The de-sortition of a Workers Power supporter from Your Party’s oversight committee exposes what we already knew: the leadership’s ‘democratic’ mechanisms are rigged to keep the rank and file out of power
Your Party’s Members Oversight Committee was supposed to be an independent check on the leadership between the November founding conference and the election of the new Central Executive Committee on 27 February. Five members, chosen by sortition—a random draw—would work alongside the Independent Alliance of MPs to make sure democratic decisions from the conference were respected.
That lasted about five minutes.
As The Canary reported, a YP member—a supporter of the Grassroots Left slate in the CEC elections and active with Workers Power—was contacted and told she had been drawn for the committee. Workers Power has independently verified that the number used to contact her was the personal mobile of Karie Murphy, an unelected YP official and a key figure in the leadership’s apparatus.
After discussing the member’s political activity and views, Murphy said she’d call back the next day. She never did. The member’s messages were ignored, her calls went unanswered. She was ghosted—de-sortitioned, in effect—once it became clear she wasn’t one of the leadership’s people.
The member herself is in no doubt about why. She told The Canary: “I told this woman, who I later learned was actually Karie Murphy, that I was in regular attendance at YP meetings and that this could be great because I could get the input of a wider part of the membership.”
That, apparently, was the wrong answer.
The democracy con
This episode is damning on its own terms. But it also illustrates a much bigger problem: the leadership’s allergy to any form of democracy it can’t control.
Sortition and centrally administered ‘one member, one vote’ plebiscites are the leadership’s democratic instruments of choice—and that is not an accident. Both mechanisms atomise the membership. A ballot of isolated individuals, or a lottery that selects them at random, produces no collective deliberation, no mandating of representatives, no accountability from below. That’s the point. These are tools designed to preserve bureaucratic control while wearing the mask of popular participation.
The leadership will tell you they’re the real democrats. One member, one vote! Everyone has an equal say! Sounds good right? But democracy is not a lottery ticket and it’s not a plebiscite run from head office. Democracy means the right of ordinary members to organise collectively, debate freely, elect delegates they can hold to account, and recall them when they fail. It means power flowing upwards from branches and workplaces, not downwards from an unelected apparatus. Working class democracy is both a defence against the emergence of bureaucratic structures that replace decision-making ‘by the many’ with decision-making ‘for the many’, and a preparation for working class power under socialism.
What the leadership actually fears is exactly this: a politically conscious, collectively organised membership that can challenge their decisions and hold them to account. Sortition guarantees that won’t happen. A randomly selected member, plucked from isolation, has no mandate, no constituency, and no power base. They can be managed, sidelined, or—as this case proves—simply dropped when they turn out to hold the wrong politics.
We’ve seen this film before
None of this should surprise anyone who lived through the Corbyn years. The whole experience of the Corbyn movement proved that the Labour left’s leaders—and the bureaucratic layer around them—were no democrats, however loudly they claimed the mantle.
When hundreds of thousands flooded into Labour after 2015, the leadership had a choice: unleash that energy through democratic structures, or contain it. They chose containment every time. Conference was stage-managed. Mandatory reselection of MPs was blocked. Activist motions were composited into oblivion. The members were treated as a fan club—useful for rallies and donations, dangerous if they started making demands.
The few democratic gains the left won—like the modest changes to trigger ballots—were fought for against the resistance of the leader’s office as much as against the Labour right. When it came to the crunch, the Corbyn leadership sided with the bureaucracy against the rank and file, again and again. They preferred loyalty to the machine over accountability to the movement that put them there.
The result? When the right moved to take back control, the left had no democratic infrastructure to resist. No network of mandated delegates, no culture of accountability, no habit of collective decision-making at the base. The members had been kept passive and atomised—exactly where the bureaucracy wanted them—and they were steamrollered.
Bureaucratic rule or working class democracy
What’s playing out in Your Party is the same struggle in miniature. On one side, a leadership layer that instinctively reaches for mechanisms—sortition, plebiscites, top-down appointment—that keep power concentrated in their hands. On the other, a rank and file fighting for the kind of delegate democracy that can make a party genuinely accountable to its members and, through them, to the wider working class.
This is not a procedural squabble, or ‘sectarianism’. It’s a clash between two fundamentally different conceptions of what a party is for. Bureaucratic rule treats the membership as a resource to be managed. Working class democracy treats them as the source of the party’s authority and direction.
The Grassroots Left slate in the CEC election stands for the second vision. If elected, they have committed to a second conference within six months, putting oversight and party democracy back where it belongs: in the hands of the members, organised collectively, debating openly, electing and recalling their own representatives.
The CEC election closes on 23 February, with results announced on 26 February. Vote Grassroots Left. The fight for rank and file democracy won’t be handed down from above—it never is. It has to be built from below.
