A new UK party of the Left, known since July 2025 as Your Party, has elected its first Central Executive Committee, reflecting competing visions of how it should develop. These visions are broadly represented by the Grassroots Left slate linked to radical young Member of Parliament for Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, and The Many slate, loyal to former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The differences between them seem slight compared with the massive rifts tearing the wider world asunder. Both aspire to building a mass party of the working class to fill the void created by Labour’s dramatic swerve to the right since Sir Keir Starmer took over in 2020. Both have drawn energy over the past 30 months from popular movements in support of Palestine and against the rise of the far right.
The Many broadly adheres to the goals outlined in the Labour election manifestos of 2017 and 2019. It aims to challenge the balance of power and wealth in society through parliamentary action supported by community engagement. It sees Corbyn’s status as a decades-long anti-war, pro-justice voice as Your Party’s greatest asset.
Grassroots Left is more explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist, pro-Trans, and more focused on grassroots activism and “maximising member democracy”. Its adherents have welcomed Zarah Sultana’s militancy and youthful energy. They have argued for co-leadership, with Your Party (YP) headed jointly by her and Corbyn. The prospect of this “dream team” sparked a wave of enthusiasm across the Left last summer.
Both slates publicly espouse unity around shared socialist principles, but the reality so far has fallen short of this noble aim. Months of uncomradely in-fighting, public hostilities and legal threats have narrowed the base of support from 800,000 plus in the first flush of enthusiasm to around 55,000 paid-up members now.
The fledgling party has lost the confidence of a large number of potential members, many of whom have chosen Zack Polanski’s Green Party rather than YP as the vehicle for their outrage at the collapse of public services, capitalism’s forever wars and endless austerity, and the absence of a real challenge to the far-right threat.
But 55,000 is nonetheless a historically significant number, almost equalling the membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain at its peak in 1945. There is no doubting the appetite for a socialist movement capable of representing those marginalised by Britain’s dysfunctional political system. We have a unique window of opportunity for a new Left project to succeed. That window could rapidly close if we fail to regain the approval of the thousands who’ve become disillusioned over the past months.
In search of collective leadership
Some 24,000 members cast votes in the CEC election. The result was a win for Corbyn’s The Many, which took 14 of the 24 seats. Seven went to Grassroots Left and three to independents, including this writer. All but four of the successful candidates were women.
Of the 24, four were elected in a separate category for Public Office Holders, primarily Members of Parliament or local councillors. Those four seats, voted on by members across the country, were split equally, with Corbyn and Sultana each elected alongside one other candidate from their slates. This reflects the widespread desire among members for unity. It mirrors their decision at the founding conference last November to choose collective leadership rather than electing a sole leader. (Co-leadership was not on the ballot.)
But journalist Rivkah Brown, writing in NovaraMedia, detected a triumphalist tone in The Many’s reaction to its election success: “Corbyn’s near-supermajority makes the very notion of collective leadership somewhat redundant.”
The first full meeting of the CEC on March 8 anointed Corbyn as Parliamentary Leader. The move was emblematic of a major fault line dividing YP—is it to be a parliamentary machine with an iconic figure at its head, or a movement with collective leadership, powered from below by its grassroots members?
Maximum member democracy—how?
Every one of the seven officers’ positions on the CEC has been taken by the dominant slate, voting down alternative proposals by a margin of 14 to 9. They form a group that meets regularly with staff with whom other CEC members have no relationship. Requests for some share of staffing oversight have been rebuffed.
At the latest meeting on March 22, there was an opportunity to share responsibility more widely. A three-person panel was appointed to hear appeals in the selection of local government election candidates, and two branch development officers were appointed to assist the Membership Officer. The Many voted as a block to ensure that no one aligned with GL was allocated either role. Zarah Sultana, seen by many as the party’s rising star, has been entirely sidelined.
CEC members are barred from reporting their discussions and decisions to the wider membership they represent until after the chair has circulated her official version. They have no means of communicating with each other and no route to members of the officers’ group beyond a generic, public address.
It is difficult to see how Your Party can flourish in an atmosphere so lacking in openness and democratic accountability.
Probably the most important task for the new CEC is facilitating the development of strong, well-resourced local branches, which must form the bedrock of party democracy. This will be impossible without the necessary money and data, both of which have been contested issues over the past several months.
Grassroots activists wanting to circulate information about activities or events in their areas have no means of reaching the thousands of members and supporters whose contact details are held by the central executive.
The CEC is making painfully slow progress towards legitimising and facilitating the activities of the dozens of existing local groups, often referred to as “proto-branches”. There are over 100 such branches waging campaigns on many fronts. Many of them are supporting independent local councillors and preparing to take the fight to the far-right Reform UK in local elections in May.
Although not a fan of collective leadership and sharply critical of some of Zarah Sultana’s actions, veteran London activist Ray Goodspeed warned:
Corbyn and his team need to realise that a large minority of the new party, maybe 40%, support the policies and the democratic aspirations of the Grassroots Left, including the commitment to dual membership.
The November conference decided that YP members could also be members of other ‘aligned allied parties’. Details were left to the CEC once elected, but some expulsions have already occurred, carried out by members of an unelected interim executive. This has angered members like Goodspeed. They believe anyone who adheres to agreed socialist principles, and is not in an organisation that opposes YP in elections, should be welcomed in “a unifying and inclusive party of the whole Left, free of bureaucratic manoeuvres”.
Making policy, handling disagreements
Building a mass socialist party demands robust, principled politics presented in ways that have broad appeal. Constructing a political programme fit for that purpose will take all the resources we can muster from across our movement. It is challenging to do this collectively, showing mutual respect for and tolerance of our differences. An example of this is the characterisation of Muslims as a community holding “socially conservative” views, such as hostility to trans people. This is wrong on many levels.
Trans people are under growing threat from the normalisation of right-wing ideologies, which target LGBTQI+ people in general, women, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) people, people of colour and people of minority faiths, particularly Muslims. Such views are common in the white working class, while there are many Muslims who are socialists and uphold the rights of all oppressed people, including trans people. This has been explained eloquently by Anwarul Khan of YP Muslim Socialists.
We know how devastating it can be to allow any form of prejudice or oppression to be weaponised, as antisemitism was in the Labour Party. Some of those now wielding influence in Your Party held powerful positions in Labour when Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters were being purged by the right wing on trumped-up charges. The same mistakes must not be repeated.
When it comes to tackling prejudice or hostility between sections of our movement, the answer has to lie in promoting active solidarity. We should learn lessons from the inspiring solidarity that developed in the 1980s between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and a Welsh community with many “socially conservative” members.
A fresh start
Your Party’s leadership is going to have to learn all these lessons and more. It will have to demonstrate the will and ability to turn a fractious, demoralised organisation into one that can unite around fundamental principles and build genuinely democratic structures. Only then will we be in a position to restore trust by putting authority where it belongs in a mass party of the working class—at the grassroots.
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is a member of the Platform for a Democratic Party. She stood as an Independent in the CEC election but was endorsed by the Grassroots Left slate.
