Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 3

[fromorbit]

Welcome to Part 3 of Mumsnet charting the drama inside Your Party. We have followed YP from the start when it looked liked it might be a major player to its ongoing internal row which has left it struggling.

We have the best and funniest commentary on British hard left wing politics, looking not just at YP itself, but wider issues plaguing the left. Dominated by the problem which weirdly didn't worry Marx, the Chartists, Anarchists, Trade Unionists, even Communist regimes, or much of the long history of left wing feminists, but suddenly in the last ten or so years has become huge. Is Human biology a thing ? Are men in dresses the most oppressed people on the planet even if they are billionaires?

Currently we are looking at Your Party internal elections which have been dominated by the split between the Corbyn and Sultana factions who have different visions of how the party should look. Summarised here:

Your Party? Whose elections?
https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2026-01-21/your-party-whose-elections?language_content_entity=en

Sultana's Grassroots Left slate not only added Corbyn without permission but others. It seems they are being denounced for undemocratic manoeuvres.

Fractures amongst Sultana's shadow caucus have opened up
https://skidrowradio.substack.com/p/the-slate-that-wasnt

As always the Men in Dresses have outsize importance. The Trans Liberation group are backing the Sultanate Grassroots Left faction, but things as always are messy.

The set up of the YP voting also means there are male and female posts in each region. The non binary types are claiming this is unfair what about them:
Is this trolling? LGBTQIA+ group demand "non-binary" CEC spots
A Your Party clique is infuriated that non-men/women isn't a category for the elections.
https://skidrowradio.substack.com/p/is-this-trolling-lgbtqia-group-demand

There is plenty more crazy to come.

Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 1
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5394557-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread

Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 2
All about the conference and run up which really saw YP faction fighting intensify. Highlights included a Scottish "trans" male sex pest berating the conference.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5440730-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread-part-2?page=1

The Dem Soc (I can't remember what faction they are. Sultana aligned I presume) are now also proposing the "Zionism is racism" motion that got bundled off the green party conference last weekend.

https://nitter.net/charliemansell/status/2039674415311397132#m

Further down in the Charlie Mansell thread is a claim from green aligned LGBTQ account stats for lefties that Corbyn has endorsed Walsall candidates for councillors who were Tory as recently as January

That sounds a bit like the Respect councillors in Tower Hamlets back in the day who, once they concluded Respect was a dead duck, defected to any party that made them an offer. Once councillor who was a paid up SWP member at the time went to the Tories.

I don't see why West Midlands/Azad Kashmir politics should be any different from East London/Sylhet politics, but Jeremy likes to believe all these councillors are ideological left wingers.

I Paraphrase as you said earlier, but left wing in the sense of wanting better public services but not in the sense of wanting Max Shanly to be state funded to sit on his arse and write Haiku's all day.

It's looking like Gaza independents are set to gain control of Birmingham council from polling.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/exclusive-shock-poll-predicts-local-33565940

Potentially with the greens but maybe not given the reaction of chief agitant brother Akhmed Yakoob to the camp dancing at the Together Alliance march against the far right last weekend

I think we most likley need an exemplar council or two to be taken by the Greens, Reform or Muslim Independents to illustrate how they are not any kind of sensible solution to anything.

Ayoub Khan MP (nominally still Your Party) was urging the army to be called in to clear up the backlogs for the bin strikes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/send-troops-plea-army-clean-31331958.amp

The millieu over the Workers/ political factions of the Gaza independents in Brum isn't very clear to me so you don't know how, or if it would be resolved.

Your Party to focus local election efforts on backing independent candidates
Party insiders have intentionally narrowed their focus to key targets including the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Redbridge, where locally rooted independent campaigns are already braced to challenge Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn’s allies will back 250 candidates, the majority of them standing under independent or local banners rather than the Your Party brand.

At the seemingly chaotic party conference in November, the party appeared to accept a targeted approach was necessary rather than standing everywhere. One insider said the approach was to “focus on particular areas and bastions” where the party could build durable local bases, rather than compete everywhere at once.
As well as London, this includes cities such as Bradford and Birmingham, where Labour’s vote has been increasingly vulnerable, particularly among Muslim

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/02/your-party-to-focus-local-election-efforts-on-backing-independent-candidates

Will these candidates have to repent the sin of being landlords, local big time capitalists, and generally skeptical on LGBT matters?
Or is it just enough that they're anti Zionist/pro Gaza?

Newham Independents Party might even win the council outright, but the mistake the white left make is to assume that, because NIP is pro-Gaza and Muslim-led, that means it's left wing. From observation, it's basically pro-small business and pro-motorist, and seems particularly vexed by LTNs and parking charges. They had Corbyn and Iqbal Mohamed at their big meeting over the new year - that said, Corbyn might have been the only white person in the room.

It'll be an interesting place to watch. It's a highly deprived borough where Labour hasn't had any serious challenge for about a century. It can't help Labour that the local party has been in special measures for years, or that there's been factional infighting over the mayoral selection, or that Labour HQ has forced a bunch of councillors to stand down because the number who had family ties (spouses, siblings, parent/child) with other councillors was ridiculous even by East End standards.

I'd bet on NIP winning any ward that's more than 35% Muslim, the Greens to do well in certain other wards, and as a joker in the pack, the former long-time Labour mayor has defected to Reform.

Comrade Sultana demonstrating she is on the right side of history and fighting the Far Right by

Checks

Complaining about Kanye West being denied a visa after releasing songs called heil Hitler and selling t-shirts with swastikas on them.

https://nitter.net/OzKaterji/status/2041513195039285500#m

Oddly this puts her on the same viewpoint as Nigel Farage

triggering Jeremy

https://nitter.net/jeremycorbyn/status/2041853442826641519#m

Rare example these days of a joke from HIGNY that lands.

Maybe in 2045 Hislop will tentatively try a joke about TRAs.

Friday night is Leninist affiliate Purge Night over at Your Party

https://nitter.net/charliemansell/status/2042679894014881929#m

"Your Party“ proscribe more Leninist organisations in a day than Labour did in the last 6 years!

Top factoid from Shanly that in 2016 Corbyn voted to abolish his incoming majority on the NEC bc he misunderstood the meaning of the vote

https://nitter.net/DouglasGibb2002/status/2042685319330312498#m

I have no problem with the idea of proscribing the SWP or the SPEW or the Weedy Wanker. I think the AWL would be more likely to be good boys, but their pro-Israel line probably doesn't make them popular.

If you're a Leninist group and you want to be in a bigger party, the least you can do is follow the example of Workers Power and pretend you've dissolved. Openly maintaining your own paper and membership and internal discipline is a bit much for any party to take.

For instance, in "People Before Profit" in Ireland, the SWP dropped their "party" designation and now claim to be a "network", even though they actually run the thing.

That's the Scottish branch gone:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/6682449c-9b8d-4264-87a8-fe6a6b1bb958?shareToken=358d09b1235ca34cec25b2d12056c102&ver=article

Dear oh dear

The purge is causing huge drama. Counterfire reports:

https://www.counterfire.org/article/your-party-a-squandered-opportunity/

I don't think we have mentioned that the released list of YP backed Independents had to be revised when a bunch turned out to be former Tories from a Muslim background.

A pity they didn't do it soon enough to run candidates and damage the Scottish Greens.

I might be wrong, but I think Lavalette only uses the word "Muslim" in that article when he's describing Sultana. Otherwise he just talks about networks of independent candidates who are anti-war and anti-austerity(*)

Michael isn't a deep thinker, but he knows who he owes his council seat in Preston to, and that is local Muslims who he's got a long term relationship with via his grassroots activism (basically Palestine plus hyperlocal concerns) and I doubt if many of them know Counterfire exists.

Also a bit cheeky to blame Corbyn's inner circle when CF's leadership (hello Lindsey, hello John) are deeply embedded in that circle, though in classic "the good tsar and his bad advisers" style Michael doesn't blame Corbyn himself for any of this, and similarly fudges Sultana's involvement in the dodgy portal etc. CF are talking up grassroots politics while playing Renaissance court politics and flattering the MPs to expand their own influence.

(*) Michael I'm sure knows much more than me about the independent councillors in Lancashire, but from my experience the one thing the Muslim independents in East London are unanimously opposed to is LTNs. Looking at the small business backgrounds of the people involved, it's not at all surprising that Newham Independents are very pro-motorist. I wonder if this will be a barrier to them forming an opportunistic coalition with the Greens. Again, it's amazing how lightly Michael skips over the nature of the community independent groups.

Lavalette can't face the truth that a left style party can't survive without ethnic votes now and those voters in fact can be pretty right wing in economics and socially. Where Independent Gaza locals used to have supress their thinking they have a big enough bloc to do their own thing.

When those groups win a lot of seats in May they will be even more confident.

The same issue the Greens are facing in medium term. An alliance of Gaza voters, LGBTQ+, environmentalists, NIMBYs, socialists and liberals has serious issues especially without party structures to quiet dissent.

British politics is reordering.

I'd argue that this alliance of opposites has always really depended on Labour controlling serious layers of government (if not national then at least local/devolved) so it can be the mechanism for handing out goodies to preferred constituencies.

It doesn't have to be Labour - the SNP and in some local areas the Lib Dems have had a fair stab at it - but I'm not convinced the Greens are mature enough to pull it off, and Lavalette being disappointed that Muslim independents in Walsall aren't behaving like Militant Liverpool in the 1980s seems to me a bit of a category error.

A disgruntled candidate for Your Party CEC is now threatening to sue them for breach on contract (? Is that even possible? Iirc party of them are a private company) and has contacted the Good Law Project to begin proceedings.

https://nitter.net/Wrevolution/status/2043947231150027163#m.

So, a likely win for Corbzy after all😝

After all the endless faff about creating the most complex party constitution imaginable (Ben Habib doesn't know he's born), I suppose it was inevitable that someone would sue to force Corbzy to rerun the election under a different system that you need to be a mathematician to understand.

And then they wonder why they can't get normies to vote for them.

Well this is a curve ball.

Remember the Together Alliance march on a few weekends back. Trade unions and left parties marching against the threat of populism and the far right. Zack Polanski twerking on stage. Vows to shun the like of Farage.

It turns out Unite (who cut their Labour party subs by 40%) have been holding secret talks with Reform about ending the Birmingham bin strikes. You know, the pivotal cause for Your Party that got Sultana on the picket line pledging solidarity

https://nitter.net/zarahsultana/status/2017320088454533552#m
https://nitter.net/patrickkmaguire/status/2044889712041635961#m

Times (paywalled) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/unite-labour-reform-farage-birmingham-bin-strike-ftsk2707m

As noted in one of the replies, the whole impetus of the dispute is an equal pay claim that, if the union won and kept the specific role in place, would leave the council in breach potentially of the equality act. Reform have said they want to scrap the act, if I remember

https://nitter.net/DanielDieppe/status/2044911047476134359#m

Sharetoken for the Times article:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/d2683840-48ba-48c3-b15b-04450467f555?shareToken=8e7355084424e0a0e8292771aa2aa611&ver=article

Was watching bits of the Starmer statement this afternoon. Lee Anderson had already been kicked out for calling Starmer a liar. By this evening Sultana had managed it too but seems to be getting the headlines and plaudits from Reform types on Twitter.

I did see she wasn't sitting close to Corbyn who'd tried to ask forensic questions from the backbenches