Your Party: from inactivity to crisis

Image: those were the days - Oliver Eagleton's Verso book on YP, published November 2025

Your Party has lurched from inactivity to crisis. In the first year of its existence it has built no campaigning profile and had virtually no role in May’s local elections. Since then, its leadership clique has attempted to suspend members of its Central Executive Committee (CEC) critical of the leadership. This has caused the Corbyn-aligned The Many to fragment and the CEC to all but collapse.

Its belated attempt to create a branch-based structure is foundering. This suggests an ignominious fate for a project that only a year ago attracted over 800,000 expressions of interest.

The latest crisis started in early July when the CEC chair, Jenn Forbes, and secretary, Dawn Aspinall, suspended three CEC members for involvement in the Socialist Federation’s launch conference. (The Socialist Federation sought to rally dissident Your Party members, though it is falling apart over the anti-trans views of its main mover, Richard Gerrard). Whether Corbyn or Karie Murphy sanctioned this political witch-hunt is unclear. Confronted at the SWP’s Marxism, where, by speaking, he was ironically committing the same “offence” as the suspended three, Corbyn claimed ignorance and the suspensions were dropped.

This attempted purge created a backlash that fractured the Corbyn-aligned group on the CEC. An emergency CEC was called to consider motions of no confidence against Forbes, Aspinall and membership officer Cassie Bellingham. It was initiated not by the critical Grassroots Left but by The Many supporter Jo Rust. This 12 July meeting was boycotted by the narrowing band of Corbyn supporters but was, nonetheless, quorate. Of the CEC’s 22 members, The Many held 14, against an effective Grassroots Left bloc of seven. That has previously given the Corbyn clique a free hand to act without constraint.

The results of the no-confidence votes were 13 to oust Forbes, 12 against Aspinall and 11 to remove Bellingham, showing both that a majority had lost confidence in the leadership and that The Many was deeply split, with six of this bloc voting against Forbes, along with the independent Sam Gorst, who had previously been Corbyn-loyal.

The response of the Corbyn clique has been to double down. They declared the meeting unconstitutional. A CEC meeting was convened with Forbes in the chair, where she made the bizarre ruling that no-confidence votes can only be taken at the AGM, effectively making them impossible. She then effectively prevented any procedural challenge to her ruling, removing the ability of the meeting to take any decisions other than those allowed by the chair. A large number of CEC members walked out, making the meeting inquorate.

The fallout has been immense. Sam Gorst has resigned from the CEC, and a number of officers have resigned their posts - national spokesperson Noor Begum, Political Officer Louise Regan and possibly others. Their resignations are a potentially fatal blow to Corbyn’s project: Gorst and Begum are councillors from the Liverpool Community Independents and Redbridge Independents respectively, exactly the kind of community-based groups that Corbyn sought as the basis of Your Party.

The clique now running the party has also sought to silence the CEC by requiring members to sign a non-disclosure agreement legally binding them not to comment on the CEC’s or officers’ actions. Anyone refusing will effectively be removed from the CEC. So much for accountability to members.

Against this backdrop, the leadership clique’s eventual push to set up branches was always likely to fall flat. In my local branch, based on a London borough, fewer than twenty people, three per cent of the declared membership, attended. This appears to be in line with a general lack of interest, and some areas do not have enough volunteers to fill the officer posts. To top this off, in her August newsletter, Zarah Sultana failed even to mention Your Party.

It is difficult to see where Your Party goes from here. It will become neither a viable member-based party nor an umbrella for community independents. Its shrunken officers’ group and unaccountable full-time staff do not have the support of the CEC, let alone the broader membership. Your Party looks like coming to an end, strangled by its own bureaucratic methods and lack of purpose.