The 12 April Central Executive Committee (CEC) of Your Party adopted a blanket ban on members belonging to other socialist organisations. This directly contradicts the November 2025 YP conference, where 69% voted against a general ban in favour of a more limited approach, the only option the leadership allowed for voting.
Membership of any organisation with its own programme, ideology, or discipline has been declared incompatible with membership of Your Party. In other words, organised socialism is to be excluded altogether.
The list of targeted groups is inconsistent and incomplete. Workers' Liberty and other organisations are named, others omitted. But the intention of driving out organised groups in the party is clear.
So, after eight months of assemblies, internal documents, a founding conference, online votes and a CEC election, Your Party is finally taking shape.
Not as the pluralist, democratic socialist vehicle many hoped for. As something far narrower: an umbrella for loosely aligned local electoral groups, underpinned by a passive membership loyal to Jeremy Corbyn and his clique.
Meanwhile, on 10 April, the leadership published the list of candidates it will support in the May local elections, for which nominations closed 9 April. An earlier list included several other groups previously supported by Corbyn which are now deleted.
Those deleted include: Pendle Community Independents, in a ruling coalition with the Lib Dems; the Oldham Group, led by an ex-Conservative councillor and slum landlord, one of whose properties collapsed last month; and the Walsall Independents, including some former Conservative councillors.
Surviving the “due diligence” is at least one ex-Tory, Obaydul Kabir in Birmingham.
Your Party’s own members have not been treated so generously. Two Grassroots Left CEC members have had their local candidacies endorsed, but many candidates selected by proto-branches have not, notably in Southwark and Waltham Forest.
In Corbyn’s backyard of Islington, the YP office is backing none of the Islington Community Independents slate.
ICI was formed, before YP, around two councillors who quit Labour in sympathy with Corbyn. They have had a joint council group with the Greens, but their leading non-councillor activist went over to the Greens, and now the Greens have refused a no-contest deal with ICI for 7 May. The ICI slate (for nine out of the 51 council seats) includes Palestine Action activist and former hunger striker Amu Gib, who has been held on remand since July 2025. One ICI-YP candidate was reportedly asked to apologise for standing in the CEC election on the Grassroots Left slate. So none of the slate gets backing.
Your Party is, however, backing non-members, notably the Aspire ruling group on Tower Hamlets council. This is a council which boasts of “savings” of £250 million since 2010 and another £42 million planned. Cuts have been reallocated to other parts of the council budget, but this is hardly the kind of no-cuts budgets endorsed by the YP conference and online vote in November.
The Corbyn clique’s aim is evidently not to build a democratic socialist party with debate, organisation, and accountability. Rather, a controlled electoral machine: localised, ideologically thin, and centrally managed, backed up by a passive Corbyn-loyal membership corralled into stage-managed online votes.
There now seems little chance of the existing proto-branches being given the chance to become the basis of recognised branches. They are likely to be replaced by larger, looser structures, possibly through assemblies open to non-members, designed to dilute internal opposition and reinforce central authority.
Alongside this will be a network of local electoral groups, politically little different from Labour council groups and socially rooted in narrow community bases, but without a working-class base or meaningful programme for fighting cuts.
The Grassroots Left is opposing the blanket ban on organised socialists, but it faces an uphill battle, since there is no official decision-making group in YP beyond the CEC (the "proto-branches" have no official status), and no new YP conference scheduled any time soon.
And meanwhile, however, Zarah Sultana (loosely associated with the Grassroots Left) has continued her habit of unthought-through pronouncements that play to the worst prejudices around the left.
The UK government has banned US rapper Kanye West (now Ye) from the UK after his adoption of a pro-Nazi stance, including releasing “Heil Hitlter” and selling a swastika T-shirt. Sultana: “Glad Keir Starmer's Labour government is prioritising stopping musicians from performing. Wouldn't want them distracted from their complicity in Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people and an illegal war on Iran.”
There are a number of issues here. First, Sultana’s opposition to bans is selective. While she appears relaxed about pro-Nazi rappers, she is less so about Israeli football supporters, in October last year calling for Maccabi Tel Aviv fans to be barred from entering the UK. Her non-censorious attitude to artistic freedom also does not extend to Israeli musicians, whom she wants banned from the Eurovision Song Contest.
Second, and more importantly, her political instinct here is appalling. Faced with a rapper being banned for siding with the most murderous antisemite of the twentieth century, what is her first instinct? She could have said that the state should not censor artists on the basis of even the most vile views. Instead, she dismisses the antisemitism as less important than condemning Israel, the creation of which is, of course, the direct consequence of that antisemitism.
This matters. There is an increasing antisemitism problem on the British left. A Solidarity reader has reported that a “Your Party” Facebook group (not an official group) included straightforwardly antisemitic posts about the arson attacks on Jewish community ambulances in Golders Green.
When he objected, his post was deleted and he was expelled. The group still contains claims that the arson was a Mossad operation and: “They [that is Jewish people] have their own police, have their own courts, have their own age of consent (3yr 1 month), their own laws and, fuck me, their own ambulances.”
That is not even the worst unofficial YP-related Facebook group; for the real dirt, see “REAL Your Party supporters ONLY”. Of course, this is social media. There is no evidence that people in Your Party have stepped over into such crude antisemitism in real life. Equally, there is no official pushback from YP against antisemitism swirling around it.
Sultana is neither defending artistic freedom nor opposing the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Iran. Her posturing instead encourages the worst elements of the social media “left”.
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