After the resignations: How Your Party lost Scotland

Sara Bennett argues that centralised control and factional infighting have left Your Party Scotland in disarray, risking the destruction of a promising grassroots movement at the moment the left needs it most.

On Monday, 13 April, the entire existing Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC) of Your Party Scotland resigned. This followed an online meeting the previous evening, which over 170 members attended to discuss the growing disaffection and mistrust north of the border. Niall Christie, Scotland’s CEC member for Your Party, issued a resignation statement that criticised “the consistent disrespect shown to Scotland and Scottish members, with decisions being made without our input, and on our behalf” as a primary reason for the resignations.

The reasons leading to the resignations are not isolated to Scotland, with proto-branches and members around Britain feeling sidelined and left without the tools they need to formally constitute themselves to be effective on the ground. But the situation in Scotland is worth looking at in the hope we might be able to learn some collective lessons.

Your Party Scotland was part of the process which saw Your Party come into being across Britain. We all remember the difficult birth: Zarah Sultana unilaterally declaring the party last July and opening registrations; Corbyn belatedly and begrudgingly getting on board; then threats of legal action over membership data and dues. Hardly the auspicious launch we had hoped for.

The national conference in Liverpool at the end of November last year saw yet more internecine battles, with the SWP being told it could not attend, and Sultana refusing to enter while others were barred. One thing that I recall thinking at the time was, ‘Let’s hope we do better than this in Scotland.’

In October and November, people set up proto-branches throughout Scotland, both in cities and rural areas. At the beginning of this process, meetings in Edinburgh were well-attended and included both members of socialist organisations and complete newcomers to organised left-wing politics. The key priorities were to build branches, organise our own conference, and determine whether we could aim to stand candidates in the 2026 Holyrood Scottish parliamentary elections.

Across Scotland, branches have begun organising at a local level and intervening on the ground. The Leith branch in Edinburgh has been involved in a Listening Campaign, holding regular stalls and door-knocking events. Coaches have been organised to Falkirk to oppose racist anti-immigrant protests outside hotels. We organised a Keep Leith Warm one-day event in December, offering free food and drink, a warm space, and toys and clothes local people could take away for free.

At the end of 2025, proto-branches began electing committees and agreed to send members to form an Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC), which was tasked with organising the conference.

Conference took place in Dundee in February 2026, with roughly 300 people in attendance. We ratified our own founding documents, voted on whether to stand in the Holyrood 2026 elections, our position on independence, dual membership, and whether to remain in Your Party UK or to form a separate sister organisation. Both Corbyn and Sultana attended, albeit separately.

Conference voted to support independence, allow dual membership, empower branches and regional assemblies to determine whether to stand Your Party candidates in elections or not. It also voted that Your Party Scotland should be a separate, sister organisation. These decisions reflect the constitutional question in Scotland. I believe they also reflect Scottish members’ determination to resist becoming victims of leadership-level fallouts, and instead chart our own course.

However, relations between Your Party Scotland ISEC and HQ were inconsistent and frustrating from the outset. The For the Many faction around Corbyn had won a majority on the CEC and is widely regarded as the grouping that includes union bureaucrats looking for a new Labour Party. Membership data and funds were not made available to ISEC, which effectively meant the Scottish group had to go via the centre to contact members and ask for money to organise. Our single (!) CEC member for Scotland, Niall Christie, repeatedly tried to table agenda items at CEC meetings to discuss Scotland’s organisation, but without success.

Relationships became further strained when the centre started bypassing the ISEC and contacting members directly, virtually re-running our conference votes. One clear example of this involved the question of standing in the Holyrood elections in May.

The Dundee conference had voted in favour of branches having the ability to decide whether to stand candidates or not. This was not completely straightforward, as we needed a formally constituted body to do this. In Edinburgh, this meant first voting on whether to become a Regional Association (we did) and then whether to stand candidates (we voted not to).

However, on 23 March this year, Scottish members received an email from CEC Chair Jenn Forbes stating: “We will also work at pace with members in Scotland and Wales to facilitate member-led strategies for the upcoming Holyrood and Senedd elections – members in each nation will receive more from us soon.” What this really meant was that we received a new vote, sent by email to the whole membership (allegedly), bypassing ISEC. The reason stated was that the CEC “is clear that decisions of this significance must be informed by the full membership, not informal regional discussions or WhatsApp groups.”

A situation was emerging where the centre deprived the locally constituted interim leadership in Scotland and our CEC member of crucial data that would have been necessary to properly form branches and contact our membership. Our inability to do so was then exploited by the centre to directly approach members, ignoring key decisions that had been debated and already voted upon in good faith in Dundee and by local groups. Unsurprisingly, many members boycotted the vote, and of those who did, a majority voted not to stand. Members also started to leave the party.

On Sunday, 12 April, members received another email from CEC Chair Jenn Forbes welcoming all socialists to Your Party, simultaneously providing a list of groups whose members were banned from YP membership. Among others, this ban affects the SWP and the Socialist Party. The Liverpool national conference had indicated a healthy majority were in favour of dual membership, therefore allowing socialists from other organisations and parties to remain members. It had been voted that the CEC would decide which other parties were ‘aligned with our values.’ However, in reality, the decision has been made not to allow any dual membership, which goes against the spirit of the Liverpool and Dundee conference votes.

Now, the state of Your Party in Scotland is one of disarray and confusion. Many members have been ejected due to dual membership, and others have left in anger and dismay. However, at the members’ meeting on Sunday, 12 April, the overall mood was to build on the work we had done, whether individuals chose to remain inside or outside of Your Party. To what extent this will be possible remains to be seen.

There are clearly different factors that need to be considered in how we got to where we are. It’s worth repeating that from the beginning, there have been clear factions at the head of the organisation that have seldom shown unity in the face of the membership. The message Your Party currently projects is one of cliques at the top fighting for control, rather than one of building hope and momentum at the grassroots.

Your Party has brought people with distinct experiences and from different parts of Scotland together, but there are also starkly different ideas of what the party should be. Some are primarily focused on an electoral outfit, with individual members vying for opportunities to stand for Your Party. In Glasgow, former and previously aspiring Green Party candidates joined Your Party last autumn and became centrally involved in the Scottish leadership. Possibly, they were hoping to stand on the YP platform.

However, it is undeniable that the real issue at stake is what those in the For the Many faction are trying to achieve and the lengths they will go to succeed, even if that includes destroying the party’s base. Karie Murphy was Corbyn’s Chief of Staff between 2017 and 2019. She was, and possibly still is, in a relationship with former Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey. Both have been accused of financial irregularities in their union roles.

Murphy was the branch secretary of Unison’s Glasgow Community Health branch from the mid-90s and was accused of financial irregularities by Unison in 2006. Murphy denied the claims and resigned before there was a disciplinary hearing. In 2013, she sought nomination as a Labour candidate in Falkirk, Scotland. However, Labour investigated the selection process due to accusations of vote-rigging … by Unite the Union.

More recently, there has been a furore with the Unite union regarding the use of member funds being ploughed into a white elephant project to build a hotel and conference complex, with McCluskey handing over vast sums of union funds to the main contractor – allegedly a close friend of his. The Observer also ran a story in September 2025, reporting that McCluskey had spent union funds to conceal his clandestine romantic affair with Murphy from the public.

Clearly, neither of these people should be anywhere near the leadership of a new socialist organisation. But it also points to the roles and influence of the trade union bureaucracy in Your Party, no doubt looking for a new home with the prospect of Labour suffering massive defeat in the May council, Holyrood and Senedd elections. This is not the basis of a mass party, rooted in communities, workplaces and movements. It is a poor attempt at a Labour 2.0 that requires the purging of embedded community and workplace activists, keeping just enough members to keep the show on the road for those pulling the strings at the top.

The treatment of Your Party members in Scotland is deeply disrespectful and damaging. What’s more, it comes at a time when the world is facing endless war, economic chaos, a cost-of-living crisis, and climate breakdown. The far right is on the rise. International law is meaningless, and genocide is blatantly declared without so much as a blink.

We live in times when there is not even the slimmest veneer of rules and justice. The trust of ordinary people in politicians and institutions could hardly be any lower. The machinations at the top of Your Party simply reinforce that sentiment when what we urgently need is a strong, united and grounded left opposition to it. Let’s hope there is still enough fight in people to help build the coalitions we need as we face these dangerous times.