It’s Your Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

There are serious threats to “Your Party” from those attempting to exter undemocratic control, and they attack as trying to destroy the party, anyone who tries to improve things.

The Labour Party is now centre-right and the large majority of us to the left of it were delighted when Jeremy took the plunge to launch a new party. It is not that parties of the left did not exist, it is that only Jeremy Corbyn has the stature to break through into mass voter support. That seems to me undeniable.

My own view is that it would be crazy for anybody other then Jeremy Corbyn to be the first leader of Your Party.

Of course, “left” is a broad concept, and like most of my friends I have signed up for the new project in order to take part democratically and endeavour to shape a party whose policies I can broadly support. If that does not materialise, I can leave, but I do not expect to agree with every single policy. Any party whose members all agree with every policy is deeply unhealthy.

I have friends in Scotland who will not join on the assumption it will be a unionist party. That of course can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I do not think it will be.

The rumours circulating about tensions at the top of “Your Party” are broadly true and often remarkably accurate. I could write a great deal about individuals and their positions, but I want now to issue an urgent alert and call to action, without names.

Simply put, I believe most of us had assumed that Your Party would be a one member, one vote democracy with major decisions taken by all members with online voting.  That includes major policy decisions and election to all the main positions in the party, both central and local.

In fact, those in charge are actively working to limit, to an extraordinary degree, one person one vote democracy in the party. That is the major reason why “Your Party” is still not actually a political party and still has zero members. It only has 850,000 people who have signed up to express interest, many of whom have paid money, but none of whom have any legal standing, democratic rights or say in how the money is spent – or crucially who it employs.

This is not an accident and no, it does not take months to set up a structure to convert these people into members. The delay is absolutely deliberate, preventing any locus standi for democratic control of the establishment process.

Incredibly, this is not an issue that divides the different factions at the top of the party. One thing that unites them is a desire to run the party through easily manipulated structures; they just differ over who should control those structures.

There have been a number of formative meetings held around the country. There is no area in the entire UK where all of those who have signed up and joined the list, or even all those who have paid money, have been invited along to a meeting to discuss setting up the local branch. In every case local members of small political parties and groups within trades unions have hand picked who to invite.

The only time that all those in an area who signed up have been invited, has been to a small number of leadership rallies with Jeremy Corbyn.

If I may just give Glasgow as an example. Your Party has 42,000 people signed up in Scotland. We can therefore estimate those signed up in Glasgow as over 5,000 people. But the “founding meeting” of the party in Glasgow was of 120 people, invited by “word of mouth”.

The other 5,000 people who had signed up had not the slightest idea the founding meeting was happening.

On a larger scale this control by selective invitation is to play out at what is billed as the party’s “Founding Conference” in November. Ordinary members will not be able to attend the conference. It will consist of delegates selected by tiny political parties and local groups, most of which the large bulk of the members in that locality will never have heard of.

There will be no way for a member simply to put themselves forward for election by all the other members in their region as a conference delegate. It is entirely a self-selecting process among established left wing factions, just like the Glasgow meeting writ large.

Let me try to bring home to you the vast gap between the membership and those who are manipulating the system. The main organising component in Scotland is a small party that initially stayed (rightly!) loyal to Tommy Sheridan after he was traduced by Murdoch, as part of the split between the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity. This group then split again as a smaller splinter off from Solidarity.

I can’t even recall what they call themselves now – the Socialist Party of Scotland or something –  and I have no reason to doubt they are great people. But they and a couple of groups of similar size – groups which without the Corbyn name would not combined be able to fill Blairgowrie town hall for a meeting on a wet Tuesday evening – are attempting to lead by the nose 42,000 people who would like to have a say in the matter.

Those 42,000 in Scotland deserve the rights and privileges of members. Now. As do those who signed up throughout the UK.

I cannot stress to you enough that this is not a glitch it is a feature. Nor is it a teething problem. Those who currently hold the reins are determined to make sure those reins cannot be voted out of their hands. I have had a number of conversations with people actually in charge of instituting all this, and the prevention of direct democracy and the structuring of the party instead through controlled committees and caucuses is for them a given.

Part of this is because, far from being a fresh start, most of those actually running the putative Your Party come from the byzantine world of the Labour Party. Others come from small parties which are avowedly revolutionary vanguardist and entryist. Large putative memberships willing to pay money are a resource to be exploited and turned to the purpose of the group, rather than comrades to be considered as equals.

Which brings me to the second, and to me more worrying, aspect of Your Party, which is conduct of meetings. Aside from the careful selectivity of who gets to be at the meetings, those currently directing Your Party seek to avoid normal democratic rules of debate and – above all – to avoid votes at their meetings. This is how the local meetings are actually being conducted.

The first method to disempower the membership at a meeting is to disassemble them, into “working goups”. Each working group is led – and the word “led” is important here – by a “moderator” who has been chosen in advance and trained. That “moderator” gives an impression of communitarianism by asking the group what they wish to discuss from a list of prepared topics, or to some degree participants can choose the topic group to join.

The conversation is then led by statements introduced by the moderator. In Glasgow this was done on the basis of whatsapp messages allegedly sent in – though who had selected the people who sent the whatsapp messages to this unadvertised meeting was not plain. The moderators then distil the collective view of the participants through a process of alchemy, and later the moderators amalgamate the view of the meeting.

This method of “consensual” discussion of policy, avoiding debate and opposition, echoes the strategies employed within groups like Occupy! and Extinction Rebellion. It draws those who arrive full of idealism into a novel and apparently communitarian process, and anybody wishing to express a radically different opinion – or to challenge the methodology – is immediately not a legitimate member putting an opposing view in debate, but a disruptor and an outcast.

When I gave a talk to the Occupy! encampment at St Paul’s many years ago, I wrote afterward that these trendy methods of decision making actually did the opposite of what they said on the tin. They empowered charismatic individuals to lead the group much more effectively than the structured rules of normal debate, and effectively created a cult following. I was unsurprised shortly afterward to discover that encampment had, precisely through the control of charismatic individuals, seen sexual abuse of female members, resulting in convictions.

The notion that normal debate, with speakers for and against and proper votes, is bourgeois or undemocratic is entirely wrong. The great E P Thompson opened The Making of the English Working Class with the insight that the structure of the London Corresponding Society was in itself an act of working class assertion. An equal subscription and one member one vote was a revolutionary notion in an era where public gatherings consisted of listening to the priest, the magnate or his underlings.

The democratic conduct of meetings is actually embedded in common law, and represents the accumulated achievement of popular control. There is nothing outdated about proper debate and one person one vote.

There is now the opportunity to update this, with online debates available to all members, and online voting on all issues available to all members. When Your Party spoke of a new and modern form of popular democracy, I presumed mass online debate and online one person one vote is what they meant. I did not for a second imagine that replacing voting with New Age cult metaphysics was meant.

I want to emphasise this to you. I have spoken to scores of people, including some very directly involved. The avoidance of debate and of votes is a deliberate policy to maintain the control of a small group of people.  In what would already be the UK’s biggest political party if they had allowed people actually to become members.

I am not mentioning names because my motivation is to heal this and make Your Party the force it should be.

I signed up immediately, to support Jeremy, and paid a small sum. I have never at any stage been invited to any of the meetings, steering groups or other activities involved in organising the party. I have never received anything from them except one vague email asking me to suggest the party’s name.

This can all be rescued. But those who have signed up need to get active now. Do these things:

a) Write to the party (reply to the email about the name) asking that formal membership be opened up immediately and stating that you wish to become a member.

b) State that you wish to attend the founding conference or at least to have a vote for delegates to attend the founding conference, with a right to put yourself forward for election if you so choose

c) State that you wish to be invited to any meetings of the party in your area

d) If meetings happen without you, kick up a fuss

e) At those meetings, insist on some general discussion and the right to vote upon things. Resist the splitting up into small groups and manipulation of consensus

f) In writing, make absolutely plain that you expect Your Party within this calendar year to have online one person one vote elections for all major positions, local and national, within the party. That includes the General Secretary or equivalent position.

g) State that going forward you expect Your Party to enact direct democracy, with one member one vote online on all major policy issues.

A popular movement depends on the people and we have the people. We now need to empower them.

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The post It’s Your Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To appeared first on Craig Murray.

Source: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/09/its-your-party-and-ill-cry-if-i-want-to/