these international alignments in the mid 20-teens, that it has attempted to steer politics toward bringing the far right to power. That is what Starmer represents. Coming off fourteen years of Tory government that exhausted the Conservative party, the main traditional party of the British ruling class, in a manner that would normally take two or three terms to recover from, this time replaced by a ‘Labour’ regime more openly brutal and reactionary than its predecessor. That is a ticket for a single Labour term and then its replacement by Reform, a far-right party. Starmer is a transitional figure to that.
This is a risk for capital though, as it can also bring into an existence a left-wing nemesis of the Labour Party. The Corbynites, though they seemed radical in 2015 when they won the Labour leadership, proved very tame. After his ejection following the engineered defeat of 2019, Corbyn procrastinated for five years and only dared verbally to go along with the creation of a new party when pushed by a younger, more militant figure, Zarah Sultana, whose radicalisation has gone much further than Corbyn was capable.
As when he was leader of the Labour Party, during the launch of the new party Corbyn has proven inadequate and incapable of leading the opposition to neoliberal capitalism. The sabotage of Your Party through a bureaucratic charade, the blatant rigging of the Central Executive Committee election so that a bureaucratic clique, loyal to Corbyn personally, led by Karie Murphy, effectively exert supremacy over the elected CEC, is an attempt to bury the potential that the party offers as an alternative to Starmer’s Labour. Murphy is both a former UNITE official and the partner and close political collaborator of UNITE ex-General Secretary Len McCluskey, who used that union’s block vote to ram the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ through the Labour NEC in 2018 – supposedly to disarm the issue. He then was surprised that the witchhunt against the left accelerated. But if you give an inch to the Zionists, they will take a mile. This is elementary.
Corbyn’s Duplicity
Since Zarah Sultana resigned from Labour at the beginning of July 2025 and announced that she was going to found a new party to oppose Labour from the left jointly with Jeremy Corbyn, Your Party has been unable to challenge Labour in any election. This is because Corbyn lied to Sultana and the public. He was not an enthusiastic partisan of the creation of a new working-class party – rather he feared one being created without him if he refused to participate. When 800,000 signed up as interested last August, Corbyn found that not encouraging and inspiring, but worrying, and his course ever since has been one of slow strangulation of the party in favour of the creation of a stilted stage army that can at most be a bargaining chip with Labour.
He has used every bureaucratic trick in the book against Zarah Sultana and the membership to ensure complete control of the project and zero challenge to the Labour Party in elections. When comrade Sultana correctly criticised the way Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party had capitulated to the Zionist witchhunters and purged socialists, this went way beyond what he was prepared to tolerate and indicated the potential the party had to correct his own bad politics. So Corbyn and his supporters, including the four non-socialist independent MPs elected alongside him (on the single issue of Gaza) in the 2024 General Election, persistently obstructed the formation of a party with a basic membership system.
To the point that in September, Zarah Sultana took action to launch Your Party’s membership portal herself. This was the starting point of a slander campaign, at first alleging that the portal was ‘unauthorised’ and fraudulent, and a whole series of briefings to the bourgeois media with spurious allegations of financial chicanery against comrade Sultana, for the titillation of their readers. It is correct to call these petit-bourgeois independent MPs allied with Corbyn non-socialist; some like Adnan Hussain are landlords who criticised policies that favour tenants having ‘too many’ rights to challenge landlords. The Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan, at one point demanded that the army break the militant, year-long Birmingham waste collectors’ strike, which was provoked by draconian pay cuts. Then there is the vocal dissent from a policy of defending transgender rights, as voiced by Adnan Hussain, backed by Iqbal Mohammad, who both walked away from the process of creating Your Party when it became clear that the overwhelming sentiment of the membership was at odds with their ‘socially conservative’ position.
The episode of the membership portal was the first of a series of blows to the party that has effectively alienated hundreds of thousands of those who signed up as potential supporters in August. A temporary limited company, MOU Operations, set up by then supporters of Zarah Sultana: Andrew Feinstein, Beth Winter and Jamie Driscoll, was to be the custodian for donations, including membership subscriptions, for the new party in the lead up to its founding. But Corbyn and close collaborators declared war on Zarah Sultana the moment that was acted upon – it is now clear why. They wanted sole control of membership data and funds. The way they have used it clearly shows that they wanted that monopoly as an instrument of bureaucratic control of the membership, instead of there being a separation, with different forces involved in different facets of preparing the launch. Corbyn, Murphy and the non-socialist independents created a situation where his ‘Peace and Justice’ pressure group, and its limited company Peace and Justice Ltd, had a monopoly of finances and data. Though this has shifted since the party’s formation with a brief interlude of a Corbyn-controlled company called Your Party Limited, which is now being wound up, the overall point of all these manoeuvres has been to create a party regime where a monopoly of control is in the hands of the clique of apparatchiks centred on Murphy, who act exclusively for Corbyn.
The result of this has been as intended by Corbyn, Murphy and co all along. The refusal of access to their local membership data of the 100 or so proto-branches around the country was not, as the Corbynite hacks claim, some kind of legal necessity, but a political choice. The purpose of that being to cripple activism and thwart the efforts of the membership to give effect to what both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana said they wanted – a member-led, democratic party. It is obvious that only Zarah Sultana was sincere in this objective, and Corbyn went along with it verbally all the better to sabotage it in practice.
Grassroots Left vs ‘the Many’ – Basic Class Politics vs Feeble Populism
Even the name Corbyn chose – ‘Your Party’ — is a joke. Classless and devoid of socialist or working-class politics, it is a mockery of the socialist aspirations of the 60,000 or so members who have signed up to join. These aspirations were clearly expressed when 80.26% of those who voted at the November conference decided that the party “should explicitly signal that it is a socialist party” and when 77.85% voted that it “should explicitly signal that the working class is at the heart of the social alliance it seeks to build”. But the membership did not get a free vote on the name, ever. They were confronted with four anodyne names, none of which had anything to do with socialism or the working class. Not surprisingly, they stuck with the one originally imposed on them as opposed to changing to something equally bland that no-one had even heard of.
Those are the underlying reasons for what is happening now, and the division in YP. Corbyn did not really want Your Party to become a genuine challenge capable of ousting Labour as the main party of the working class, though much of his base did, and many still do. He wants a bargaining chip at best. The real difference between the slates in the CEC election – the Corbyn led The Many (TM), and the pro-ZS Grassroots Left (GL) – is that the programme of the Corbyn wing is a vague left populism. They chose the name, which is anodyne, and they have little explicit to say about policy. Whereas the GL is forthright in its socialist aspirations, opposing NATO and Zionism, defends oppressed groups who the ruling class wants as a scapegoat and a thin end of the wedge – i.e. trans rights — and its leading figure advocates ‘class war’ politics. Also, the GL advocates a ‘party of the whole left’, which means no witchhunts, and the opportunity for all trends to argue policy and gain influence according to their political strength (or lose it according to their weaknesses). Whereas TM has already started bureaucratically excluding Marxists of differing views.
So that was what the contest between slates was about, and why it was correct to be involved in the GL. The GL is very heterogenous, and it includes people who are often not a model of clarity or anti-imperialism, some with awful or naive views on things like Ukraine, Iran, etc, but correctly in conflict with the Corbyn group over the questions in dispute. We have no reason to be fearful of this as orthodox Marxists. Our record in the SLN can serve as an example, as we won that organisation to a correct position on Ukraine, for instance. There is real comradeship emerging in the GL; this is the progressive aspect – the antidote to sectarianism. But the results remain to be seen.
The results of the election for the CEC were: 13 seats for The Many slate, 7 for the Grassroots left, and 2 friendly independents elected including one from Scotland. There seems to have been a major rise in the Your Party electorate, from around 25,000 at the time of the founding conference in November – when only 11,000 actually voted, to today, when there are, out of just short of 60,000 members, 35,000 or so actually verified and able to vote through the website. Though again, the actual number who voted was much less, around 25,000 this time. There were also a very small number of postal votes – only a couple of dozen valid ones, according to sortitioned observers of the electoral process. So that aspect of it was negligible.
Bureaucratic Rigging of the CEC Election
More to the point was the monopoly of data in the hands of the Corbyn faction. The apparatus that had charge of the data and organised the election was completely in the hands of Murphy and co. These people controlled the electoral process, with very little oversight as to how they controlled the data. Many members repeatedly got emails promoting TM, despite never having signed up for such promotions. It is clear they got this from the membership list of which they had a monopoly. The TM slate and its bureaucratic supporters were no slouch. The number of verified members, able to vote, rose considerably between the conference and the CEC vote. It particularly grew considerably between the end of endorsements, and the actual vote – there was a big effort to get voters verified and work on them with many campaign emails by the TM people. This is clearly why the results of endorsements of candidates were so different from the results of the actual vote. The electorate had effectively doubled by these means.
Not that there is anything wrong with expanding the voting membership. But only one side had access to the data to do this. The difference this made was such that, whereas the Grassroots Left in London overwhelmingly won the endorsements, only one of their two people won a CEC seat. This was the product of the TM’s monopoly of the membership data. There were simply large parts of the membership that no one else other than TM were allowed to approach. Then there was the choice of Imperiali as the method of STV (Single Transferable Vote) used for the election. This one is unusual in that it strongly favours larger blocks and generally rejected by those seeking a genuinely proportionate election. There was a risk that with this, it could potentially favour the GL just as much as the TM. So, it had to be supplemented with the (ab)use of the TM’s data monopoly to make sure Imperiali worked the ‘right’ way (much of the work done in analysing this was done by Matt Cooper of the AWL, whose politics are unconscionable – and who did not endorse the GL – but was useful nevertheless).
Since the CEC election, TM has continued in the same mould. At its first meeting it selected an apparatus led by Karie Murphy once again, along with Alex Nunns, Angus Satow and Artin Giles. The apparatus and all the actual positions on the CEC were filled by supporters of TM, there was no proportional sharing out of responsible political posts. Corbyn was selected by the TM majority on the CEC as ‘parliamentary leader’ of YP in apparent contradiction to the decision of the November YP founding conference that the party should be led by a collective leadership, not an individual leader. There is an attempt to stop the membership from even knowing who runs the apparatus and impose a ‘code of conduct’ on elected CEC members preventing them from reporting accurately and in full the actions of the CEC to the members who elected them. So much, again, for a ‘member-led party’. This ‘code’ also gives the power to the staff ‘secretariat’, the group around Karie Murphy, not even the CEC itself, to declare that the business of the elected CEC can be declared ‘confidential’. This is another attack on the membership’s right to know what the CEC is doing and an attack on those CEC members who were elected on the promise to provide comprehensive reports of the CEC’s discussions to members.
Proposals to extend the CEC’s meetings to a whole day per month, and to have shorter 2-hour online meetings weekly, were rejected. As a result, the vital question of branch organisation fell off the agenda at the first meeting. What was also discussed was elections, and potential endorsements for the various local temporary registered local socialist groups, or campaigns of independent candidates that members of Your Party have been involved in setting up while the clique around Corbyn were instead preoccupied with bureaucratic manoeuvres against their own members. It appears that candidates, whether in such groups or independents, will have to pay an admin fee to be vetted by the central TM clique for accord with ‘our values’. Given the fulminations from some of the TM people about how such policies as anti-Zionism, opposition to NATO, etc would make the party ‘unelectable’, this sounds very much like the kind of procedures Labour under Starmer and Blair used to exclude genuinely left-wing candidates. This is also the reason why the branches that formed up since July were excluded from having access to the data of those who signed up to be members of the party. This vetting is clearly designed to exclude candidates from the genuinely socialist left, particularly Marxists. It is worth noting that when it was suggested that local campaign groups etc. that the Corbynite-dominated CEC wanted to support should be checked to see that their politics were actually socialist, that was rejected as ‘purity testing’. Evidently non-socialist forces are not a problem – it’s the left who are to be excluded.
Corbynites Assist the Greens to Thwart YP
The victory of the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by -election, beating both the far-right Reform and Labour, pushing Labour into third place, shows that politics abhors a vacuum. It also showed the opportunity that potentially existed for a left-wing challenge to Labour if the Corbynites had wanted to mount one. But they were opposed to that. There was no shortage of suitable candidates to stand, and numerous activists would have been prepared to make a beeline for that locality had a candidate been put forward. Zarah Sultana tried to get Your Party to stand a candidate, but this was denounced by TM in the person of Terry Deans, who (unsuccessfully) stood as a TM CEC candidate in the South-West region, for trying to “dictate a GL-biased candidate in an election the party was not ready to contend” (https://skidrowradio.substack.com/p/exposed-the-canary-lies-for). He then went on to denounce the Grassroots Left for “rubbish[ing] the idea of YP supporting the more established Green Party candidate (ibid).” It’s clear that the TM objected to class politics making its presence felt in the election and particularly of any overt socialist from the GL. Once it was clear the idea of YP standing had been squashed, some comrades, including Zarah Sultana, did indeed comprehensibly decide that the Green Party candidate’s victory was preferable. But the TM sabotaged the actual attempt by GL supporters to get YP to stand.
The ferocious campaign of the clique around Corbyn to control those who signed up for the putative party is the real reason why many tens of thousands of putative Your Party activists have instead joined the petty-bourgeois radical Green Party. If Your Party defaults on its promise, social and political discontent can find other, seemingly left-wing outlets. Obviously, given what happened this defeat for Labour and Reform is not unwelcome in the circumstances. Benefiting the Greens is preferable in an immediate sense to benefitting the far right. Though because of the Greens’ lack of a working-class political programme and social base, it will only prove a temporary obstacle to the far right at best. No trust can be placed in the Greens: we cannot give them any political endorsement, as they are a petty bourgeois radical party and this is an imperialist country. They are a satellite party of the imperialist bourgeoisie. We need to build a genuine working-class party that can win over the socialist-minded elements of the Greens, as well as undercutting the appeal of the far right to the sections of the working class that, having been abandoned by Labour, have been driven to Reform. There need to be partial tactics for so interacting with left-wing Greens that stop short of any liquidation of class politics into a political bloc with the Greens. This is likely a subject for future debate on the left.
A New Initiative is Needed
What is needed in Your Party is an organised opposition body that is prepared to operate as a mass membership organisation in its own right. That this is entirely feasible shows when you consider that the joint appeal for a new party in August 2025 netted 800,000 potential supporters. When the first membership portal was opened by Zarah Sultana in September, 20,000 signed up as members in a couple of hours. Yet because of the counterattack against the left from the Corbynites, and the ensuing air of bureaucratic chaos given off by the project since, the party recruited less than 60,000 people. It is highly likely that if the original portal had not been denounced, 60,000 members would have joined in one day! This bureaucratic chicanery and its results are not set in stone, and politics is extremely fluid. The potential mass base that was revealed by the 800,000 signups is still a real possibility and the explosive growth of the Greens is a symptom of this.
The Your Party socialist left should not accept such bureaucratic chicanery and dirty tricks, whose real target is the militant and indeed revolutionary potential of the party project itself. But neither should they walk away. We must contest the legitimacy of the anti-party Corbyn wing. One way of doing so would be set up a membership association within the party, aimed at putting things right and creating a genuinely member-led democratic party. Such an association can even itself be registered with the Electoral Commission and collect its own funds and data. Membership associations can be used for reactionary purposes – one called Labour Together, which broke electoral law on a massive scale with illegal, undeclared fundraising from the Zionist lobby, was used to undermine and overthrow Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But in a fluid situation like this, where the mass appeal and growth of a new party have been undermined by bureaucratic sabotage, this could be used as a weapon of the socialist left against such sabotage and be operated in a manner that is completely democratic and above board. What the Corbynites would do about such an initiative is up to them – a witchhunt could backfire spectacularly!
There are various proposals on the agenda of some of the genuinely socialist forces within Your Party, that potentially point in this direction. We will participate in these discussions, and as much as possible, try to encourage them in the right direction, so the party project can be renewed and hopefully reach the potential it showed in August 2025.
