05.03.2026

Definitely His Party now

With Gorton and Denton, Jeremy Corbyn jumped on the Green bandwagon. Where he might simply want an election deal, many will go the whole hog and take out membership. Carla Roberts reports on a very expensive CEC election campaign and the suffocating control-freakery

Less than five hours after the result of the leadership elections in Your Party was announced at 11.30am on February 26, the Peace and Justice Party posted a picture of Jeremy Corbyn with his newly coined title, ‘Elected parliamentary leader of Your Party!’¹ A rather symbolic faux pas that shows exactly in which direction Your Party will travel now. Needless to say, the central executive committee (CEC) had not even set a date for its first meeting at that stage - let alone decided to, say, unilaterally change the party’s constitution to establish such a position (or elect Corbyn to it, for that matter).

That gives us a good idea of what is meant by “getting the party back on track” - the main slogan of The Many, the HQ leadership faction’s slate: it meant back into the hands of those who have mismanaged, manipulated, rigged, leaked and generally run roughshod over the members and branches. Not that the party was ever ‘out of their hands’.

But there was certainly an increasingly vocal opposition that protested loudly against the undemocratic way in which the Corbyn clique micro-managed the whole run-up to the November launch conference, with impotent regional assemblies, in which members were not allowed to vote, let alone move any motions or amendments to the four pre-written conference documents. Then there was the stage-managed Liverpool conference, with sortitioned attendees rather than democratically elected and accountable delegates, the expulsion of members of groups like the SWP, online voting hours after the short ‘debates’, and the livestream cut, whenever somebody criticised the leadership.

Proto branches

All the while, hundreds of proto-branches up and down the country were gagging to get going, only to be entirely ignored by HQ. How could there not have been a rebellion? Some 800,000 people begged Corbyn to launch a socialist party - he dithered, he delayed, he equivocated and what he finally launched is not exactly inspiring. Of course, people have felt let down. The Grassroots Left was formed in reaction to this misleadership, in an attempt to turn things around.

The Many tried to paint those speaking up as ‘sectarian troublemakers’ - and no doubt, this worked on the more passive YP members, especially as the bourgeois press had a jolly good time reporting about the alleged “factional infighting”, symbolised neatly by “Zarah versus Jeremy”.

But this story is very unlikely to have worked on those who are actually active in YP: those who hold the branches together, those organising YP stalls, those who have produced banners and leaflets, paid for out of their own pockets. There can be no doubt that most of those members will have gotten behind the Grassroots Left - which did very well in the initial stages of the election. The endorsement figures indicated a narrow win, with a slim majority of between one and four members on the CEC. Eleven thousand members had endorsed candidates - pretty much exactly the same number who had voted in the Christmas referendum. There can be no doubt that Corbyn’s slate got spooked by these projections, which, we suspect, were confirmed by the first few thousands votes coming in. The Many could, of course, witness those first results coming in ‘live’, seeing as those running the slate also run HQ - and the election itself.

While the ‘First year organisational strategy’ agreed at launch conference promised that “the CEC election will be run by an independent and professional third party”,² HQ simply changed its mind - “to save money”, as they assured us in a throwaway sentence in an email a couple of months back. Well, not quite, as it turned out: they simply decided the money would be better spent elsewhere. We know they waited until the first eager supporters on both sides had voted. No point spending money on them. Around 10,000 or so members voted in the first week.

In week two Karie Murphy really showed why Jeremy Corbyn trusts her so completely: She really is an excellent bureaucrat and manipulator. She arranged to send A5 postcards to every single YP member who had not voted within those first few days - ie, those not actively involved in the branches. Naturally, it had Jeremy Corbyn’s face and name all over it. Handily, all candidates on Corbyn’s slate were listed on the website with the phrase, “Endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn”. No need to read statements to make up your mind, is there? This little exercise must have cost around £25,000.

Phone banks

HQ also hired a professional marketing company to phone every member who had not yet voted. We have no way of knowing how many people were called, but we do know that a lot of people got phone calls from both YP and Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project. AI tells us that it would cost anywhere between £30,000 and £50,000 to employ a company to call 50,000 members.

Add to that the number of PJP full-timers and Corbyn staffers working on the campaign, the cost for graphic design and other such campaign expenditure and this election could easily have cost HQ £100,000. It now makes a lot of sense that the election rules did not set an upper limit on expenditure per candidate - only that no individual was allowed to donate more than £1,000 in the election. An entirely pointless rule that benefits those who spent a lot of money, obviously. As an aside, for anybody who wondered why MP Ayoub Khan was disqualified - we hear he did not submit his candidate expenditure on time, even when HQ extended the deadline by two hours, just for him.

HQ will no doubt claim that all of this money was spent in ‘the name of democracy’, to increase members’ engagement, etc. You would have to be extremely naive to believe that. Had The Many looked like a shoo-in for the CEC, HQ would undoubtedly not have spent such an amount on increasing voter turnout.

Some online commentators have joked that perhaps Your Party will now be renamed ‘His Party’. And this was all that Your Party was ever supposed to be - a “legacy project for Jeremy”, as his wife, Laura Alvarez, has reportedly called it more than a few times.

Under Corbyn’s leadership, we are likely to see the worst of the Labour Party, mixed with Podemos‑style online voting and topped off with a sprinkle of Momentum circa 2021. Corbyn is and remains at best a left Labourite who still believes in the British 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.

Seeing as The Many now controls the CEC and therefore will make damn sure that the next conference is just as much of a stitch-up as the previous one, we are now likely to see the consolidation of Your Party along the following lines:

With a powerless and sidelined CEC similar to Labour’s NEC, meeting occasionally, its main job will be to rubberstamp decisions made by the real leadership - the small group of officers, in cooperation with the party machine and the new general secretary - who might or might not be called Karie Murphy (she rather symbolically did attend the first meeting of the CEC, more below). This has already begun. Before the CEC even met, HQ put out a number of lame statements and petitions on the war in Iran, without even showing them to the new CEC.
With Jeremy Corbyn crowned leader before long, be it as ‘parliamentary leader’ or whatever they can come up with. And then they will move to abolish ‘collective leadership’ altogether at the next conference, so that he can reside as undisputed king of YP until he drops.
With policy-making outsourced to tame ‘members’ policy forums’, which will be easily controlled and run by trusted bureaucrats. Tony Blair first came up with that idea to gut Labour conference - it is beyond shocking that Corbyn would want to copy this in YP. Instead of a group of bureaucrats huddling away somewhere to come up with YP policy, we believe that it should be the members in the branches who discuss policy and then present motions to a sovereign conference.
With inactive, underfunded and gutted branches, which will not be set up for some time. We hear there are plans for yet more ‘assemblies’ to discuss how branches could be organised - mainly to stop lots of them from actually getting organised. At best we might see ‘trusted’ bureaucrats calling inaugural meetings here and there, which will have most matters and positions sown up pretty tightly - especially if we see CEC member Hannah Hawkins’ wish come true: during the elections she argued that those who kept the proto-branches alive should be barred from standing in local leadership elections.
With online voting, email referendums and conferences made up mainly of unaccountable participants chosen randomly by sortition, which will sideline the branches even more. Instead of ‘empowering’ members, this will atomise them even further - which is, of course, why Margaret Thatcher took away the power of workplace union branches to call a strike by a show of hands. Instead, she introduced the kind of Omov voting at home now championed by parties like Podemos, DiEm25 - and Your Party. They certainly achieve one thing: it makes it almost impossible to hold the leadership to account. Bureaucracies love online voting - socialists argue vehemently against it.
With an expansion of the witch‑hunt against the left, with very few groups allowed on the ‘white list’ for dual membership. Perhaps the Green Party might be on it, perhaps Counterfire - their member Steph Driver certainly delivered an Oscar-worthy performance when she was wheeled out on February 26 as one of the five-strong Member Oversight Committee to announce that the CEC elections had been conducted in a “free and fair manner” and that “nobody has seen the results before today”. We suspect this will be more of a simmering rather than a ‘hot’ witch-hunt - as long as you keep your head down and don’t run for a position or such, members of the SWP, SPEW, CPGB, etc might be tolerated. Unless of course local witch-hunters report them to Your Party’s compliance unit. We suspect there will be a very big compliance and disciplinary unit, having to deal with hundreds and hundreds of complaints. Never a sign of a healthy organisation.
Politically, Corbyn seems keen to position YP as an appendage to the Green Party - not that he appears to have spoken to Zack Polanski about it. It makes some sense, from Corbyn’s perspective. For a start, there is not much between Corbyn and Polanski programmatically - if anything, the Greens seem currently to the left of YP. Neither of them believe that capitalism has to be overthrown or that, indeed, the working class has to be organised to fulfil this historic mission. Corbyn seems to imagine a slightly parasitic relationship, where he can feed off the Greens’ massively bigger energy and membership figures (now well over 200,000). YP members could help out and tag along where the Greens are standing and maybe in some areas the Greens would, in return, ‘allow’ YP to stand.

Red-green?

But this is, to put it mildly, a risky strategy for Corbyn. What exactly would be the point of Your Party as a separate entity, if there is no distinction politically or organisationally? Many of those 800,000 who begged Corbyn to launch a new socialist party never joined Your Party, but went straight to the Greens - and many are now leaving to join it, unsurprisingly. The Greens, according to a new poll, have just leapfrogged the Labour Party and the Tories (both at 16%) into second place, with 21% of the vote, after Reform’s 23%. As an aside, we should take this poll³ with more than a pinch of salt - not just because mid-term polls are skewed anyway and the ‘first past the post’ system would lead to an entirely different result in terms of the actual number of MPs. We should also note that the poll was produced for The Times and its main purpose is probably to create a sense of slight panic - best we all get back behind the establishment parties ASAP.

And there is no denying that the Greens do not just look a lot more attractive than ‘Yorp’ (which does not even feature in the Times poll) - it is also a hell of a lot more democratic. Branches and members are - shock, horror - able to present motions to conference (not something you can currently do in YP). Should their spring conference adopt the motion committing the party to “anti-Zionism”, this would make it even more attractive - to anybody but hardened socialists who know that the Greens are not the answer - ie, to those that Corbyn does not really want in his party.

He could end up with a mere shell of an organisation that does not do very much, apart from suppressing its members. Perhaps that would indeed suit him to a tee, but it would surely not be able to survive for very long. Far from getting Your Party ‘back on track’, Corbyn’s victory is likely to finish off the organisation before long. We are suspecting that to anybody on the left with any ambition to become (or remain) a councillor or MP, for example, the Green Party is already looking very, very attractive.

As we have pointed out before, from our perspective the Green Party is not the answer - or even part of the answer. That does not mean it is unprincipled to ever call for a vote for it or, on occasion, work together on this or that campaign. But even if the Greens officially take on the moniker of ‘eco-socialist’, that does not qualitatively change things. As was pointed out in a certain little bestseller, called the Communist manifesto, there are all sorts of ‘socialisms’ - most of which are, in reality, dead ends, because they do not base themselves on the working class. The Green Party’s programme is based politically on the petty bourgeoisie. Unlike the working class, which has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’, this class has quite a bit to lose from the end of capitalism - its shops, property portfolios, plumbing firms. It does not actually want to get rid of capitalism, but merely tweak it. Another dead end.

Many on the left will continue to argue that the main task for socialists today is to ‘stop Reform’ and that we need to support the Greens or build a red-green alliance to achieve that. Actually, the best way to stop Reform is to build a real political alternative - a socialist party worthy of the name.

It remains to be seen if Grassroots Left will be able to survive in such a ‘hostile environment’ and in what form. There is certainly a huge political space to the left of Your Party - but an increasingly small space within it.

Had Grassroots Left won a majority, the CEC would have become a truly collective leadership. As it is, the seven GL members on the CEC (nine if you count Naomi Wimborne Idrissi and Niall Christie - and you should) will be in a fight they have almost no chance of winning. The Corbyn clique will make sure that their own 14 supporters on the CEC vote as a block on most, if not all, things. (Louise Regan, activist in the National Union of Education, might on occasion vote with GL supporters, as might independent Sam Gorst.)

Some in GL suggest that we should now focus on carrying on building proto-branches regardless, in the hope of showing the CEC how vibrant they are, so that it has to acknowledge them, while also building a GL conference, which should take steps to “build campaigns on the cost-of-living crisis”, as former long-time Workers Power cadre Richard Brenner suggests. All very worthy - and very unlikely to succeed. This is, we fear, based more on wishful thinking than a hard look at reality.

Many socialists decided not to join Your Party, because of the lack of democracy and the total control exercised by the Corbyn clique. And many more have now left after the CEC elections - or are about to leave: some towards the shiny Greens, some into their local mini-parties and many will just leave, demoralised. This is a pity, but certainly understandable.

Some have accused us of demoralising members and “ruining things” by realistically assessing our current situation. We reject that. First of all, as those accusing us will be first to point out, the CPGB is hardly a mass organisation. We do not have that kind of power.

We also believe that being honest should be the key task for Marxists - “aussprechen was ist” (saying what is). We can understand why some prefer ‘official optimism’. But it cannot get us very far: quite the opposite. It leads to even bigger demoralisation, when what you promised does not materialise.

Transparency and openness are now of the utmost importance - they really are the only real weapons the left in YP now has. GL members on the CEC have pledged to report openly and in detail about all meetings, so that at least the members and the wider working class can see what is happening - and which mistakes are being made.

Naturally, we have already seen attempts by the bureaucracy to label various things as ‘confidential’ in the run up to the first introductory CEC meeting on March 3. Socialists should simply ignore such demands - they are there to stop the bureaucrats from being held accountable.

First CEC

We hear it was Jeremy Corbyn who chaired the first half of the meeting, after having been told by a very hands-on Karie Murphy how to use Zoom. Twenty minutes were spent on introductions and Corbyn giving a five-minute long pep-talk about “needing to deliver the change we need.”

HQ had obviously decided beforehand to push through Jenn Forbes as permanent chair of the CEC. This was vehemently opposed by GL CEC members, most of whom had very unpleasant experiences with her - she was, for example, one of the chairs at the launch conference, telling people off like naughty children. GL members demanded, quite rightly, that the CEC should, at least, first agree on the remit of what powers such a chair would have.

Some had hoped that Louise Regan would be to the left of The Many - that has not yet transpired, we hear. In fact, we are told that she tried to push the meeting into electing Forbes as permanent chair, even after Corbyn had proposed that maybe electing an interim chair for now would be enough. As he was chairing, this is what the meeting eventually agreed to do.

Jenn Forbes, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and, somewhat strangely, Niall Christie, put themselves forward. Christie was not fully endorsed by the Grassroots Left, because it had foolishly agreed to stay out of Wales and Scotland - but he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of YP. The comrades should try to coordinate better in future. Not that it would have made a difference, on this occasion: Forbes got 14 votes and Wimborne-Idrissi nine. Sam Gorst writes in his report that he was the only one voting for Niall Christie.

This vote was, incidentally, conducted via anonymous Zoom polling. Very bad, in our view - clearly, members should be able to find out who voted for what. Anonymous polls protect those who do not want members to know what they are doing.

And we hear that there is a plan for worse to come: that votes at future CEC meetings are to be conducted after the meeting - ie, exactly like at the launch conference. That would be an incredibly undemocratic way to go about things and any moves to implement this will be vehemently opposed by GL CEC members.

After the vote, Karie Murphy gave a very long and, by all accounts, very boring verbal report of the wonderful work of the interim leadership, which she called “the secretariat”. It obviously did a brilliant job “implementing all conference decisions” and then an awful lot of other marvellous stuff. Most comrades we spoke to say they can hardly remember any of it, as it was full of HR-style waffle, which sounded like it had been compiled by ChatGPT. But if anybody was in any doubt about who has been running things, her report made it clear.

Next up was Angus Satow, YP’s young and eager press officer, who gave a self-congratulatory report about the “many exciting” things YP had been up to - like the regional assemblies and the conference. Very exciting. He explained that he and others are employed on a “temporary basis as freelance contractors” and that he was leading YP communications, along with Alex Nunns and Artin Giles.

There was no time scheduled for questions or comments on the reports and Forbes went straight into rattling through all the things the first full meeting on Sunday March 8 (3-5pm) would be discussing - for example, the CEC standing orders, its code of conduct, the first policy commissions, local branches and the local elections (on the latter, it appears that the focus will be on “supporting independent campaigns” rather than standing YP candidates). GL comrades did their best to demand written reports, that the various documents will be shared well ahead of Sunday and that the meeting should be extended - clearly, there is no chance that this could all be properly discussed and agreed upon in two hours. Jenn Forbes, being almost as good a bureaucrat as Karie Murphy, was very keen to hear all suggestions - and then did absolutely nothing with them. A sign of things to come, we fear.

As communists, we will continue to engage with the thousands of socialists who remain YP members and we are urging our supporters and readers to stay and fight. We shall, of course, continue honest and detailed reporting.