Coup de Grâce: Trotskyist organizations purged from Your Party

Professor John Kelly

On 12 April the Your Party Central Executive Committee (CEC) voted to proscribe organizations ‘that operate according to principles of democratic centralism, with their own internal decision-making processes and systems of accountability and discipline, binding on their members’ and the ensuing, non-exhaustive list included Britain’s two largest Trotskyist groups, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party as well as six other far-left organizations:

This decision has finally destroyed the dream, shared by 14 Trotskyist organizations, of transforming Your Party into a mass, radical socialist party in which they would wield enormous influence. Yet only four months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the founding conference, Trotskyists were still upbeat and fairly positive about their prospects within the new organization. So how did it all go so wrong for them, and so quickly? To answer that question, we need to return to the weekend of 29-30 November and reconsider the events of the founding conference and the subsequent electoral contest for the YP leadership.

The Founding Conference

The Trotskyist left approached the founding conference of Your Party with considerable optimism despite the prohibitions previously announced by the party leadership. According to its provisional rules, members of other political parties were ineligible to join Your Party or be selected as delegates to its Founding Conference, i.e. ‘dual party membership’ was forbidden. On the eve of conference at least five members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) received email notification of their expulsion and on the opening day of conference several members of Counterfire (a 2010 breakaway from the SWP) were denied entry. Co-founder Zarah Sultana protested these actions by boycotting the first day of conference although she attended, and spoke, on the second day. Nevertheless, detailed accounts of the founding conference seemed to bear out far left optimism: the Socialist Party for example (formerly the Militant Tendency) claimed at its Saturday night fringe meeting to have around 70 delegates at the conference and announced the following week that 11 of them had spoken from the rostrum (see here)

SWP speakers were also plentiful, including longstanding member Amy Leather who announced that she had been expelled the previous day but bizarrely was allowed to continue speaking! Given the SWP’s assiduous involvement in Your Party over many months it would be surprising if they didn’t have at least a similar number of delegates to their Socialist Party rival. If we also include known speakers from other Trotskyist groups, notably Counterfire, rs21 and Socialist Alternative, it seems likely there were at least 150 Trotskyist delegates amongst the 1,500 or so at the Founding Conference, an astonishing achievement for a movement ostensibly precluded by rule from attending.

On the key, and contentious, issue of ‘dual membership’, delegates were presented with just two options. An outright ban was supported by just 30.8 per cent of those voting (a mixture of conference delegates and party members online) whilst the clear majority – 69.2 per cent – opted to permit dual membership with national political parties provided they were ‘aligning with the Party’s values’ and subject to the approval of the yet-to-be-elected Central Executive Committee. Whilst Trotskyists would undoubtedly have preferred a motion offering unqualified approval for dual membership, they took the overwhelming rejection of an outright ban as a clear expression of the spirit of the conference and the Party at large and a green light for their continued participation. The other highly contentious structural issue was the choice between a single Party leader or the collective leadership of an elected committee. Trotskyists also won on this issue, albeit narrowly, with collective leadership attracting 51.6 per cent of votes cast. The largest votes -over 10,000 - were recorded on substantive issues arising from the party’s Political Statement, as delegates overwhelmingly backed amendments declaring that Your Party was an anti-austerity, socialist organization, in favour of trans liberation and with the working class at its heart. But a number of significant Trotskyist-backed propositions on the exclusive role of party branch meetings and annual conference were defeated. Should motions and delegates to annual conference be elected by quorate branch meetings, often attended and influenced by the most active and vocal members or should the much larger, online membership also have a say? Delegates voted to preserve the rights of online members not attending branch meetings and took a similar view of the proceedings of conference, asserting that voting on motions would involve the entire membership, both in-person and online and would not be confined to conference delegates.

Based on figures from the Your Party website, the majority of members did not register in order to participate in any of the 28 votes held during its founding conference. The largest number of registered voters was 23,258, which equates to just 42.3 per cent of the claimed 55,000 membership. Yet the actual votes cast for each of the motions and amendments varied between a low of 6,941 and a high of 10,906 (with a mean of 9,026), indicating that even a majority of registered voters didn’t actually vote at all. Measured as a percentage of total membership, voting turnout varied between 12.2 and 19.8 per cent, averaging just 16.4 per cent. From the standpoint of the Trotskyist left and with an eye to the leadership elections in the new year, these figures were potentially encouraging because, other things equal, low election turnouts tend to favour the most highly organized groups within the electorate, primarily but not exclusively the Trotskyist left.

Overall then, Trotskyist assessments of the conference were generally positive:

‘Your Party leadership loses key votes at conference’ (Socialist Workers Party, 30 November)

‘Your Party: the left in ascendant but what next?’ (Counterfire, 1 December)

‘Build on victories at Your Party conference: get organised!’ (Socialist Alternative, 2 December)

That said, there were a few notes of caution and uncertainty:

‘Your Party exists! Now the hard work begins…(Anti-Capitalist Resistance, 1 December)

‘Where does Your Party conference put us on the course towards a new mass workers’ party?’ (Socialist Party, 3 December)

Contesting elections to the Central Executive Committee (CEC): first setbacks

The original timetable for CEC elections stated that nominations would open 5 January, confirmation of candidates with the requisite number of endorsements would take place by the beginning of February and voting would occur between the 9 and 23 February. Detailed electoral rules were to be drawn up by the interim party leadership and published 8 December but did not actually materialize until two days before Christmas. Under those rules two candidates would be elected from each of nine regions, plus one each from Scotland and Wales, as well as four ‘public office holders’, such as councillors or MPs. But to the consternation of the Trotskyist left, and notwithstanding the conference vote, Rule 2 re-asserted an unambiguous ban on dual membership: ‘For the avoidance of doubt, members of other national political parties shall not be permitted to stand for election.’ This statement alone made it abundantly clear that the leaders of Your Party were not going to tolerate Trotskyist entrism into the organization and it triggered a frantic series of meetings over Christmas and New Year, involving at least six Trotskyist groups, as well as other supporters of Zarah Sultana who were also supporters of dual membership. The outcome of these discussions was a punchy political statement of socialist and anti-imperialist principles, drafted by Zarah Sultana, and a set of candidates who would contest the CEC elections as the ‘Grassroots Left’

https://grassrootsleft.org/

The SWP declined to offer any candidates, perhaps fearing they would be barred by the YP leadership from standing, and in the event the final candidate selection meeting declined to include any Trotskyist candidates on its slate, although it did agree to ‘endorse’ Michael Lavalette, a Preston councillor and Counterfire member. Notwithstanding the dearth of ‘their’ candidates, seven Trotskyist groups, including the SWP, Counterfire, Socialist Alternative and rs21, firmly backed the Grassroots Left slate and urged their members within Your Party to vote for it.

Meantime, the Socialist Party had decided to steer clear of the Grassroots Left group and field its own candidates, including the former Labour MP Dave Nellist. On 7 January they published an Open Letter to the Your Party leadership, asking for ‘clarification’ of the electoral rules but insisting nonetheless they should be allowed to stand their own candidates. Since the rules were perfectly clear, no reply was necessary and none was sent. The Socialist Party went ahead and proposed four candidates from their own ranks, Dave Nellist, April Ashley, Mushin Manir and Rob Rooney, but within a matter of weeks all four had been barred and their appeals rejected. Curiously Ruth Cashman was allowed to stand as a candidate in London despite her well-known membership of the small Trotskyist group, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a fact omitted from her election address (and in similar vein Michael Lavelette’s election statement made no mention of his membership of Counterfire). By mid-January Jeremy Corbyn had announced his own slate of candidates – The Many – and the CEC election became, in effect, a factional battle despite the presence of a small number of independent candidates. On one side was the Corbyn grouping, adhering to a left social democratic platform, and on the other side was the Sultana grouping, pushing a more radical socialist set of policies.

Corbyn’s election victory: another setback for the Trotskyist left

Some on the Trotskyist left were reasonably optimistic about the leadership elections:

‘The fact that the unelected clique currently controlling YP HQ are resorting to these kinds of methods [the ban on Socialist Party candidates] indicates clearly that they are losing the argument among members.’ (Socialist Alternative, 21 January)

‘Your Party can come out of the gate after the CEC elections swinging, empowering branches to organise around immediate concerns from housing to climate to fighting the far right.’ (Anti-Capitalist Resistance, 29 January)

The dominant mood however was more guarded and uncertain:

‘.. the CEC elections matter. Your Party can move forward with a collective leadership that recognises that the antidote to the factionalism is to allow members’ democracy and local branches to flourish. This can begin to re-engage the roughly 800,000 who originally signed up.’ (Socialist Workers Party, 18 February)

‘Michael Lavalette, a Counterfire member, is standing in the ‘public office holders’ section – which means anyone in the country can vote for him. When YP launched it met with huge excitement. But factionalism has debilitated YP and these elections will be crucial to determine its future direction.’ (Counterfire, 8 February)

The final outcome was therefore particularly disappointing, with Corbyn’s group winning 14 of the 24 seats, Sultana’s Grassroots Left securing just seven and three seats going to Independents. The ‘Trotskyist’ candidates, Michael Lavalette and Ruth Cashman, secured around 10 per cent and 5 per cent of the vote respectively and neither was elected. There were 25,347 votes cast in the election, which was reported on the Your Party website as 61.8 per cent of verified membership, a figure that translates into a membership total of just 41,015 rather than the commonly cited figures of 55,000 or 60,000.

If the election result constituted a major setback for the Grassroots Left, this was not apparent from the initial Trotskyist responses which comprised a mixture of bravado and wishful thinking:

‘After a bitter campaign, Your Party has the opportunity to put factionalism behind it and become a united, insurgent party.’ (Counterfire, 26 February)

‘The result has to immediately be a spur for getting Your Party back on the right track with no delay.’ (Socialist Worker’s Party, 4 March)

‘..the struggle for a democratic, socialist party continues..’ (Socialist Alternative, 26 February)

Trotskyist hopes for reconciliation or compromise between the Corbyn and Sultana factions at the early meetings of the new Central Executive Committee (CEC) were swiftly dashed. At the first full meeting of the CEC, 8 March, the Sultana’s Grassroots Left group tabled fifteen amendments to the CEC Standing Orders and Code of Conduct. All but one were rejected and the vote margin was almost invariably 14 against (the entire complement of Corbyn’s The Many group) with 9 in favour (the Grassroots Left seven plus two Independents). The same meeting voted to elect officers, such as Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer and Secretary and there were at least two nominations for each position, one from each faction. All seven posts went to members of the Corbyn faction and the voting ran consistently on factional lines, 14 to 9. In other words, and notwithstanding prior Trotskyist talk of ‘working together’ and ‘building unity’, the voting proceeded entirely on factional lines as the Corbyn group firmly and unambiguously asserted their authority.

12 April CEC: the coup de grâce for the Trotskyist left

Shortly before the 12 April CEC party officers circulated their paper calling for a prohibition of dual membership, provoking outrage on the Trotskyist left and strident denunciations of ‘the witch hunt’, ‘the blacklist’, the ‘bans and expulsions’. It was repeatedly claimed that such a measure was a violation of the November conference vote to reject an outright ban. That is true….but it is also true that conference voted in favour of dual membership with two key provisos: that the values of those other parties were aligned with those of Your Party; and that the CEC gave its approval to such parties. Consequently the Corbyn majority on the CEC voted to ban dual membership, overriding the opposition from Grassroots Left and two Independents, and bringing to an abrupt end the organized Trotskyist presence in Your Party.

This outcome was both predictable and predicted. Corbyn’s group had made clear their intransigent opposition to dual membership as far back as 24 September when the new membership portal categorically precluded members of other parties from joining Your Party. Their position was re-affirmed in the draft Constitution, released on 17 October; reiterated with the eve-of-conference expulsions of several leading Trotskyists; affirmed once again in the CEC election rules issued 23 December; reinforced by the prohibition of Socialist Party candidates from contesting the CEC election; and finally achieved thanks to the election victory of the Corbyn faction. The 12 April ban on dual membership was therefore a consummation of their long-cherished ambition to purge Your Party once and for all of its unwelcome Trotskyist interlopers.