Your Party: a stillbirth
Sabotaged by Corbyn, oblivious to the class line
The 3 July 2025 announcement by former Labour left MP Zarah Sultana that she and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were going to launch a new party was greeted with a surge of popular enthusiasm. Within a week, some 600,000 signed up for “Your Party”, including many who had participated in the “Enough is Enough” (EIE) campaign during the wave of public sector strikes that peaked in February 2022. Sultana, who played a leading role in EIE, sought to channel this working-class militancy back into the Labour Party by suggesting that Keir Starmer could perhaps be pressured to the left.
But after winning the 2024 general election, Starmer tacked hard to the right—increasing attacks on working-class living standards and purging Sultana and other Labour leftists who dared oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Corbyn, who had previously spinelessly accepted the absurd Zionist definition of anti-Semitism, was among those shown the door. The new Labour government continued most of the Tories’ reactionary austerity policies while scapegoating migrants and suppressing political opposition with “anti-terror” legislation. Starmer’s sinking popular support has paralleled Britain’s steady decline in economic and social conditions as Michael Roberts recently observed:
“Britain has the highest inflation in the G7; the highest electricity prices in the OECD; rising unemployment hitting 5%, stagnating real incomes since 2019; rising inequality and poverty (with 3m-plus living off ‘food banks’); the widest regional disparities in Europe; the lowest benefits relative to average wages in the OECD; public services in tatters; NHS waiting lists at a record high; local governments going bankrupt; care workers exploited by private companies and the government; more ‘social housing’ being sold to private landlord companies than are being built; water and energy companies making huge profits, while sewage pours into rivers and the beaches; and the prison and justice system paralysed.”
—thenextrecesssion.wordpress.com, 26 November 2025
While Britain’s rulers attempt to prep the hoi polloi for future wars, Starmer’s talk of an “island of strangers” feeds into Nigel Farage’s xenophobic attacks on migrants. Standing behind Farage is the movement of Zionist-funded fascist thugs led by Tommy Robinson who held a rally of over 100,000 last September—the largest far-right mobilisation in British history—where tech bro billionaire Elon Musk called for toppling the British government.
Starmer’s unwillingness to do anything to help Labour’s traditional working-class base provided an opening for Your Party (YP) which attracted support from disillusioned trade unionists and disaffected youth looking for a militant political alternative. Three Green Party councillors in Glasgow broke with their party over its support for austerity and joined YP. One of them, Dan Hutchinson, a former call centre worker, explained:
“’For too long has the neoliberal consensus of the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives decimated our public services, sold our public assets off to the highest bidder.
‘I’ve spent the last 10 years fighting to get the Greens to be the left-wing force they think they are. But their MSPs have their heads deep in the sand, voting to cut budgets year after year and enabling the largest sell-off of public land to the private sector. … ‘I’m proud to be joining a truly socialist party who will not accept the status quo, will actually involve ordinary people in the politics that impacts their lives, and won’t be accepting brutal cuts in exchange for scraps off the table.’”
—heraldscotland.com, 24 October 2025
We joined most of the British “far left” in jumping into YP activity in its formative period. Our comrades reported after attending their first meeting that many long-time Labour supporters were eager to break with Starmer and the whole social democratic project of incrementally “reforming” capitalism—some even advocated the expropriation of the capitalists without compensation. Corbyn and his allies in The Independent Alliance of MPs who considered themselves the natural leadership of the new initiative were alarmed by the militant sentiments animating many YP supporters. Corbyn did not want to share the spotlight with Sultana, who kick-started the project. The 5 July 2025 Times reported:
“Corbyn’s allies … [argued] that only he had the authority to be leader and ought to do it alone. Corbyn himself agrees—not due to a desire to be front and centre again, some close to him say, but rather because he believes joint leaderships do not work”.
It seems clear that the chief concern of Corbyn and his cronies was that the YP project might turn British politics upside down if it escaped his control.
YP conference – ‘the most democratic this country has ever seen’
When Sultana sought to push YP forward by opening a membership portal in mid-September, Corbyn immediately accused her of misusing membership data and taking money under false pretences. After briefly hesitating, Sultana capitulated and agreed to turn over the funds and membership data collected to the Corbyn clique. Corbyn threatened to launch a lawsuit to speed things up—clearly demonstrating his contempt for the fundamental socialist principle of keeping the bosses’ courts out of the workers’ movement. Sultana threatened to counter with her own legal action, but eventually dropped it.
As local YP proto-branches began to coalesce, Corbyn’s clique sought to impede their progress by refusing to provide local membership lists. In a bid to consolidate control, Corbyn announced a November founding conference in Liverpool which he cynically promised would be “the most democratic this country has ever seen”. Seeking to monopolise the political agenda, the leadership presented four documents a few weeks before the projected conference and instructed members to hold regional assemblies to discuss them. Team Corbyn “stewards” were designated to collect input from each assembly and provide the leadership with feedback. The membership was informed that they could offer amendments to some parts of the documents but there was no transparency about which amendments got through (very few did) in this bizarrely bureaucratic process.
Branches formed through local initiatives were not permitted to send delegates to the founding event and were informed that they would only be recognised at some point after the conference concluded. To further ensure compliance, conference attendees were not elected but instead selected by a nebulous “sortition” process administered by the central leadership. Membership participation was restricted to an online vote on officially approved amendments.
This elaborate, pre-emptively bureaucratic procedure naturally generated considerable dissatisfaction within the membership, many of whom could recall similar bureaucratic manoeuvres by Labour right-wingers in the past. People initially attracted to YP began to gravitate to the petit-bourgeois Green Party which doubled in size during this period. This caught the attention of the political chameleons of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which, after participating in the initial flurry of excitement over YP, began to orient to the surging Greens whose:
“…growth in membership and popularity is no accident. [Zack] Polanski’s Green Party is making an audacious gambit to fill the vacuum on the left of British politics, with a programme that speaks to the needs of the working class.”
—communist.red, 15 October 2025
The Greens’ left-populist posturing, designed to attract support from traditional Labour voters, is belied by the consistent compliance of Green councillors in implementing austerity. For the RCP the Greens’ pro-capitalist politics are less important than its “growth in membership and popularity.”
The rest of the left was not so quick to jump ship. At the initiative of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and other left activists, YP’s Sheffield branch produced a document, later dubbed the “Sheffield Demands”, advocating measures to promote inner-party democracy. These included replacing centralised “sortition” by the democratic election of delegates from each branch, an average skilled workers’ wage for any YP MP or public representative, and the election of a Central Executive Committee (CEC) whose members would be recallable by a majority of the membership at any time. The Sheffield Demands included the right of political tendencies to exist within YP—a rejection of the Corbyn clique’s policy of expelling members of far-left groups.
We endorsed the “Sheffield Demands,” as did Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the CPGB-inspired Democratic Socialists in Your Party (DSYP), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), RS21 (a 2011 SWP split) and several other groups. Prior to the Liverpool conference, a majority of those who supported the demands voted to adopt the name “Socialist Unity Platform” (SUP) which implied a great deal more programmatic cohesion than actually existed. We nonetheless participated in the SUP as it was not, despite its name, at that point a bloc for propaganda.
In August 2025, Max Shanly, DSYP’s de facto leader who is close to Zarah Sultana, published an influential critique of the anti-democratic character of the Corbyn cabal which advocated switching from a “cult of personality” to the “democracy of the many”:
“For a socialist party, the fundamental purpose of its existence is to be a mass association of the working class, united for the purpose of collective political action, independent of all capitalist parties and influences. Its foundations are rooted not in the blind trust of or the slavish loyalty to the self-appointed few, but the democracy of the many.
“It is thus of supreme importance, above all else, that such a party reflects in its structures, practices and modes of behaviour not the society it developed inside of, but the society it aspires to build. It must practice what it preaches, for all involved to believe that socialism demands democracy, precisely because democracy demands socialism. …
“It may also well be the only avenue through which a decisive break can be made from the mistakes of the Corbyn era: the cults of personality around one public office holder or another, and the apolitical, anti-democratic networks of personal patronage and authoritarian enforcement through which people associated with said big wigs get to dictate decisions that should otherwise be democratically deliberated and decided upon.”
—Max Shanly, Born for Life, or Marked for Death?, 23 August 2025 (emphasis in original)
Sultana responded to the overt hostility of Team Corbyn by posturing left; she called for a Brexit from NATO and declared that she was a proud anti-Zionist. When a sympathetic journalist asked Corbyn if he too was “anti-Zionist” he awkwardly refused to answer. Sultana meanwhile declared her “radical socialist” opposition to capitalism and imperialism:
“Our agenda will bring us into direct conflict with the forces of capital and imperialism. Only a mass, democratic party can take on entrenched power and win.
If we’re serious about delivering a radical socialist agenda, Your Party must be built to resist elite capture from day one.”
—tribunemag.co.uk, 10 October 2025
At a protest in Huddersfield a week later she declared: “we are fighting for a thing called socialism. Not tweaks to a broken system, not a wealth tax here and lowering of bills here… we’re done begging for the crumbs. We’re taking the fucking lot!” A month later, however, during her 13 November appearance on BBC Question Time, she was proposing “tweaks to a broken system” via a two percent wealth tax on the 20,000 richest people in Britain: “The magic money tree exists – it’s in the City of London, and it’s with the billionaires.”
One of the thorny issues up for discussion at YP’s November founding conference was the question of dual membership for adherents of far-left organisations. The day before the Liverpool conference opened, the Corbynites decided to pre-empt the discussion by expelling members of the SWP. That night at a lively and well-attended rally at the venue, Sultana denounced this bureaucratic manoeuvre. Corbyn’s bullying tactics undercut his support at the conference, and because of the chaotic sortition process, potential attendees received only two weeks’ notice which made it impossible for many to arrange affordable accommodation, transport and childcare. To avoid a half empty hall, the leadership clique opted to open the sortition process up further, a move which increased the weight of more determined members, and thus the organised left, as became clear during the debates.
Team Corbyn’s attempt to secure rubber-stamped approval of the leader and his top-heavy, anti-democratic organisational model ran into unanticipated resistance as many conference participants voiced scepticism or open contempt for the proposed set-up. Attempts to employ the tricks used routinely by Labour Party hacks and trade-union bureaucrats generally proved counterproductive. Those watching the live stream of the event must have wondered about the musical interludes which interrupted the broadcast when speakers went beyond what Team Corbyn judged permissible. Inside the venue microphones were turned off and the debate was tightly controlled.
These heavy-handed tactics appalled many of Corbyn’s own supporters and likely contributed to defeats for the leadership on several key issues that came to a vote. A clear majority supported a collective leadership, rather than a single leader. The milder of two motions regulating dual membership was adopted, although the leadership subsequently banned particular groups from standing in the CEC elections. The conference set these elections for February and deferred the parameters for recognition of local branches to the incoming leadership. Team Corbyn left the conference somewhat deflated, as the building rocked with chants of “Oh Zarah Sultana”.
Marxism vs ‘Municipal Socialism’
After the conference many local branches, particularly those dominated by more reformist elements, began to focus on the possibility of contesting local council elections in May which involved many of the “practical” political questions Ralph Miliband discussed in his 1961 book Parliamentary Socialism:
“English ‘reformists’ did not seek to justify themselves with the kind of analysis of the nature and future of capitalism with which men like Eduard Bernstein sought to buttress German reformism. They did not find it necessary to argue that capitalism was no longer the prisoner of unsurmountable contradictions which must lead to ever greater crises. They had never believed that it was. They did of course believe that there was much that was wrong with capitalism, on economic, social and moral grounds. But they also believed that what was wrong with it could be gradually cured by remedial action mainly conceived in terms of growing State intervention. They assumed that, given sufficient pressure in Parliament, the State would not only further the process of redressing the economic and social balance in favour of Labour, but also that, in time, this would entail a measure of collectivism so wide that it would also mean the supersession of capitalism, without strife and upheaval.”
In 1912, J. Ramsay MacDonald, a founder of the Labour Party who became its first prime minister, outlined the passive, class-collaborationist policy that characterises Corbyn’s politics today:
“…any project of social reconstruction which founds itself upon reality must begin with the facts of social unity, not with those of class conflict…The new order is to arise not by the smashing up of the old by the Syndicalist method of ‘exterior pressure,’ but by the maturing of the old itself. Social growth, not class conflict, is to produce it.”
—Syndicalism – A Critical Examination
Miliband describes the horse-trading between the Labour Representation Committee (LRC—precursor of the Labour Party) and the bourgeois Liberal Party:
“…the history of the L.R.C. is largely the history of political manoeuvres to reach electoral accommodations with the Liberals. That this often involved the support of ’moderate’ Labour candidates in preference to socialist ones was something which the strategists of the L.R.C. found it relatively easy to accept…. There were naturally differences in the degree of eagerness with which the leaders of the L.R.C. … viewed the Liberal connection. But it is worth noting that they all found it much easier to contemplate association with the Liberals than with the Marxists of the Social Democratic Federation.”
—Miliband, op. cit.
Current discussions in YP about working out “no contest” arrangements and other electoral tactics with the Green party, which is just as much a capitalist party as the Liberal Democrats, constitutes a regression to Labour’s primitive past. The reformists of Socialist Action, Corbyn’s most cravenly servile “Marxist” boosters, observed:
“The founding conference of Your Party indicated that there are fundamental questions of orientation that need to be resolved by the new party. The principal options, as outlined by leading protagonists, are the choice between an explicitly anti-capitalist party, which must aim for the overthrow of capitalism, versus a party of left social democracy, which advocates reforms that it intends to carry out.
“The latter option is most clearly represented by Jeremy Corbyn. For objective reasons, it is the only viable one if Your Party is to become and sustain itself as a mass party.”
—socialistaction.net, 22 December 2025
Marxists of course support any measures beneficial to the masses of ordinary people—but we also recognise that even minor reforms, often only won through sharp class struggle, are fragile and reversible under capitalism. At the SUP fringe meeting in Liverpool one of our supporters spelled out the difference between social-democratic electoralism and class-struggle politics:
“YP needs to use parliament as a stage for its ideas and, where possible, for implementing positive social reforms. More importantly, however, YP should be focusing on building working-class power through unionisation and working-class activity such as strikes. The strike wave of 2022 showed that there is tremendous potential which is currently restricted by anti-trade union legislation. YP should be campaigning for defying the anti-trade union laws and for their abolition while wholeheartedly supporting every strike. It should fight for decent, affordable housing and education for all and the complete, fully funded re-nationalisation of the NHS, water and railways, with the ultimate aim of bringing the entire economy under democratic workers’ control.”
—marxistbulletin.org, 24 December 2025
The Glasgow YP councillors who broke with the Greens over Polanski’s austerity agenda proposed to cut the work week of council staff from five days to four, without loss in pay, and re-employing outsourced council workers. They proposed to fund this by increasing the tax rate:
“‘Current shortfalls’ would be met by increasing council tax by 5%, which the party says is ‘one of the lowest proposals in Scotland’. …
Councillor Dan Hutchison, Your Party councillor for Govan, added: ‘Councillors shouldn’t be taking decisions based on how they manage decline. They should be taking them based on what’s best for their constituents, and the people of Glasgow. That is what we have put forward.’”
—heraldscotland.com, 23 February 2026
At the YP conference, supporters of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC—the Socialist Party’s [SP’s] electoral vehicle) essentially proposed a version of municipal socialism—a “no-cuts” (‘peoples’) budget”:
“Your Party candidates pledge to take these issues and more into the council chambers, campaigning for a no-cuts budget that meets the needs of our communities and demanding the money to pay for it from central government. There is vast wealth in society, the super-rich should be made to pay.”
—socialistparty.org.uk, 22. October 2025
TUSC also boasts that its budgets will always be “legal” by utilising council reserves and ‘prudential borrowing powers’. In Liverpool between 1983 and ’87, local councillors affiliated with the Militant tendency, the SP’s predecessor, managed to initially wrest some additional funding from Whitehall for social housing. But when the reactionary Thatcher government eventually withdrew funding, the Militant-dominated Labour council responded by issuing redundancy notices to its workforce. That move was seen as a shameful betrayal by many who had believed Militant’s fantastic projection of turning Liverpool into an island of municipal “socialism” in the sea of Thatcherite reaction. In the aftermath of the defeat, Peter Taaffe, the SP’s leading figure, acknowledged the obvious:
“A local council restricted to one city, however is far from being in the position of a healthy, democratic workers’ state. Its actions are still dominated by the capitalist economy generally, and by constraints imposed by the government. It is still subject to the laws of capitalism. Even under the most radical leadership, therefore, the actions of the council can at best ameliorate the conditions of the working class.”
—Peter Taaffe, Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool–A City That Dared To Fight, 1987
In Liverpool, rather than “ameliorating” conditions for council workers, Militant, bending to “the laws of capitalism,” opted for sacking them. Eighty years earlier, Vladimir Lenin explained why “municipal socialism” schemes were inevitably fraudulent:
“The bourgeois intelligentsia of the West, like the English Fabians, elevate municipal socialism to a special ‘trend’ precisely because it dreams of social peace, of class conciliation, and seeks to divert public attention away from the fundamental questions of the economic system as a whole, and of the state structure as a whole, to minor questions of local self-government…. It does not need more than a slight acquaintance with ‘municipal socialism’ in the West to know that any attempt on the part of socialist municipalities to go a little beyond the boundaries of their normal, i. e., minor, petty activities, which give no substantial relief to the workers, any attempt to meddle with capital, is invariably vetoed in the most emphatic manner by the central authorities, of the bourgeois state.”
—V. I. Lenin, The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907, November-December 1907
A BT supporter who intervened in a discussion of YP electoral activity during the SUP fringe meeting followed Lenin’s advice and posed the issue in the context of “the fundamental questions of the economic system as a whole, and of the state structure as a whole”:
“The capitalist state is dependent on tax income and, in the short term, loans provided by private financial institutions which can dictate economic outcomes over the subjective will of any government. Should a government try to implement leftist reforms, these institutions might cut off funding, and welfare for the broader population can’t be achieved as the Syriza government demonstrated in Greece in 2015. …Sometimes the capitalist state’s repressive apparatus resorts to violence when it feels that its interests are under threat as the military coup against Allende’s Popular Front in Chile in 1973 showed. The threats made in September 2015 by an unnamed general to carry out a coup, should Jeremy Corbyn come to power in a future general election, shows that the working class needs to be prepared for this scenario. In order to prevent economic sabotage, the working class will need to nationalise large corporations, banks and the transport system without compensation and place them under democratic workers’ control.”
—marxistbulletin.org, op. cit.
Your Party embraces the Greens
We were less enthusiastic about the prospect of running candidates in the upcoming May council elections than most participants at the conference. But when a by-election was called in late January for the Gorton and Denton parliamentary seat vacated by a sitting Labour member, many YP activists were forced to consider some of the practical and political problems involved with running a candidate. The chief one was that pollsters reported surging support for the Greens while YP languished in the low single-digits. This situation acutely posed the principled political issue of class-collaboration because the Greens, while capable of posturing to the left, are in fact a petit-bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, political formation with no organic connection to the working class.
At the end of the 19th Century, a few years prior to the founding of the Labour Party, Friedrich Engels pointed to the centrality of the class line—the political independence of the working class from capitalist parties:
“This socialism of theirs [the Fabians—future Labour leaders] is then represented as an extreme but inevitable consequence of bourgeois Liberalism, and hence follow their tactics of not decisively opposing the Liberals as adversaries but of pushing them on towards socialist conclusions and therefore of intriguing with them, of permeating Liberalism with Socialism, of not putting up Socialist candidates against the Liberals but of fastening them on to the Liberals, forcing them upon them, or deceiving them into taking them. That in the course of this process they are either lied to and deceived themselves or else betray socialism, they do not of course realise.”
—Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 18 January 1893
It is entirely logical that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, as continuators of the Fabian/Labourite tradition, are willing to “collaborate with the Greens” as Sky News reported. The meteoric rise of the Greens paralleled the precipitous decline in support for YP resulting from the Corbyn clique’s deliberate damping down of the initial excitement about the prospect of a viable left challenge to Labour. Corbyn and company paved the way for the Greens to recruit a lot of disenchanted former Labour voters, much as the left posturing bourgeois-nationalist Scottish National Party (SNP) did in traditional Labour strongholds in the 2015 general election.
Sultana offered the following rationalisation for collaboration with the Greens:
“I think there has to be conversations around electoral alliances. We have to look at the next election where the goal has to be to stop Nigel Farage from getting the keys to Downing Street.
“But fundamentally we are different parties: we are a socialist party. We’re a party that is going to represent the working class, that isn’t shy about talking about material issues affecting workers.”
—theguardian.com, 7 December 2025
The Greens have no allegiance to the working class. In 2013, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas called for, and directly participated in scabbing on the Brighton refuse workers’ strike. Zack Polanski has been posturing more to the left with his talk about abolishing landlords and introducing a wealth tax, while at the same time being willing to help negotiate austerity:
“If councils do no-cuts budgets, lets talk about Bristol in particular, what happens is, they effectively down tools, and then the government comes in and then do all the cuts anyway.
“And the councillors actually have nothing to do about it, and it can be even worse than actually making the cuts in the first place.”
—socialistparty.org.uk, 15 October 2025
The Greens’ 2024 election manifesto proclaimed “that NATO has an important role in ensuring the ability of its member states to respond to threats to their security.” In a recent interview with Sky News, Polanski indicated willingness to adhere to the imperialist alliance’s Article 5 which calls for defending NATO members under attack. The Greens have participated in demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza, but Polanski, while supporting the “Zionism is racism” motion submitted to the Greens recent Spring 2026 conference, refuses to acknowledge the inherently racist character of the Zionist settler-colonial project from its inception:
“’I think clearly when the idea of Zionism was created, that was about making sure there was a peaceful place for people to live.’ … ‘I think the version of Zionism that [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government put forward, I would say, is racist.’”
—lbc.co.uk, 18 February 2026
Both Sultana and Corbyn opposed standing a YP candidate in Gorton and Denton against the Greens. Sultana explained why she advocated voting Green:
“The candidate list is now published and it is clear that Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and trade unionist, is the strongest challenger to Labour and Reform. I am, therefore, giving my personal critical support to her and the Green Party in this by-election, and I urge others to do the same. I have always been clear that the left is strongest when it is united. Our real opponents are not one another.”
—thecanary.co, 4 February 2026
The Greens are a minor capitalist party and therefore, by definition, not “part of the left”, even when they run an eco-populist plumber for office. Sultana’s main reason for voting Green was to block Reform, arguing that “Ultimately, defeating fascism must be our number one priority” (Ibid.). Fascists cannot be stopped electorally—their attempts to mobilise must be physically smashed. Reform are not fascists—they are racist right-populists whose prospects have risen in lockstep with the decline of the Tories and Labour. Their strategy is to pursue a parliamentary majority by blaming migrants for the austerity imposed by Britain’s capitalist rulers. When Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin was endorsed by Zionist-bankrolled fascist thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, a party spokesperson responded: “We have consistently been clear on this issue. He isn’t welcome in the party”. So Robinson’s fascist Advance UK stood its own candidate in Gorton and Denton.
…and the ‘far-left’ falls in line
Sultana’s explicit call for voting Green was echoed by YP’s Grassroots Left (GL) which includes the DSYP and CPGB. In an attempt to give this capitulation a bit of left cover, the GL stipulated it “will not lend unconditional support to the Green Party candidate, because the Greens are a pro-capitalist, pro-Nato party and have been enforcing cuts up and down the country”. But a vote is a vote, with or without “conditions”. In an 8 February Turn Left podcast (from 15:20 mins) Max Shanly, a leading figure in the GL and DSYP, said “I think we should give conditional support to the Greens in certain situations like the by-election” in Gorton and Denton. A joint article by two YP CEC candidates and DSYP members from London and Bristol, entitled “The Green Party is great, but it is not enough”, projected the Greens as an “asset” for socialists:
“The Greens aren’t the problem – right now, they’re an asset. After years without mainstream opposition to the rightward lurch in British politics, the Green party now provides it. Zack Polanski’s polling spikes, positive media coverage and viral videos have revived hope on the left that after decades of austerity and misery, we can still turn the tide.”
—novaramedia.com, 3 February 2026
The authors admit that while supposedly “reviv[ing] hope on the left… after decades of austerity and misery” the Greens have also “shown that at the council level, they won’t hesitate to vote through cuts.” Hardly a surprise coming from a party committed to capitalism.
The Grassroots Left’s credo “Socialism demands democracy. The Grassroots Left is organising to deliver it”, recalls Ramsay MacDonald’s dictum that the Labour party “walks with the map of Socialism in front of it and guides its steps by the compass of democracy” (Parliament and revolution, 1919). The GL Platform declares that “Our goal is to bring an end to capitalism, a socially and ecologically destructive system driven by the profit motive and private ownership of the means of production, and replace it with a socialist society organised to meet people’s needs, not generate profit”—but all this took a backseat to preventing a Reform Party victory at the ballot box.
The GL slate in the YP CEC election advocated voting for Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Lavalette as Public Office Holders along with their preferred leader Zarah Sultana. This made it clear that their priority was “unity” with the right-wing leadership. Lavalette’s pitch for election to the CEC highlighted his participation in an on-going political alliance with the Greens:
“I’m a councillor on Lancashire County Council, elected in May 2025 as one of three Preston Independents….The Preston Independents group are part of Progressive Lancashire which unites Independents and Greens and is the Official Opposition to Reform.”
Marxists can neither give political support to bourgeois political formations like the Greens, nor to leftists who endorse or participate in cross-class political blocs with them. Yet most of the various “revolutionary” groups seeking to find a home in YP—including the CPGB, the SWP, DSYP, SAlt, and members of the SP’s electoral vehicle TUSC, backed the Grassroots Left slate. The SWP itemised the Greens’ role in imposing various cuts:
“A famous example occurred on Leeds council in 2004, where the coalition included both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, and where the Greens collaborated in cutting funding for libraries and other social provision, including hostels for homeless people. Similarly, in Oxfordshire in 2016, Green councillors voted with the Tories to pass a budget proposing £50 million in cuts. Some 20 libraries were threatened with closure, children’s centres were shut and adult social care provision was cut. In other instances, Greens have voted with Labour to push through cuts. For instance, in Bristol, from 2014 to 2015, they voted to support Labour’s £90 million austerity package, which again included cuts to adult social care and library closures. On Sheffield City Council, from 2020 to 2023, the Greens approved budget cuts as part of a coalition with Labour and the Liberal Democrats. … It should be the duty of socialists to refuse to implement cuts on principle, and at the very least, refuse to form any coalition with ardently pro-capitalist parties such as the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats in local government.”
—isj.org.uk, 9 October 2025
Despite outlining this clear history of the Greens’ implementation of brutal cuts, the SWP statement explicitly endorsed the idea of a “Red-Green popular front”: as long as it is not “the starting point”:
“Clearly, local pacts between the Greens and whatever left candidates stand in next year’s council elections will need to be made in specific areas, but a Red-Green popular front should not be the starting point.”
—Ibid.
The rightward-moving Spartacist League (SL), in a statement entitled “Vote for the Grassroots Left”, argued: “It is crucial for socialists to campaign for the Grassroots Left” because “A win, or even a strong showing, would …advance the fight to turn Your Party into a radical, socialist alternative”. While enumerating a few secondary “problems” with the GL, the SL entirely ignored its political support for the bourgeois Greens.
Our former associates in the International Bolshevik Tendency, via the YP “Bolshevik Caucus” (BC), issued a 9 February statement entitled, “Vote for CEC Candidates who Don’t Support the Greens!” denouncing collaboration with Polanski and concluding:
“The bold (and necessary) move in this situation is to sharply distinguish ourselves from the Greens. We believe that some Grassroots Left candidates and supporters disagree with Sultana and Shanly’s conditional or critical support. They should say so. No vote to the Greens! This is not a line that should be papered over with ambiguous words.”
We can only agree. But instead of taking their own advice the BC issued a declaration the next day attempting to “paper over” the awkward fact that despite their claim to be “aware of two who came out against a Green vote” (Pete McLaren and Ian Spencer), neither actually rejected voting for the Greens in the statements the BC appended as proof.
Ian Spencer, who resigned from the CPGB shortly before the YP Liverpool conference, simply states that the Greens are “not our friends” and should not be “tail-ended”. He undoubtedly feels much the same way about Starmer’s Labour Party or many of the CPGB’s leftist opponents. But he does not say “No vote to the Greens!” In fact, the CPGB, with which he remains aligned politically, is quite prepared to vote for the Greens, as Spencer’s mentor, Jack Conrad, recently explained:
“Nothing wrong as a matter of principle with voting Green, or Labour, or Communist League … as long as the ‘Vote X’ call is solidly based on clear programmatic perspectives.”
—weeklyworker.co.uk, 12 February 2026
The BC’s other endorsee, Pete McLaren, a TUSC supporter, also does not come out in opposition to voting Green. He merely states: “I’m not convinced myself we should be supporting the Greens, a party that implements austerity when in power….” McLaren’s position closely corresponds to TUSC ’s which is currently supporting a petition campaign aimed at pressuring the Greens into posing as “friends of labour” [“Greens must pledge no cuts to services!”] Clive Heemskerk, TUSC’s national election agent, spelled out the position clearly:
“This May TUSC has agreed that we will not be standing against Your Party candidates and, if there are Green councillors or candidates who sign the trade union petition to Zack Polanski, we will not stand in competition with them too.”
—socialistparty.org.uk, 4 February 2026
The arguments put forward by the various “revolutionaries” in YP who claim to stand for working-class political independence while counselling a “critical” vote for the Greens to stop Reform, closely parallel those Lenin rebutted over a century ago in attacking the notion of “uniting against reaction” by voting for the Liberals:
“The Liberal Cabinet in Britain, like the entire Liberal Party, is doing its utmost to persuade the workers that all forces must be united against reaction (i.e., against the Conservative Party), that the Liberal majority must be preserved, for it may melt away if the workers do not vote with the Liberals, and that the workers must not isolate themselves but must support the Liberals…. The opportunists…did not want to say plainly that they were in favour of supporting the Liberals. They expressed their idea in general phrases, and, of course, did not fail to mention the ‘independence’ of the working class. Just like our liquidators, who always shout especially loudly about the ‘independence’ of the working class whenever they are in fact preparing to replace its independence by a liberal labour policy.”
—V.I. Lenin, Debates in Britain on Liberal-Labour Politics, October 1912
In January, a majority of the Lewisham proto-branch voted to “enter into discussions with the Greens about how we can maximise the likelihood of defeating Labour in all the wards” in the May local elections. We responded with a letter explaining why we were stepping down from the Steering Group (SG) of the branch:
“The basis of our involvement in the SG, and building Your Party (YP) as a whole, has always been to try and promote political class consciousness, beginning with defence of working-class living standards, as part of the struggle towards a socialist society. The Greens are not a working-class formation, let alone committed to the project of working-class rule. They have a track record of implementing cuts in councils under their control… For socialists, it is a matter of fundamental principle to never give political support to capitalist parties (including horse-trading in elections), however ‘radical’ their rhetoric.”
The willingness to vote for the supposedly lesser-evil capitalist Greens put Your Party on a fast-track to oblivion before it was even consolidated. Corbyn’s victory in the CEC election has emboldened his faction at Sultana’s expense, but as her willingness to vote Green in Gorton and Denton revealed, there is little to distinguish her from the more overtly Fabian leadership clique.
The combined impact of massive de-industrialisation, the battering of the trade-union movement and the hegemony of the overtly pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist Blair/Starmer wing of Labour has negatively impacted the political consciousness of the working class. Many white-collar workers who are still able to keep their heads above water hope that the Greens may offer a way out, but other layers of the working class are turning to the right in their desperation.
Of the hundreds of thousands of people who initially rallied to YP, only a small fraction remain—very few of whom can have much confidence in the organisation’s future. Neither Sultana’s occasionally militant-sounding utterances nor Corbyn’s craven Fabian reformism transcend their common Labourite political framework. Despite its initial promise, it is now clear that there is no possibility of YP evolving into the revolutionary, class-struggle organisation that is so desperately needed. Such a party—one capable of leading mass insurrection to upend capitalism—can only be built by militants who comprehend that, because the interests of the ruling class and their exploited and oppressed victims are fundamentally incompatible, it is necessary to implacably oppose every form of class-collaboration.
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The following six-point programme was issued by BT co-thinkers and allies in YP in November 2025: marxistbulletin.org