WeeklyWorker

26.02.2026
Jeremy Corbyn: red-baiting

Those who do the counting

Shedloads of members’ money was spent on a red-baiting election campaign. Grassroots Left remains committed to fight for the kind of socialist, democratic and anti-Zionist party that is urgently needed. Carla Roberts reports

Your Party election results are now in. After a short introduction by Steph Driver (wheeled out perhaps because she is a member of Counterfire), Andrew Jordan gave us the results. Basically, The Many won, with 14 CEC members. Grassroots Left got a very credible seven (plus two of the independents are closely aligned to the left). Naturally we will fully analyse the results and what they mean politically next week. Meanwhile, it is worth saying that Grassroots Left is committed to continue to fight for the kind of socialist, democratic and anti-Zionist party that is actually needed - without witch-hunts, red-baiting and purges. There are suggestions of organising a GL conference, with delegates from branches, etc. Whether that will be enough to rescue the Your Party ship is, though, an open question.

These elections have hardly been free and fair. Between the closing of the vote on February 23 and the anouncement of the results there was that ‘3-day fuckery period’. We were told that HQ needed that time to go through all the candidates’ expenses to make sure everything is ‘above board’. Given that the faction running The Many slate has also done the counting, it is understandable why candidates, especially the so-called, independents, feel cheated.

The long vote-counting period is just one of ‘the many’ (forgive the pun) bureaucratic tricks that the Corbyn clique has used over the last few months. They have expelled members, disbarred candidates and, with the ‘imperiali’ system, have chosen the most undemocratic version of STV - but one which suits them best. They have organised the hustings and chosen which questions were put to which candidates.

Spend, spend, spend

HQ also spent at least £25,000 on sending A5 postcards to members who did not vote within the first few days. This indicates that they were getting worried about the results and hoped to activate the more passive members - those who might have joined simply because they like Corbyn. This seemed to have worked: previously, during launch conference and in the Christmas referendum, just over 10,000 members voted, and this crept up to just over 11,000 endorsements for the CEC candidates; but the final number of those voting in the CEC elections went up to 24,000.

Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, which resides in the same building as YP and for which Karie Murphy officially works, has acted as chief cheerleader for The Many. It sent out dozens of increasingly desperate emails and text messages: “Jeremy Corbyn needs your help”, “A request from Jeremy”, “Just three days left to back Jeremy”, and an almost threatening one: “Do it for Jeremy!”

A final PJP email sent on February 22 borders on the unhinged:

Throughout years of abuse and attacks by the establishment, Jeremy never abandoned his unique approach to politics: always welcoming, always seeking to build the broadest possible support without wavering on his socialist convictions. He is, above all, relentlessly focussed on the issues. Your Party began with the same approach. But now it’s in real danger of becoming something very different - an angry fringe party that conducts purity tests at the door and rails against potential allies. And, once again, Jeremy finds himself the target of abuse. There’s only one way to support Jeremy’s positive approach to Your Party - by voting for him and, vitally, for The Many, his team of candidates standing for the collective leadership.

Where to begin with this nonsense? For a start, Corbyn has already said he wants to do away with “collective leadership” and become the “parliamentary leader” - a position that does not exist in the YP constitution. As an aside, we have to admit that it was Zarah Sultana who came up with that particular idea in the first place and it was sneaked into the GL programme (which, as we previously reported, was merely waved through by the constituent groups for time reasons). We really do not see the need for such a position, which clearly goes against the spirit of real collective leadership.

Corbyn certainly used to have a reputation for being “always welcoming”, “positive” and interested in building the “broadest possible” alliances, often to the detriment of political clarity. But you would have to have lived in a deep cave to have missed the fact that he has become something entirely different. As leader of the Labour Party, he could just about get away with claiming that his hands were tied, while his general secretary, Jennie Formby, proudly expelled one after another of his supporters, in a futile attempt to appease the right and the pro-Zionist lobby. Of course, they only grew stronger.

But Corbyn has now taken on the role of witch-hunter general. It is in fact he who “conducts purity tests at the door”: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the SWP, SPEW or any of the other left ‘sects’? If so, you’re out. He has justified and stands by the conference expulsions and the barring of candidates.

As an aside, we too call some of these organisations ‘sects’ - confessional sects, to be precise - because they insist that their members do not publicly express political differences they may have with their organisation’s particular ideology. What the Corbyn clique, on the other hand, means by ‘sects’ is pretty much all organised left groups.

No wonder that many on the left are not just “angry” with those behind The Many slate. Add to that the fact that HQ has done absolutely nothing with the 800,000 supporters who have been begging Corbyn to launch a socialist party, and “fuming” would be the more precise word.

Green Party

Corbyn has publicly declared that he wants to overturn even the limited rule permitting ‘dual membership’. As we warned, HQ has been interpreting this as punitively as possible - ie, expel organised leftwingers before the first CEC could even produce a white list of which groups will be allowed to participate. Should The Many have achieved a clear majority, there will be very few if any left groups on that list - but we could well imagine that it might include the Green Party.

Corbyn has made a number of public overtures in that direction. While the official YP statement was very mealy-mouthed on the by‑election in Gorton and Denton, giving no clear support for anybody, Corbyn has gone on to gush: “There is only one way we will defeat Reform: together.” And: “I’m supporting Hannah Spencer, because we need to defeat Reform and we need to defeat the Right. The Greens are by far the best placed to do this and have the best record in opposing the rise of racism in any form in society.”1 The Greens have the “best record”? There is also a video of him popping up during a speech by Green Party co-leader Mothin Ali at a recent anti-racism rally in Manchester, to publicly give him a hug.2

Of course, the Greens do not allow dual membership themselves and putting them on a YP white list would be little more than a symbolic offering to win back the tens of thousands who have become so disillusioned by the way the dithering Corbyn clique has run Your Party into the ground that they’ve joined the Greens instead. We argue against dual membership with the Green Party - it would create the illusion that they are a socialist party of some kind. They aren’t!

Yes, Polanski poses left and the Green Party (which is about to hit 200,000 members) is running rings around the shambles that is Your Party. Polanski has called for the legalisation of drugs and prostitution and supports motions to the Green’s March conference that would allow “all applicants [for asylum] to take up employment” and be “treated by the NHS” - outrageous only to avid readers of the Daily Mail. But a lot less radical when you look at the detail: the Greens “want a world without borders”, but “until that happens, the Green Party will implement a fair and humane immigration system of managed immigration where people can move if they wish to do so”.3

An obvious contradiction - you cannot allow people to “move if they wish to do so” and at the same time call for “managed immigration”. Unless you mean people are always free to move away. Until a few years ago, that is exactly the kind of programme the Green Party very openly fought for. It campaigned for a reduction of the population of Britain to no more than 30 million, a stance heavily influenced by the 1972 book The limits to growth and the work of ‘overpopulation expert’ Paul Ehrlich.

Only the naive would choose to ignore Polanski’s colourful past as a Lib Dem who only joined the Greens in 2017, then fought publicly for the party to adopt the IHRA mis-definition of anti-Semitism,4 and criticised Corbyn and the Labour Party for being “rife with anti-Semitism”. The man is an arch-opportunist who has spotted the obvious ‘gap in the market’ on the left, thanks to the dithering Corbyn. But he is no socialist. He does not believe in the need for the working class to collectively organise to overthrow capitalism. He relies politically on the petty bourgeoisie and believes that capitalism can be reformed into a kinder, greener, caring version. In that, he is rather close to Corbyn and we would be surprised if Corbyn had not considered leaving politics through the green back door. Having been kicked out the Labour Party, he became a man without a political compass.

Some irony then that the anti-Semitism smear campaign has now been turning its focus on the Green Party - they currently look like a much bigger threat to the status quo than YP: “Israel condemns ‘hateful and racist’ Greens”, fumes the Daily Telegraph5 about a motion going forward to the March conference, penned by British-Palestinian artist Lubna Speitan.6 This is topped off by the headlines that “UK Green leader backs ‘Zionism is racism’ motion despite outcry”7 and the claim that “an internal whistleblower” has reported his party to “counter-terror police” over “anti-Zionist elements”.

One or two?

All very 2017-18. The motion is bog-standard left stuff, including its call for “a single, democratic Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital”. As Moshé Machover has explained, this demand is not so much wrong as “illusory” and therefore not very useful: “The problem with it is that the present set of conditions that prevail in the Middle East do not allow it to be implemented”.8

Contrary to the headlines, Polanski has not come out in support of the motion. Here he is equivocating: “Exactly what do you mean by Zionism? Terms are abstract, and this is a very abstract term, and it depends what exactly you’re talking about. If you’re talking about the original historical definition, no, I don’t think it’s racist. If you’re talking about the genocide of the Palestinian people under the definition of Zionism, then yes, it’s clearly racist.”

Just like Corbyn, Polanski cannot publicly state that he is an anti-Zionist. Perhaps both of them still think they can appease the pro-Israel lobby, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Zionism is Israel’s foundational ideology - a racist ideology with origins in a misguided reaction to the blood-and-soil nationalism of late 19th century European reaction. As a state Israel began with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians. The nakba. Zionism predictably oversaw an apartheid state with a political economy that seeks to exclude the Palestinian population. That means ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide.

Clearly what is needed is a socialist party that can proudly call itself anti-Zionist, with no ifs and buts.

  1. x.com/jeremycorbyn/status/2026721580848451734.↩︎

  2. www.facebook.com/reel/1597719864604767.↩︎

  3. www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-15590575/Greens-plan-hand-illegal-migrants-free-house-wage.html.↩︎

  4. www.jewishnews.co.uk/green-party-elects-jewish-non-zionist-zack-polanski-as-new-leader.↩︎

  5. The Daily Telegraph February 23.↩︎

  6. Full text here: x.com/kennardmatt/status/2015725442653639107.↩︎

  7. www.politico.eu/article/uk-green-zack-polanski-zionism-is-racism-motion.↩︎

  8. weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1489/one-state-two-state-illusions.↩︎