Your Party Scotland resignations – our view
Socialist Party Scotland statement
The entire interim leadership of Your Party Scotland (ISEC) has resigned in protest at the actions of the majority of the party’s UK Central Executive Committee (CEC). The resignations – from their positions and from membership of Your Party – include the elected CEC member from Scotland.
Their statement declares that “the need for a new party on the left in Scotland couldn’t be more urgent, and it’s our clear intention to continue working towards this.” At a meeting of 175 Your Party Scotland members on Sunday 12 April, there was also strong support for breaking with YP at a UK level and setting up a new party.
The CEC, as soon as it was formed, worked to ignore, undermine, and reverse key decisions taken at the YP conference in Liverpool in November, and at the supposedly “autonomous” Scottish conference held in Dundee in February 2026. The CEC is made up of a majority of those who were part of “The Many” slate – led by Jeremy Corbyn – that won the election earlier this year defeating Zarah Sultana’s “Grassroots Alliance.”
Dual membership
The Scottish conference in Dundee supported dual membership rights for parties that “align with our values,” as did the Liverpool conference. The CEC majority has now produced a list of socialist parties and organisations whose members are to be excluded from membership of YP.
Included on that list of banned organisations was the Socialist Party. This would, if it maintains, result in the exclusion of all members of Socialist Party Scotland and the Socialist Party England and Wales from membership of YP.
Our members include leading trade unionists with a long record of struggle. Our tactics, strategy, and ideas also played a key role in building the movement of mass non-payment that defeated the poll tax, and Thatcher with it, as well as the huge reforms carried out by the socialist Liverpool City Council in the 1980s. It is unclear how these working-class victories, won by those struggles, are considered not to align with the values of Your Party.
In the email sent to all members by the CEC, they state: “Our Party invites all socialists and socialist parties to join us in order to build a mass, democratic party where every member’s voice counts. All those willing to join Your Party’s mission are welcome!”
However, in the same email, they go on: “members of other national political parties that do not align with these core values of openness are ineligible for membership of Your Party. This includes parties that maintain strict internal discipline and binding lines that are incompatible with transparency and accountability within Your Party.”
To justify this conclusion, they state: “Transparent, democratic decision-making – the lifeblood of a member-led party – is only possible when every member is able to trust that, whatever differences of opinion arise, all members put Your Party’s interests first. This trust cannot be built when some members – their identities not always known – vote according to a line set elsewhere, for the benefit of another party.”
As Hannah Sell, general secretary of the Socialist Party England and Wales, explained in her recent letter to Your Party officers: “But what does this mean? In any left party members, and leaders, are subject to huge outside pressures which – unlike membership of a socialist organisation – are aimed at wrecking the left party. Remember the battles that took place in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and the gigantic pressures that were exerted by the capitalist press and right wing media, as well as the Blairite wing of the party, to ditch Corbyn for someone more ‘moderate’, that is safe for capitalism?
“There are many lessons to be learnt from that period, but a key one is that it is impossible to have a party sealed off from ‘outside’ influences. Instead, a mass membership organised in a democratic structure, and based on the working class, is the only effective way to counter the pressures of the capitalist class. In our view, Marxist organisations also have a crucial role to play. It is not an accident that expelling Militant from the Labour Party was a prerequisite step on the long road to its transformation into ‘New Labour’.
“When Socialist Party members have argued for Your Party to oppose cuts in local services, or for the party to be built on a federal basis, with the trade unions playing a central role, we have been putting ‘Your Party’s interests’ first, as we see them. Others clearly have different ideas for what is in the best interests of Your Party, but that is inevitable. It is not possible to create a new mass workers’ party without different views and trends within it.”
Holyrood election
The resignation of the YP Scotland leadership was not, however, primarily about the dual membership issue alone. The CEC had also set out to block decisions of the YP Scotland conference, including the decision to stand candidates in the Holyrood election. They refused to allow discussion of this issue at the first meeting of the CEC in March, after ignoring all requests from the ISEC for assistance in getting candidate selection up and running from February onwards.
Farcically, after weeks of delay and obstruction, the CEC decided to ignore the decisions made in Dundee and asked Scottish members to vote again online on whether they wanted to stand. This was done just five days before the deadline for candidate nominations. They also blocked all access to membership data by the Scottish leadership, making the democratic selection of candidates impossible.
In effect, the decisions of YP Scotland conference have been overridden by the UK CEC. Underlining the complete cloth-eared approach to the rights of a supposedly autonomous Scottish Your Party. This is nothing but a continuation of the mistaken approach made towards the Scottish national question by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the past and currently.
Socialist Party Scotland members have participated in the Your Party process – including discussions in Collective Scotland that preceded it – for the past year. We have long advocated the building of a mass workers’ party based on the trade unions and the organised working class.
While it was clear from early on that the leading elements of what became Your Party would not rise to that task – and were led by political forces that did not intend to turn to the workers’ movement – we still saw the potential within it.
The initial waves of enthusiasm for YP reflected that potential, with 800,000 people going online to indicate their support for a new party led by Jeremy Corbyn. In addition, opinion polls showing support for YP at 10-15% last year. The failure to stand YP candidates widely is a boost to parties of cuts and austerity, including Reform UK.
Notwithstanding the bureaucratic stranglehold that ‘The Many’ faction has on YP, we did not support Zarah Sultana and her supporters. This is due not least to their opposition to allowing democratic trade union affiliation to YP and the building of a mass workers’ party based on a fighting socialist programme aimed at uniting the working class. Additionally, they continually emphasised building a party of the “left,” rather than primarily aiming to win over the millions of workers and young people who are currently not in any party.
When it was clear that Your Party Scotland would be unable to stand for Holyrood, Scottish TUSC took the decision to challenge in six parliamentary constituencies, giving a quarter of a million voters the chance to vote socialist. TUSC is also standing 298 candidates in England for the council elections, as well as candidates for the Senedd in Wales.
Many Your Party members are supporting these election challenges by TUSC, which is very welcome. Your Party are standing 20 candidates in England for the council election and none in Scotland or Wales – underlining the missed opportunity by Your Party to assist in offering a stronger anti-cuts, socialist election alternative.
Bans and proscriptions of the Socialist Party – formerly Militant – are not new. For example in the Labour Party they were carried out by a leadership attempting to consolidate its base using bureaucratic methods to shift the party politically to the right, making it safer for capitalist interests.
In contrast, the approach of the Socialist Party is to engage in political debate and clarification, raising the level of understanding of the tasks facing socialists.
Socialist Party Scotland will continue to advocate for the building of a mass working-class political voice that can offer a fighting socialist alternative to parties of cuts and capitalism. We will fight within the trade unions to advocate steps towards building such a force.
We will also seek discussions with those socialists leaving Your Party Scotland and those who remain in Your Party, encouraging them to work with us in these efforts – including in the remainder of the Scottish TUSC Holyrood election campaign and in preparation for the 2027 council elections.
We appeal to any current and former YP Scotland members to contact us to continue these discussions.
