Monthly meetings of Your Party’s top leadership body follow a predictable cycle. This past weekend, however, that mundane routine was shattered by a revolt within its ranks. The left party’s future governance now remains in serious doubt, a deep split has opened up in its upper reaches and Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation as leader of this teetering political project is not out of the question.
As The Left Lane reveals below, the leader of Your Party has come down firmly on the side of three members of the party’s officers’ group, including the chair, who have lost the confidence of the majority of members of the party’s top leadership body. And in another development, Corbyn has proposed that Your Party considers standing a candidate in the Clacton byelection, while local members have given the idea the thumbs down.
Let’s start by looking at the normal sequence for the monthly sessions of Your Party’s central executive committee (CEC). First, Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s long-time political aide and the party’s defacto unofficial CEO, drafts the meeting’s agenda. Then the party’s officers’ group effectively rubber-stamps what Murphy has proposed, as Corbyn’s The Many (TM) slate controls all of its seven posts.
That sets the stage for an actual CEC meeting. The vote tallies are usually predictable, with a 14-9 vote in favour of the TM slate being a typical result. Then within 48 hours, chairperson Jenn Forbes, who was appointed by Murphy, emails out a breezy report about the “good news” from that meeting.
The readership for her emails once numbered about 55,000 party activists. Current numbers are not disclosed, but figures as low as 15,000 are mentioned at local Your Party meetings. Back in early September, 800,000 activists expressed support for this new party and began signing up as paid members at £5 per month. Yet in the past ten days, this rhythm has seriously broken down. First, Forbes and the party’s secretary suspended three CEC members out of the blue. They were not suspended from the CEC itself but, in an unusual procedural move, blocked from attending the planned monthly 5 July CEC meeting.
Then, following protests within party ranks about the three suspensions and upon receiving a formal and closely-argued, four-page complaint letter from seven CEC members, Forbes cancelled the 5 July meeting itself.
Rupture to business as usual
But what came next was the first real rupture to business as usual since Your Party’s first CEC took office back in late February. The party is no longer “Jeremy’s party” as one person put it. Another political observer gave the conflict a wider context by commenting: “The crux of the matter is not Corbyn, but Your Party’s entire governance process.” In a switch, the agenda for the next CEC meeting on Sunday 12 July was not written by Murphy. Rather, it was derived from a motion of no confidence in three party officers proposed by Jo Rust, a CEC member on the TM slate from the East of England, a long-time Corbyn loyalist and ex-Momentum member.
Andrew Jordan, another Corbyn/ Murphy loyalist, tried to block the 12 July meet from occurring, but failed. There is more on this below. At this early evening CEC meeting and following discussion by about 14 attendees of the 23-person body – and hence there was a quorum – three votes of no confidence were held in accordance with Section 17 of the CEC’s standing orders as follows.
- 13 CEC members voted no confidence in Jenn Forbes as chair.
- 12 CEC members voted no confidence in Dawn Aspinall as secretary.
- 11 CEC members voted no confidence in Cassi Bellingham as membership officer.
All three of these officers serve on Corbyn’s slate. Slates persist due to block voting on almost every issue. Neither party leader Corbyn nor Murphy, who is unelected, attended and no details of the 12 July CEC discussions have been released. As of early Thursday16 July, Forbes had not sent out any explanatory report to party members as is her usual practice. However, minutes agreed by the majority of those attending the special meeting have since been made available as those circulating the minutes felt it was important to inform members of CEC developments. The minutes of the 12 July CEC meeting can be downloaded here.
It is clear that the party’s leadership, including Corbyn, do not regard the meeting or the majority no confidence vote as legitimate. How Forbes can continue as chair remains a mystery, but who would replace her is also a mystery. The TM slate is not deep in political talent or experienced socialist campaigners. The CEC next meets on Monday 20 July.
A former unsuccessful Labour Party candidate in Cornwall in the 2019 general election, Forbes is widely perceived to have been promoted by Corbyn and Murphy far above her level of experience. They may still regard her as Your Party chair, but the above voting numbers (13 of 14 against) reveal she has lost the confidence of the entire Grassroots Left slate, including MP Zarah Sultana, several independent CEC candidates and some members of the Corbyn’s own TM slate.
That TM split may soon widen further as more of Murphy’s personal CEC picks ‘go rogue’, as Rust and Hannah Hawkins from the north east have already done.
Corbyn says 13 July no confidence vote was “illegitimate”
A 15 July request emailed to the party’s HQ for clarification as to whether Forbes is still the Your Party chair went unanswered. Corbyn’s office also declined, saying “Jeremy is not available” for an interview about his future or the deepening split inside the CEC. But in an email from Corbyn sent to other CEC members and obtained last night by The Left Lane, the long-time Labour MP and now Your Party leader says he is “very sorry” about how the three members of the officers’ group have been treated.
“I am very sorry that any sense of natural justice was denied to Jenn, Dawn and Cassi when they were subjected to an illegitimate vote of no confidence, without a right of reply, at a short-notice, ad-hoc meeting to which not all CEC members were even invited,” Corbyn wrote about the members of his TM slate. Yet, it was members of his own slate who helped organise the 12 July meet and prepared the motion of non-confidence.
Corbyn’s eight-paragraph email makes no mention whatsoever of the recent CEC suspensions that had been found to be without merit. Without mentioning by name the three CEC members who had been suspended, Corbyn wrote that “it seems to me that many members of the CEC are not interested in developing Your Party but are addicted to internal infighting” and carrying out what he labelled “destructive behaviour”. The email also mentions a “threatening” email sent by one CEC member to all party staff. The staff are managed by Murphy.
This phrasing underlines the extent of animosity that now pervades the party’s directing group, reveals how party governance is at breaking point and how Corbyn’s own authority has been eroded. Corbyn’s email makes no mention of the peculiar circumstances under which the three CEC members were suspended and underlines the urgent need for an impartial investigation by competent outsiders of the entire murky affair, both for the benefit of the CEC and Your Party members.
What about a Your Party candidate in Clacton?
In the same email, Corbyn says that “at my request an email was sent to the CEC to consider contesting the Clacton byelection”. Reform leader Nigel Farage recently resigned as the Essex constituency’s MP but will stand again in the high-profile 13 August vote. Corbyn did appear in a Tuesday evening online meeting with some Essex-area Your Party members, who are very few in number, but they decided not to field a candidate. Your Party has yet to contest any elections to parliament and most commentators believe finishing behind novelty candidate Count Binface would reveal to a national audience just how weak the party is.
Essex Your Party held its first branch meeting on 4 July, when less than 25 members attended, and it is fair to say very few residents of Clacton-on-Sea are saying: “We want a Your Party MP.”
CEC member: “Your Party is finished”
Meanwhile, one CEC member told The Left Lane two weeks ago in a 45-minute, not for attribution interview that “Your Party is finished”, adding how disappointed they now were in Corbyn, a politician they once admired.
The rollout of Your Party branches, which CEC member Cassi Bellingham directs, has proceeded poorly as reported a week ago in The Left Lane. The party’s branch launch in Durham attracted only seven members and two key officer posts remain unfilled. While the Isle of Wight branch was the first English branch launched more than five weeks ago, a verbal report to The Left Lane this week said: “Nothing much happened down here since”. I have also just read a report that a well-motivated Cambridge Youth group which was actually doing local campaigning has now exited Your Party.
This near-total collapse of the party is occurring at a time when a new prime minister Andy Burnham takes over to govern on essentially the same agenda as that of his failed predecessor Keir Starmer. Reform’s fate is unknown but worrying. Climate change is fast becoming all-out climate chaos. And the threat of warfare grows daily with half-crazed Trump in the global driving seat. In short, these are bleak days for the left-of-Labour progressives and the working-class movement.
Your Party faces a basic test. Can it undergo a virtual cultural revolution in its governance and begin to operate, even tentatively at first, on socialist values in a socialist political culture? Or will it remain stuck in its debilitating social democratic and Labourist ways?
What these no confidence votes say about Your Party
This incident gives us another insight into how Your Party is governed and some of the changes required, that is, if you think YP can be transformed. Many think it is already too far gone to be rehabilitated.
The three CEC members who were banned from the 5 July meeting (later cancelled) are Mel Mullings, Solma Ahmed and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi. The planned main topic for that meeting was the party’s racism policy and this fact alone goes far beyond mere irony. Several of these women had been pushing for this issue to be discussed since March. All three have now been cleared of the bogus allegations and we won’t waste space here either to repeat them or refute them.
In a 13 July reply to Your Party secretary Aspinall from Wimborne-Idrissi, the latter wrote: “Your Party members will expect: 1. A full account of the process by which the unjust suspensions were decided upon and enacted. 2. A formal apology placing on record that the suspensions should never have been imposed on me, Solma or Mel and that they have no impact on our participation in CEC business.”
This is hardly a radical request. The fact that, ten days after the bogus suspensions were issued, neither an account of the process nor an apology has been issued by the party’s officers’ group speaks volumes as to the leadership style of Corbyn and his TM slate.
They simply refuse to give any agency whatsoever to elected CEC members and to party members they consider both a nuisance and, indeed, the enemy for protesting the suspensions. The whole incident is “a harsh reminder of the intimidation and bullying many of us experienced in the Labour Party,” wrote Idrissi-Wimborne to Aspinall. The fact that Your Party has never done a systematic socialist critique of Labour and Labourism also speaks volumes.
Your Party has only been operating for relatively few months and already it is stacked by powerful staff members such as Karie Murphy and Andrew Jordan. They are so powerful that CEC members are even forbidden, upon threat of party discipline, from mentioning their names as being paid staff. One hopes the same sanctions won’t be attempted against journalists for The Left Lane who are also Your Party members.
Jordan, who used to be president of the notoriously undemocratic Socialist Labour Party of Arthur Scargill, is the party’s governance expert. He was called in on 12 July to try to block the holding of the CEC meet that very evening and promptly claimed the meeting was not “properly convened”. On the one hand, the complaint from the seven CEC members demolished his arguments, as several people with legal training have agreed. On the other hand, why didn’t Jordan use his talents at governance to tell Forbes and Aspinall upfront that their complaint against the three CEC members had no legal basis in the party’s standing orders? Again, the need for an investigation would appear to be urgent and it’s clear that many party activists want such paid and unelected party insiders to be kept closely in check.
The incidents of recent weeks reveal again the dangers of hero worship and uncritical adoration by members towards the party’s leaders. Such attitudes dramatically weakens the chances of democratic governance. Moreover, when combined with the “we’re-the-only-show-in-town-ism” attitude that emanates from the upper ranks of Your Party, the combination is lethal.
On Tuesday night, as a member of Your Party, I jumped into two Zoom sessions of lefts assessing the current state of the party and its future. One advertised speaker said that “Your Party is the only way forward”, that Corbyn has “presence” and that “figureheads” such as Corbyn and Sultana “will attract people to our cause.”
You have to ask, did this type of veneration work in keeping more than 750,000 people who have headed for the exits? If the party continues to operate as detailed above, they probably won’t be the last.
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