16.07.2026
Final death throes
Rebellion on the YP leadership cannot save the Corbyn party, says Carla Roberts - and not only because it will continue to be dominated by his right-hand woman, Karie Murphy
It is good that the botched suspension of three Grassroots Left supporters on Your Party’s central executive committee (CEC) on July 4 has woken up some of the more placid members on the leadership, including the ‘independent’, Sam Gorst, and a handful of those who were elected on the slate of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership faction, The Many.
Up until now, those who were elected for The Many had gone along with the bureaucratic mismanagement of the party without as much as a peep. None of them expressed any outrage when a raft of socialists were expelled and whole organisations proscribed - some openly supported that move. None of them made any effort to publish the full CEC documents or criticised the fact that every single decision had been outsourced to the officers’ group (which is tightly controlled by Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy).
But, clearly, even some of the previously loyal Corbyn supporters - let’s call them ‘The Few’! - have had enough. Maybe not because of the lack of democracy and transparency - but they have clearly had enough of having to front what has turned into a very failed project.
Fourteen CEC members attended a ‘special meeting’ on July 12, which was called after Jo Rust (elected in the East of England, as part of The Many slate) put forward a motion of no confidence against chair Jenn Forbes and secretary Dawn Aspinall, who together fronted the three suspensions. As an aside, the attempt to backtrack has produced a rather hilarious exchange between Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Dawn Aspinall … the first complaining of Labour Party type behaviour, the latter desperately backtracking and writing about “learning opportunities”.
A motion of no confidence against membership secretary Cassie Bellingham was added just before the meeting. As we have reported, there are still very few branches that have been ‘allowed’ to officially meet, and those meetings are generally very badly attended, with most not hitting the stupid 20% quorum. In Liverpool of all places, the deadline for nominations for positions on the branch committee had to be extended, as there weren’t enough candidates. This is not helped by the fact that Bellingham is moving at glacial speed and has been entirely sidelining CEC members, some of whom wanted to help out with the ‘branches rollout’. Anybody who is not on the small officers’ group is basically just there to give the illusion of democracy. All decisions are made upfront by the officers and then just waved through by The Many’s majority on the CEC.
If that strategy was successful and YP was going places, we suspect most of The Few who are rebelling now might have swallowed their anger about being kept out of the real ‘action’. But the opposite is happening. For example, the grand ‘summer programme’ of various commissions being formed, with events supposedly taking place weekly, has mostly evaporated. YP hovers at around 0% in the polls. Membership numbers will have seriously plummeted - though the details are being kept a closely guarded secret.
As a serious political alternative, Your Party is as dead as a dodo. As we have previously explained, that is of no real concern to Corbyn and those around him - he has no interest in building a real party of the working class. YP would not exist if Zarah Sultana had not bounced him into launching it. The Corbyn clique is working hard to make sure it will be nothing more than a tightly controlled vanity project - a nice retirement number that allows Labourite Corbyn to travel the planet, giving worthy speeches.
Embarrassment
It is different for the CEC members - YP has become a bit of an embarrassment for them. There were originally 24 members on the CEC, but Grace Lewis, elected in the ‘public office holder section’, had to leave after she lost her position as councillor. She was on her way out anyway. Former MP Laura Smith resigned last week, without giving a public reason.
The short statement published by those in attendance on July 12 says a maximum of 14 members were present for the three and a half hour meeting, with 13 supporting the no confidence vote against Forbes; 12 against Aspinall and 11 the motion against Bellingham. Unfortunately, the names of those present and voting are not listed, as some of The Few did not want to be named. Why on earth not? Karie Murphy will know very well who was there - it is YP members who are being kept in the dark.
We know that all seven Grassroots Left supporters were present, as was Sam Gorst - which means five of The Few were present and voted in favour of some of the no confidence votes. Missing were Hannah Hawkins (elected in the North East), despite the fact that she previously mouthed off in various WhatsApp groups that “none of us were best pleased” about the suspensions. She has now left those groups instead. Just the type of courageous person you would want on any leadership.
Of course, Corbyn was not there either - he does not get his hands dirty with such matters. We suspect Monique Mosley (Yorkshire) stayed away too - she attends very few CEC meetings anyway - and we believe Cath Davis (elected in the North East) was not there either. Jim Monaghan (who replaced Niall Christie in Scotland) claimed, on Facebook: “I wasn’t invited. Whoever is organising it didn’t invite every CEC member. Hadn’t even heard about it until I saw this post.” The three people named in the motions also did not attend.
Everybody else was present, though some people left the meeting halfway through. Either they only attended to have a look at who was there, or they got cold feet - or both. We hope the forthcoming ‘minutes’ of this meeting will shed some more light on all of this. We should know what our elected leaders are doing.
The three no confidence votes taken on July 12 may have, on paper, met the requirements demanded by the CEC standing orders.1 These state that CEC ‘special meetings’ may be convened “at the request of 50% of all CEC or OG members”; that CEC meetings are quorate when 50% of members attend and that “a 2/3 majority of members present and voting will be required for the vote of no confidence to pass”.
However, just before the meeting, all CEC members received an email from Andrew Jordan threatening not to attend, because it was “not compliant” with the standing orders. Jordan was national president of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, then moved on to the Labour Party under Corbyn, before joining Transform (where he acted as ‘election officer’), after which he transitioned to Your Party, where he officially holds the position of ‘returning officer’. A lot of jobs in a lot of parties for somebody who looks about 21 - but clearly, he is a useful bureaucrat. He was not elected to the YP position, needless to say, and we suspect sending CEC members threatening emails does not fall into the job description either.
Nevertheless, here he writes with some kind of authority, probably bestowed on him by Karie Murphy (who presumably does not want her name on it, despite being the de facto general secretary of YP - unelected too, of course):
It has come to my attention that some CEC members have scheduled a ‘CEC meeting’ for this evening. Comrades will be aware that the CEC Standing Orders under item 5.2, ‘Special Meetings’, the provision exists for “Special meetings of the CEC … may be convened: at the request of 50% of all CEC … members …”
I understand that certain CEC members are insisting on the meeting taking place today and have even produced an agenda for it - as well as circulating invites to some, but not all, CEC members.
There is no provision in the CEC Standing Orders for any member(s) of the CEC to insist upon the date of a meeting and/or a specific agenda and/or to circulate an invite other than those whose role this ordinarily is. To this end the provisions as outlined in items 6 and 7 have not been complied with in reference to this evening’s proposed meeting and therefore this meeting is not compliant with the CEC Standing Orders. Item 5.2 provides for a request only.
On this basis the proposed meeting should not go ahead this evening and instead those comrades wishing to request a Special Meeting can of course do so, as per item 5.2 of the CEC Standing Orders, but must ensure compliance with CEC Standing Orders items 6 and 7, if wishing to do so. I understand a CEC meeting is scheduled in accordance with the CEC Standing Orders in any case within the next 10 days that has been properly convened by the Chair/Secretary.
I would advise members that an unofficial meeting in advance of our next scheduled meeting is not properly convened under CEC Standing Orders and would not be considered in order.
Andrew Jordan
This is a funny email, isn’t it? Jordan admits that CEC members have, in theory, the right to hold a special meeting - however, they do not have the right to actually convene it, he claims. Only the secretary and chair have that right, he says. A bureaucrat’s escape clause. Of course, those in the crosshairs are in no rush to call a meeting that could get rid of them! Forbes and Aspinall are, incidentally, also the only people who are allowed to put the agenda together for the next ‘official’ CEC meeting, scheduled for Sunday July 19. They can simply decide not to table any motions of no confidence. No wonder the statement by the attendees of the July 12 opposition meeting pleads: “It is our collective hope that the leadership of the party acts on the outcome of this constitutional meeting, so that we can work together to build the party our members hoped for - and that this country deserves.”
Leaving aside the hopeless appeal for ‘unity in the national interest’ (yuk), the comrades clearly know that they hold no power at all. There is no higher authority to appeal to, nobody that could implement these votes. It was a pyrrhic victory, at best. It is very clearly not the CEC that is in charge of Your Party. If Murphy decides Forbes and Aspinall should stay in office, they will stay. If she thinks they should be replaced, they will go.
But to be replaced by whom? Surely the seven Grassroots Left members remain ‘out’. They are too unreliable. Would somebody vaguely competent like Sam Gorst or Louise Regan in the chair really make a difference? They might make CEC meetings feel slightly ‘nicer’, but do we really think either of them would be able to rescue the sinking ship? Would they lead to an influx in membership? Overturn the undemocratic structures of YP? Make it into a vibrant party?
While Gorst at times supported the fight against the anti-Semitism witch-hunt in the Labour Party, he has also been something of a side kick of Liverpool YP bureaucrat Alan Gibbons, who used to run Momentum, loyally enforcing the witch-hunting constitution written by Jon Lansman. Gorst is one of the CEC members who openly supported the banning of left groups. Louise Regan is a leading member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, but also a long-standing supporter of the shadowy sect, Socialist Action, which is known for propping up Labour bureaucrats like Corbyn and playing (a very lucrative) Praetorian guard to people like Ken Livingstone - some of their members earned absolute fortunes, while running the Greater London Authority and various of its quangos. Their commitment to democracy and transparency is patchy, at best. There will be similar ‘issues’ with rest of The Few - which is why Murphy picked them in the first place. They are not reliable allies, by any stretch of the imagination.
To make matters worse, while there is certainly disappointment among the CEC opposition about how things are going in YP, there seems to be no agreed way forward - and it is difficult to think of one, at this late stage.
There is absolutely no chance that the 13 or 14 will follow the ‘advice’ of Richard Gerrard, who thinks that “the CEC opposition should declare themselves the majority and appeal to the branches to recognise them as the CEC, preparing to break away” - so that they can join his Socialist Federation, presumably. Not only is SF a numerical dead end (there were 80 people at the last ‘conference’, down from 120 at the previous one) - its method is entirely wrong way around. As we have reported, political differences are brushed under the carpet through the forced amalgamation of vastly different perspectives, discussed in two-minute speeches, in an attempt to ‘get on with the job’ of launching various ‘mass actions’. This kind of culture of ‘we all pretend we sort of want the same thing’ can smooth over the cracks only for so long.
An issue like the ‘trans question’ could blow such a shaky endeavour out of the water in no time: Gerrard is a gender critic, who used to viciously attack all and sundry on Facebook over the issue, but has now gone very quiet about it and even deleted his FB account - no wonder, seeing as most of the active SF supporters adhere to identity politics. One of many ticking timebombs. There is a very good reason why Marxists dedicate serious time to discussing our programme - to avoid such problems. The shiny SF website will not hold things together for very long.
In reality, the Socialist Federation and Your Party are cut from the same opportunist cloth - it is just that YP is still an awful lot bigger. And why would CEC members go for the mini‑me version? Not even the majority of the Grassroots Left members on the CEC are getting involved in it and there is no chance Zarah Sultana would touch it with a bargepole.
On the other hand, it is clear that a new chair and secretary would not and could not do away with the bureaucratic overall control exercised by Karie Murphy. She has fought tooth and nail to shape YP into what it has become, at the behest of Corbyn. They will do everything in their power to stop any real, significant changes. And if that does not work, they could always press the nuclear button and blow the whole thing up - or simply walk. The result would be the same, because Your Party without Corbyn certainly would not work. But we doubt it will come to that.
For a start, it remains to be seen if The Few really keep their bottle until the next meeting on July 19. There will be a lot of pressure on them at that meeting not to support any votes of no confidence (if they are even tabled). Perhaps there will be a few sweeteners, too. Most CEC members probably do agree with the general gist of how Murphy has been doing things, just not with the fact it has been so staggeringly unsuccessful. After all, Murphy’s bureaucratic method is just a slightly crasser version of how much of the left today organises: either they have no programme to speak of - or they demand total ‘agreement’ with every single dot and comma; either they set up extremely bureaucratic top-down structures - or pretty much no structures at all; either they entirely dismiss the need for democracy and transparency - or they claim to adhere to it, while in reality enforcing bans and (self-)censorship. The outcome is the same: it creates sects - nothing more.
The left desperately needs a real cultural revolution if it ever wants to be in a position to build a real party of the working class. This hesitant mini‑rebellion looks, unfortunately, very much like a case of too little, too late.
Dying on hills
Talking of bad culture, if you were following the recent ‘scandal’ over the CPGB’s attitude to free speech only on social media or WhatsApp groups, without reading any of the relevant articles in the Weekly Worker, you would think that the organisation has suddenly become a fan club for Tommy Robinson and/or Adolf Hitler. Apparently, the CPGB has “gone entirely mad”, its attitude is “bizarre and insane”, it has chosen “an unbelievably stupid hill to die on”, it “just wants to insult trans and black people” and, the most common charge, repeated in a number of variations: “The CPGB fights for the right to throw around racist slurs in meetings.”
As happens in the midst of a moralistic outrage, clearly some people have lost all sense of rationality. Our opposition to the bureaucratic shutdown of the nascent Socialist Education and Debate Association (SEDA) - which we thought might have played a useful role in trying to overcome the sect culture of the left, but which has now reinforced that culture - has created quite a scandal. My article in last week’s Weekly Worker has been deleted from a number of WhatsApp groups and online forums, as was a video with Jack Conrad from the July 5 Online Communist Forum, and there are calls, too, to ban CPGB and Weekly Worker supporters from those forums. To make sure they are “safe spaces”, you see. All sorts of presumably very ‘safe’ insults have been hurled at us in the process.
The most hysterical of those comments come from people who, funnily enough, also vehemently protest against our “toxic bullying” - a short cut for us arguing in favour of full transparency, when it comes to Your Party. Our calls on Grassroots Left supporters on the CEC to publish all documents - even those that Karie Murphy stamped with the word (shock, horror) ‘confidential’ - have been met with utter outrage; our publishing some of those documents described as “sabotage”. We therefore do not take the current outrage of Richard Gerrard et al particularly seriously: they are enjoying a sort of rather obvious anti-CPGB ‘gotcha’ moment.
We are particularly tickled by a self-declared “communist”, who goes by the name of Ryan Higginson on X. He simply cannot understand our “obsession” with free speech - he says what a lot of people on the left clearly believe: “Since when has the left ever been for free speech? We are rightly for the suppression of speech in all sorts of situations. To imagine otherwise is pure liberalism”, followed by: “Surely you’re in favour of the terror? If so, how can you maintain the ‘principle of free speech’? You have to accept that its openness or limitation is dependent on the needs of class struggle, and has to be argued on that basis, not your current faulty liberal one.”
He is right, of course, that most of the left is indeed in favour of speech controls, the micromanagement of members and bureaucratic centralism. As is all too evident, that culture does not build you a real party of the working class: only small and entirely ineffective sects. As soon as differences of opinion emerge in those organisations, they have to split - into smaller and smaller grouplets. As for being “in favour of the terror”… well, yes, but we would rather avoid such an outcome. The better organised we are and the more people we have won over, the less need there is for violence. We believe the Chartists got it right when they argued “peacefully if we can, forcefully if we must”.
This understanding of needing to win over significant sections of the working class to our programme for socialism is precisely why we fight for democratic centralism and a culture of unrestricted free speech. People in this alienated, atomised society hold all sorts of funny ideas. In general, we should seek to explain, expose, convince and persuade - not to ban and censor. In fact, the cancel culture and bureaucratic control in many leftwing groups plays a large part in putting off ‘normal’ working class people.
Slightly more concerning is the fact that some groups and comrades who profess to share our commitment to ‘partyism’, free speech and an opposition to censorship and bans have joined in the outrage - in particular comrades around the Democratic Socialists and the Marxist Unity Caucus in Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21). Quite a few in those circles have expressed “utter disbelief”, “total surprise” and “real concern about the conduct” of CPGB members. Perhaps the most common reaction here is along the lines of a plea to just shut up already: “Why would you double down when you can see how it is putting off those you’ve been trying to win over?”, we have been asked.
Most of these comrades argue in favour of free speech and against censorship and bans - in theory. However, in practice they demand self-censorship (as a minimum). Not only should we not have printed and spoken the ‘N-word’ (even if it was as part of a quote by Karl Marx) - why on earth would we want to look at Marx’s use of the word in the first place? That is just needlessly offensive, they say, with more than a nod to identity politics. And there is no need, is there? We can just ignore the fact that he used it five or six times in private correspondence to his comrade, Frederick Engels.
Well, the ruling class is not quite so easily persuaded to ‘drop it’. During the height of the anti-Semitism witch-hunt in the Labour Party in particular, there were plenty of bourgeois and Zionist commentators (for example, The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland2) who used exactly that charge against the left: look, Marx was an anti-Semite and anti-black racist, here is the proof - and this explains why Corbyn and his followers are racists, too, even though they’re pretending they aren’t! It is a widely known and common attack strategy. We therefore supported the plans of a comrade - who is not a member of the CPGB - to run an ‘ABC of Marxism’ education and discussion series as part of the (now probably stillborn) SEDA. The comrade was planning on discussing a long list of issues, including Marx’s attitude to racism - surely an important subject for all socialists. This would have been impossible without looking at the problematic sides of some of Marx’s writings, too. We are not sycophants - we are able to look at Lenin, Marx and other socialist greats without rose-tinted spectacles.
Having heard the comrade speak about the subject before, we know that he was seeking to clear both Marx and socialists of the charge of racism, and we think that would have been a very useful exercise in sharpening our weapons for confronting the renewal of this fight against the left by actual racists and Zionists. Instead, the CPGB is now called “racist” for wanting to do just that. This irony escapes our comrades, obviously.
We must also take up a rumour going round - spread by former supporter of the Democratic Socialists, Tom Gann, of the New Socialist - that four of the seven members of the executive committee of the Democratic Socialists “resigned over this”. Utter nonsense. One person, James Kulmar, who is heavily involved in the Socialist Federation, did indeed resign because he supports SEDA founder Alex Green’s diktat that only those people should now be allowed to get involved who “agree” with his list of banned words and organisations. But, seeing as comrade Kulmar never attended a meeting of the EC anyway, that does not weigh particularly heavily. He clearly used the opportunity to unburden himself of yet another WhatsApp group.
The other people who resigned are all members of the Marxist Unity Caucus in RS21, which had already made a decision to withdraw from leadership positions in Democratic Socialists a few weeks ago (though one comrade, Jon Benson, continues to put a lot of work into the Democratic Socialists). None of them mentioned this ‘scandal’ in their staggered resignation letters - one comrade resigned in fact many days beforehand, another one cited ‘capacity’ issues and comrade Benson thought Democratic Socialists members’ original decision to get involved with SEDA was a total waste of time altogether (he was right, as it turns out). This might well spell the end for Democratic Socialists, which is a shame, but not entirely surprising, if, in fact, all it takes to implode this political trend is to read out a quote from Marx.
Former CPGB member Lawrence Parker thinks that Jack Conrad has mentioned the ‘N-word’ on purpose, for “sect cohesion” purposes. No, it is precisely because we fight against the sect nature of much of the left that we take the struggle against cancel culture and speech controls so seriously. Our ‘partyism’ is based on the understanding that censorship and bans are a very slippery slope to building, at best, yet another sect. At worst, projects like SEDA might not even take off, having been strangled at birth with bureaucratic micro-management. Censorship and bureaucratic overreach go, by definition, hand in hand.
Like much of the left, Democratic Socialists has struggled with a lack of purpose or sense of direction during the slow death of Your Party. The ‘scandal’ over quoting Marx really is a reflection of the fact that what remains of the left in and around YP is now eating itself up. Most will probably drift out of politics altogether, some might end up in this or that small sect - and maybe a few will join us in the struggle for a genuine Communist Party, which fights uncompromisingly for real, extreme democracy and against bans, censorship and self‑censorship.