On Sunday 12 April, the Central Executive Committee of Your Party voted to expel members of organised socialist tendencies.
CEC Chair Jenn Forbes’s missive is a masterpiece of doublespeak and self-delusion. It simultaneously invites all socialists to join a party that thousands have been fleeing in despair, while announcing the expulsion of those that remain.
The ostensible reason is that socialist organisations ‘vote according to a line set elsewhere’ — so not like The Many faction on the CEC then! Nobody seriously believes the people around Corbyn and Murphy are just private individuals who happen to think alike. The difference is that their faction is concealed from the members, while the organisations being purged are perfectly open about what they believe. The secret faction is expelling the public one.
Why? There are two reasons. The apparatus around Corbyn is opportunistic and ideologically formless to a degree unusual even by the low standards of British reformism. It has therefore developed a pathological fear and loathing of any organisation that might level even the most mild and loyal criticism — nevermind those more consistently opposed to their bureaucratic outlook.
The purge also gives the leadership an alibi for its own wrecking of the project. As a demoralised membership lapses and branches decamp, the explanation is already prepared: it was Sultana, it was the socialists, it was the left.
Thousands joined Your Party to build a new party that would put the working class first, at home and abroad, and challenge the machine politics of the official labour movement. That aspiration still has a wide audience, because many people still look to elections and leaders to deliver reforms from above. The recent growth of the Greens underlines that.
But the career politicians, bureaucrats and fixers who seized control of the project from the outset wanted something else. They wanted a populist vehicle in the style of Podemos or La France Insoumise: broad, leader-centred, tightly managed from above, and politically vague enough to permit an accommodation with anti-socialist forces to their right. They are moving away from working-class politics while still appealing to a base that wants a return to class.
That contradiction has now been resolved. The guillotine has come down on the party’s socialist left wing.
Labourites and trade union bureaucrats will exploit this wreckage the way they did after Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance and Respect: every failed or derailed attempt to build outside Labour becomes one more argument that nothing can exist beyond Labour except confusion, splits or bureaucratic collapse. The argument is false, but Corbyn and his acolytes have handed them fresh ammunition.
What failed here was the basis on which Your Party was built: no programme, no commitment to working class democracy, and the old habits of bureaucratic control carried straight into the new structure.
Of course that does not invalidate the whole experience. Branches were formed, campaign networks built, new people entered organised politics for the first time. None of that vanishes because the leadership has chosen this course, and it should not be abandoned out of hand.
As we said in our statement opposing the proposed expulsions, the CEC has no mandate to impose any blacklist. Branches should treat any instruction to exclude affiliated socialists as illegitimate, endorse the statement published by DSYP and other socialist organisations, and pass motions of protest to the CEC.
Nevertheless it is clear that the question now is what can be salvaged and reconstituted. The Connections conference in Sheffield on 6 June is one place where that discussion can begin. It should be used seriously. But alongside that discussion there also needs to be a practical way for those still involved to act together.
One useful next step would be for the surviving branches, socialist groups and individual activists to build a united front against the cost of living crisis, which could take up the council cuts, the fight against the far right, strike solidarity and opposition to rearmament. This would be directed outward at trade unions, workplace militants and community campaigns, not just to the organised left.
A short call for united action on that basis could help give such work a practical focus. That would not pre-empt the wider questions of programme or party organisation—which require substantial discussion—within an ongoing association of branches and socialist tendencies. But it would help keep the best forces together in struggle while those discussions continue.
We appeal to comrades who agree with our perspective to share it in their branches and networks, and contact us to work together.
Workers Power, 15 April 2026
