The Scottish branch of Your Party is dead, for now. On 13 April, all 12 members of Your Party’s interim Scottish executive committee (ISEC) resigned en masse, declaring the party’s Scotland branch “over”, and pledging to form a rival left-wing party. The resignations followed a meeting of 200 members of Your Party Scotland on 12 April.
The leadership struggle at the top of the party ended on 26 February when Jeremy Corbyn’s faction, The Many, beat Zarah Sultana’s slate, Grassroots Left, in the party’s central executive committee elections. But intra-party relations are still strained, and now frustrations north of the border with party leadership have culminated in this mass resignation. Niall Christie, the sole Scottish member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC, Your Party’s ruling body), has also resigned from his position. Christie ran as an independent candidate in the CEC elections, although he was endorsed by Sultana’s slate.
In their joint resignation statement, ISEC cited “consistent contempt” shown towards them by Your Party leadership. The interim committee (which, as a Your Party source pointed out, was not directly elected by members) had been hoping to field Your Party candidates in the upcoming Holyrood elections, which will take place on 7 May. However, in a vote taken on 27 March, Your Party members in Scotland voted not to field candidates. The ISEC also claimed proposals tabled by Christie have been “repeatedly ignored” by Your Party’s chair, Jennifer Forbes, and further accuse the party leadership of ignoring requests by Your Party Scotland for support and discussions.
In his resignation statement, Christie wrote that this moment shows Your Party has “run out of road”. “This is in no small part down to the consistent disrespect shown to Scotland and Scottish members, with decisions about us being made without our input, and on our behalf,” he said. “My own main takeaway, having been involved in Your Party, is that whatever comes next must be built in Scotland, by Scotland, for Scotland. Anything else is doomed to fail.”
The New Statesman understands that Your Party now plans to hold an election so Scottish members can elect an official Scottish Executive Committee with elections overseen by the CEC. Until such an election, a committee of Scottish members will be selected via sortition in order to help establish local branches. (Sortition is the selection of political officials or citizens’ assembly members by lottery, designed to ensure a representative sample of the population.)
A spokesperson for Your Party thanked Christie and the interim committee members for their “contribution to support members in Scotland”. They added: “We understand these members disagreed with the vote taken by Scottish members not to stand candidates for the upcoming Holyrood elections. That is their right.” The spokesperson added “every decision about Your Party in Scotland will be taken by members in Scotland.”
This incident will not have much material impact on how the party will approach the Holyrood elections. Recruiting and fielding Your Party candidates in this set of elections was never part of the central party’s plan. In an interview in March, Corbyn and Forbes told the New Statesman that due to the close timeline between the CEC elections and the May elections, the party planned to funnel its resources into supporting community independents (local left-wing, mainly pro-Gaza parties which have strong links to Corbyn – such as the Newham Independents) rather than fielding its own set of Your Party candidates.
All of this is a consequence of Your Party’s struggle to become a mass left-wing movement. Now it is wearied by months of factional struggles and is stuck in the shadow of Zack Polanski’s Green Party. So far, Your Party’s story is a tale of competing visions. And Corbyn’s slate winning the CEC elections appears not to have settled these tensions. Is Your Party’s dissolution in Scotland simply a fluke? Or is it a sign of more splits to come?
[Further reading: Labour picks a new fight over the EU]
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