A year on from the inaugural meeting of the local branch of the new party now led in parliament by Jeremy Corbyn, and the organisers of Your Party in Croydon are finally being allowed to know who are their members in the borough.
Slow progress: Jeremy Corbyn, Your Party’s parliamentary leader, has been much criticised
“Hooray!” said one socialist stalwart, with more than a touch of irony, as the in-fighting which characterised Your Party’s founding conference last year has continued, with a series of controversial suspensions, resignations from senior positions and claims and counter-claims about how the party nationally is being mismanaged.
The latest to quit is Noor Begum, Your Party’s elected spokesperson, citing “serious concerns”.
Begum’s concerns related to “legal, compliance, data protection, governance, liability, insurance, and organisational standards”.
In her resignation letter, she wrote: “These concerns have too often been ignored or dismissed. I have also found the culture, lack of effective leadership and perceived double standards to be deeply disappointing.”
In-fighting: it has taken Your Party a year to allow its grassroots organisers to… well… organise
Your Party is supposedly run by a collective leadership, through the CEC, or Central Executive Committee, where Jenny Forbes is chair and the secretary is Dawn Aspinall.
Last month, a motion of no confidence in Forbes and Aspinall was raised at the CEC. According to Begum, the motion “was passed by a clear majority”.
She wrote: “The subsequent refusal to recognise the outcome of that vote, together with continued manoeuvring, negative briefings and pressure to disregard the democratic will of members has further eroded my confidence in the current leadership.”
With no membership data and little by way of funds, Your Party in Croydon was unable to field more than a single token candidate in May’s local elections, and did little campaigning: Mel Mullings won 327 votes, finishing 16th in Thornton Heath ward.
In the first flush of enthusiasm last year, 800,000 people registered their interest in the new party within days of it being (somewhat chaotically) announced by co-founder Zarah Sultana MP. By comparison, after five years of Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party, they are now down to their lowest membership tally since 2014: 260,000.
Even the inherent divisions within a party which began with two separate, competing portals to receive millions of pounds in subscriptions from grassroots members has not deterred those in Your Party Croydon’s “proto-branch”: not only has it had no money and no membership list, almost 12 months on from its first meeting, it was still to be officially sanctioned by those at the top of Your Party.
‘Proto-secretary’: YP Croydon’s David White
“These won’t be branches in the old familiar model. Many people have too much experience of torturous branch meetings that turn into endless arguments between a few key players over the wording of motions, with little impact on the world outside,” the Your Party website says.
“It drains the life out of you,” said the people who have just presided over 12 months of torturous in-fighting and endless arguments that have little impact on the world outside.
Some remain undaunted. “In Croydon we have built a successful proto-branch,” David White, the proto-secretary of the proto-branch, says.
“It has held regular meetings for the past year, taken part in a wide range of campaigns and even fought an election. Train driver and Black Lives Matter activist Mel Mullings was our candidate in Thornton Heath in the local elections in May this year.
“One thing that held us back is that we didn’t have access locally to Your Party’s membership data for Croydon. So we could only directly contact people we happened to know.
“Now, at a meeting on August 1, we have been able to hold an inaugural ‘official’ branch meeting. This will lead to our having the membership data.
“So, Your Party Croydon will continue campaigning on issues that matter to people – cost of living, housing, opposition to council cuts, anti-racism, climate change, opposition to genocide in Gaza and much more.”
It is reckoned that Your Party has 400 members across Croydon.
White says that anyone interested in finding out more about Your Party in Croydon should email them directly at yourpartycroydon@gmail.com.
Read more: Can Corbyn’s ‘Your Party’ handle its daunting challenges?
Read more: Four black women among six councillors rejected by Labour
Read more: Mounting complaints of suspected fraud in Labour’s selections
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