9 Dec 2025
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/12/your-party-and-its-conference/

It is probably no bad thing that health struggles have delayed my writing up
Your Party's extraordinary Liverpool founding conference. Perspective is
definitely helpful to process something unique.

Personally, I could not help but be struck by the number of participants who
approached me as regular readers of my blog, certainly well into three
figures. I did scores of selfies and even signed several booklets. The very
large majority of these - and you may be among them - were very enthusiastic
about the experience of the conference.

They loved the feeling of a new beginning, of taking the fight to Blue Labour
and Reform, of openly espousing socialist principles and policies. They enjoyed
the more heated debates over party structures as evidence of functioning and
lively democracy. They were uplifted by the speeches of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah
Sultana, by Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan, and by the guest speakers from European
left parties.

I felt some of this myself. The speeches were indeed uplifting, and the heated
arguments were the bit I enjoyed the most, where it felt that the opinion of
members mattered.

But all of that was to ignore the undercurrent of extreme factional infighting
that had dogged the formation of the party, and resulted in only 45,000 joining
out of the 850,000 who had signed up to register their interest.

I am not going to rehearse the history of conflict and infuriating dispute
between Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn that led up to the conference. But the
continuation of this into the founding conference itself was a petulant betrayal
of the good people who are working to put together a new Left party.

That Sultana and Corbyn could not find it in themselves to just stand side by
side on the stage together, smile and wave for five minutes for the
photographers is pathetic. The power play on the eve of conference to expel
members of the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire and other socialist groups,
in such a way that many did not find out until they were in Liverpool, was
extraordinary.

This is what happened. Broadly speaking the organisation of the party has been
in the hands of factions broadly aligned to Jeremy Corbyn. The founding draft
documents state that the Alliance MPs are the steering committee of the
party. There has so far been no democratic input from members in control of the
party.

While the conference was to adopt a constitution setting out a new Central
Executive Committee and its election, there was no provision for any interim
democratic input until that executive is elected - probably five months from
Conference. A number of left wing groups were therefore planning to propose that
the conference itself should elect a temporary steering committee, to run the
party until the executive elections.

The last minute expulsions were a reaction against those who were believed to be
leading the plan to elect a temporary committee from the conference. Other
measures were also put into effect to stop it - for example it was imposed that
no points of order could be made from the floor, that no motions or amendments
could be expressed from the floor, and burly security men were brought in to
impose this "order" on the hall.

Now I should make plain all of this bothers me. I did not know of any plan, but
I would have voted that conference should elect an interim committee. I deeply
dislike the way that decisions are being made with nobody knowing who makes
them, and on what authority.

The prime example of this is the decision to expel people. Nobody seems able to
say who made this decision, and on what authority. To be plain, it was not only
members of the SWP affected. Three friends of mine have been expelled, for
reasons I simply cannot fathom.

Similarly, it is impossible to know who selected what could be debated by
conference. There were indeed heated debates - but the agenda was set and the
wording decided by invisible and unnamed people, drawing on divided up
"Assemblies" which were always designed to produce no clear democratic outcome.

So, for example, the proposal that MPs should receive a workers' wage and give
the rest of their salary to the party was not chosen for debate, despite being
the most popular in the online poll.

The leadership suffered a hefty defeat over dual party membership, with members
voting strongly in favour. The one man one vote system of online voting for all
members that was used, I strongly support. But the dual party membership debate
is a precise example of the abuse of control of the agenda.

The two options were both drafted by the leadership which opposed dual party
membership, and you were given two choices. The first choice was no dual party
membership. The second choice was dual party membership, but only with a list of
parties to be decided by the Central Executive Committee and agreed by
Conference.

As there is no such list yet, and indeed no executive committee yet, all those
expelled who come from the SWP and other organisations, remain expelled at least
until Conference in Autumn 2026. This was against the strong sentiment of the
Conference.

So I could not shake off the awareness of all this counter-productive
machination and could not enjoy the conference. I find all this distasteful, and
highly reminiscent of the worst behaviours of the Labour Party. I have to state
I left Liverpool with a lower opinion of both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana
than I turned up with.

...