Rebecca Anderson and KD Tait
On 12 April 2026, the Central Executive Committee of Your Party — the new formation launched last year by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana — voted to expel members of organised socialist tendencies. Thousands had joined the project in the hope that it would become a genuine break to the left of the British Labour Party, which under Prime Minister Keir Starmer has continued its accelerating drift to the right. Instead, within months of its founding conference, the party’s own leadership has brought the guillotine down on its socialist left wing.
The expulsions close a chapter. They concluded a struggle over what kind of formation Your Party would become, and the answer is now unambiguous: a bureaucratically managed electoral vehicle, populist in form, politically formless in content, and hostile to any organised opposition from its left. The episode is worth examining beyond Britain, because it shows in compressed form the bureaucratic reflexes that left populism everywhere exhibits when confronted with the prospect of its own politicisation.
An injury to one
The leadership’s move is a declaration of war on the active membership. It is a bureaucratic attempt to smash organised opposition, silence political debate, and ensure Your Party develops as a tightly controlled electoral vehicle rather than a democratic party of the working class.
The forces behind this leadership squandered the best opportunity in a generation to build a mass socialist party in Britain, and they did so at a moment when such a party is most needed. Of the 800,000 people who initially registered their interest in the project, control-from-above drove the actual membership down to some 60,000. Further drift and demoralisation — accelerated by the absence of any serious political campaigning — have seen many of these quit organised politics altogether, or decamp to the Green Party, which has grown rapidly over the past year on a vaguely left-populist basis.
Rather than launch branches, back strike solidarity, or organise a national campaign against war, racism or the cost-of-living crisis, the CEC prioritised an internal purge that will exclude many of the party’s most active members. It claimed the expulsions were necessary for “democracy, transparency and accountability,” on the grounds that member-led decision-making is “only possible when every member is able to trust that… all members put Your Party’s interests first.” The formulation treats organised socialists as an inherent threat to unity. The reality is simpler: the decision is not about unity, but about control.
The right to dual membership — written into the party’s founding constitution — is being torn up in practice, even while the CEC insists it technically “remains the case” for organisations the leadership approves. Rights exist only at the discretion of the centre.
At the founding conference itself, a bureaucratic manoeuvre denied delegates a vote on the amendment barring the prohibition of socialist groups, despite its being among the most popular amendments submitted. This is typical of the pseudo-democratic procedures and the cult-of-the-leader style that Corbyn and his circle now indulge in — features common to left-populist formations from Spain to France. The demand that members engage with Your Party only as individuals, and abstain from organising with other like-minded members, is disingenuous. Not all factions will be subject to the rules: those in power will remain untouched. The purge may start with the revolutionary left, but its real target is any organised opposition that might emerge against the leadership’s opportunism in the future.
Bureaucratic reformism: from Corbyn’s Labour to Your Party
The drive to exclude organised revolutionary socialists from Your Party mirrors the experience of the Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership between 2015 and 2020. In both cases, the decisive obstacle was not simply pressure from the right or from the media, but the enduring power of a bureaucratic reformist layer embedded in the institutions of the British labour movement. As we have argued elsewhere, this layer functions to regulate and contain struggle, prioritising electoral management and internal stability over political clarification and mass mobilisation.
Under Corbyn, Labour became briefly a site of mass politicisation and radical expectation. Hundreds of thousands joined the party, many of them young people entering organised politics for the first time. Yet its bureaucratic core — the parliamentary caucus, the unelected officials, the trade-union leaderships — moved repeatedly to narrow debate, marginalise the organised left, and block any programmatic radicalisation. The result was a leadership hemmed in by its own apparatus, committed rhetorically to socialism but incapable of transforming either the party or its relationship to working-class struggle.
In truth, Corbyn accommodated himself to these bureaucratic restraints, and by the end used them against the membership’s clear will — on immigration, on the second Brexit referendum, on the handling of the antisemitism row. His parliamentary socialism led him to concede to the right-wing MPs because he always believed that only with their (largely middle-class) social base could he win office on a programme of mild reforms. That schema was blown apart in Labour. But the essence of it — left Labourism — lives on in Your Party, in the shape of landlord MPs and even former Conservative council candidates selected to stand under the party’s banner.
Your Party is now repeating the same trajectory in compressed form and on a far smaller scale. Once again, a reformist leadership confronts the prospect that an influx of politicised members — especially those organised around revolutionary socialist programmes — will force decisive debates over what socialism means in practice, how it can be achieved, and what confrontations with the state, capital and the existing political order this entails. As with Labour, the response is not to open those debates but to close them down administratively.
The language has changed. Where the New Labour right spoke of “electability” and Corbyn’s apparatus of “broad-church unity,” the current leadership speaks of “eligibility,” “clarity,” and “trust.” The logic is familiar. Organised politics is treated as a threat; collective tendencies are framed as disloyal or alien; and democracy is reduced to passive affirmation of decisions taken elsewhere. In both Labour under Corbyn and Your Party today, bureaucratic reformism operates by substituting administrative control for political leadership, and by treating programme as an electoral brand rather than the outcome of collective argument and struggle.
The parallel is not accidental. The milieu of advisers, former Labour staffers, trade-union full-timers and professional campaigners who clustered around Corbyn in Labour has reassembled itself around him in Your Party. They have brought with them the instincts acquired over a decade inside a mass reformist apparatus. Those instincts are not socialist; they are the reflexes of a social layer whose position depends on managing the relationship between the organised working class and the capitalist state — containing the former, reassuring the latter.
What can be salvaged
The struggle over Your Party’s character has now been concluded, from above. The expulsions are a fact. The question for the period ahead is what can be salvaged from the experience.
Thousands joined Your Party to build something that would put the working class first, at home and abroad, and challenge the machine politics of the official labour movement. That aspiration persists, even if this particular vehicle has been crippled by its own leadership. Branches were formed, campaigning networks built, new militants entered organised politics for the first time. None of that disappears because the apparatus has chosen this course.
The most useful next step for the surviving branches, socialist organisations and individual activists is to orient outward — to the working-class struggles of the coming period: the fight against council cuts, the cost-of-living crisis, solidarity with striking workers, the defence of migrants, opposition to racism and the far right, and resistance to the rearmament drive. A united front on that basis — directed at trade unions, workplace militants and community campaigns, not confined to the organised left — could give concrete political content to the call for a workers’ party, and keep the best forces of Your Party’s experience together in common struggle while the wider questions of programme and organisation are fought out.
Those questions cannot be pre-empted. They can only be answered through serious political debate, within whatever association of branches and socialist tendencies emerges from the wreckage, and on the basis of the open right of tendencies to organise and argue for their positions. A revolutionary organisation should not pretend it has all the answers; it must be prepared to learn from the class. But a political programme — a strategy to lead today’s struggles toward socialism — cannot be gleaned from the work of local branches alone. It has to address the great questions of the day, and the greatest question facing the movement today is still the one Your Party’s collapse has once again posed: reform or revolution?
For socialists internationally, the lesson is a familiar one, sharpened once more by experience. Left populism offers an apparently shorter road to political influence than the patient construction of a revolutionary workers’ party. It does so by substituting the authority of a leader, an electoral brand, and a technocratic apparatus for the collective political life of the class. Where it is tested by real struggle — or by the simple pressure of its own politicising members — its bureaucratic core reasserts itself against its base. Podemos, La France Insoumise, Syriza, and now Your Party: the details differ, but the basic dynamic does not.
The task remains to build, in Britain and internationally, a revolutionary party rooted in the working class, open in its debates, and armed with a programme capable of leading struggle toward power. Anything less reproduces, under new branding, the same limitations that have repeatedly blocked the emergence of a mass socialist alternative.
