Cover photo: From a recent publication of the venerable Electoral Reform Society founded in 1884.

Three items in today’s THE LEFT LANE

1. The fact that this many people could die from global warming in 25 years from now is overlooked by the mainstream media. (From Media Lens/ Click below on underlined words)

4 Billion Dead: ‘There Are No Words’

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2. Sincere apologies to subscribers

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3. Burnham & proportional representation: will he make good on promises. Or instead pull a Justin Trudeau caper?

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2. Sincere apologies to subscribers

As the editor of THE LEFT LANE (TLL), I want to offer my sincere apologies to TLL subscribers who are still receiving emails from an organisation that has no connection whatsoever with TLL. I understand three such non-consensual mails have been sent out. The latest was on Friday, 21 August from a group called “LEFT FIELD”.

In the TLL issue of 4 August, I explained that this spring I helped to launch a new publication – let’s call it TLL #2 – and agreed it could use THE LEFT LANE name, logo, and its subscribers list of +1100 names I had gathered since January 2024. Between May Day and late July, you would have received weekly digests by email from TLL#2.

However about 1 August, three key members of the TLL#2 team (including me as co-editor) resigned over sharp editorial and political differences and TLL#2 folded a week later. I then re-launched this substack and this is the fifth issue since the resumption. I was assured in writing by those running this new publication that no further messages would be emailed to TLL subscribers unless those recipients specifically requested it.

I was misled, and you – subscribers - are being affected. I apologise. If you receive more unwanted emails from “LEFT FIELD”, do click “UNSUBSCRIBE” if that is your wish.

I will continue to monitor the situation. I will take further steps if needed on a matter related to data protection, the unauthorised use of someone else’s labour, and other issues.

Alan Story

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3. Burnham & proportional representation: will he make good on promises? Or will he pull a Justin Trudeau caper?

By Alan Story

Electoral reformers are getting into an increasingly upbeat and anticipatory mood. New PM Andy Burnham says he supports a change to proportional representation (PR) voting. And commentators predict he will shortly announce the creation of an electoral reform commission, with PR likely featuring as a Labour manifesto pledge in the next election.

“Andy Burnham’s rise to Downing Street means that for the first time in modern history we have a prime minister who is openly committed to proportional representation”, last month wrote Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society (ERS). This past weekend a headline in The Independent read: “Andy Burnham wants to change the voting system - and it could well happen.”

Abolishing the badly-creaking and blatantly undemocratic First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system would undoubtedly be an important democratic reform. FPTP dates from the same decade that the ERS was formed, namely the 1880s.

But “Who cares?” you may ask. Isn’t electoral reform a subject of interest mostly to political geeks and math nerds? To be honest, I held that view myself until fairly recently. The following view of ACE, The Electoral Knowledge Network, may be a bit OTT, but not by much.

“… Political institutions shape the rules of the game under which democracy is practised, and it is often argued that the easiest political institution to manipulate, for good or for bad, is the electoral system. In translating the votes cast in a general election into seats in the legislature, the choice of electoral system can effectively determine who is elected and which party gains power.” [ Note to readers: ACE provides the most encyclopaedic and even-handed global resource base on elections HERE if you want to check out the differences between Imperiali (the deeply-flawed system used for 2026 Your Party elections) and STV and FPTP and the rest.]

Two things are clear: Voting systems are all about power and, once you start to grasp the differences between PR and FPTP, you will never look at an election result in the same way again. That assumes, of course, that you are a democrat and believe all votes cast should have equal political impact.

Mind you, the wider question for progressives to keep asking is how much elections can really change things under a capitalist system. And how much effort should we put into electoral campaigning? The Greens, for example, put far too much effort into electioneering in my opinion. But that’s a subject for another day.

Political alienation is rife

Certainly in an era when more and more people don’t trust politicians – we hardly need polls to prove that point – and deep political alienation is rife, major reforms are urgently needed. “If the Burnham government was really serious about bringing in PR, they would do it in time for the next election and try to ensure we won’t have a Tory/ Reform coalition government,” long-time electoral reformer Glenn Oliver of Derbyshire told THE LEFT LANE in an interview yesterday (25 August).

Moreover, even if Burnham and Labour were re-elected under our current flawed FPTP system, observers on both sides of the Atlantic say we need to be worried Burnham might “pull a Justin Trudeau” and renege on his promises after being elected; see more below.

The inertia of the status quo is strong. And so are those forces who want to maintain it. Battles won and lost elsewhere have been tough. “You know, looking back to 35 years ago, we were bloody lucky we were able to ditch our old voting system and bring in a new one,” New Zealand electoral reformer Phil Saxby reflected in a recent Zoom call with TLL.

Back in 1990 to 1993, Saxby, a Labour Party member, was one of the leading Kiwi campaigners in the fight to replace its FPTP system, a relic of British colonialism, with its own MMP (mixed member proportional) PR system. MMP is quite similar to the voting systems now used for elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Northern Ireland uses ranked ballot FPTP. England is the especially backward one.

Commenting on that 1993 NZ victory, ACE said: “Discarding a long-established voting system is never an easy process politically, nor is it likely to appeal to entrenched interests or to most incumbent politicians.” Both of its biggest parties, Labour and the Kiwis’ Tories, the National Party, were against voting reform. See below on how Saxby and his fellow campaigners won.

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Polls tells a tale of disproportionality

An Electoral Calculus poll of August 2026.

As mentioned on the cover, Labour won only 34% of the total vote but got 63% of the seats In the last general election. The results in the next election may not be as lopsided as that and polls taken this month may be dramatically different in two or three years from now.

But assuming this poll of current voter intentions held, the disparity between votes cast and seats won shows a quite similar unfairness. So it is worth comparing the number of constituencies that would be won under FPTP with the seats that MIGHT be won under a proportional system. We need to say MIGHT because a common feature of FPTP, tactical voting, usually plummets in a PR system and overall voting patterns may shift.

Here are three examples derived from this poll: 1) The Greens would receive 11.4% of the total vote but would only double their current number of seats to 10. That’s a mere 1.5% of the seats in the 650-member House of Commons. Under a PR system, the Greens would get least 70 seats; Glenn Oliver estimates 78, which is 12% of the total seats and just about matches their overall vote percentage; 2) Labour would receive 23.9% of the votes and win 244 seats. With PR – and the same level of voter support --- Labour win 163 seats (25.1%) of the total, but that would be a decline of 81 seats from under FPTP; 3) Reform would get 23.4% of the votes and 127 seats; under PR, they would get about 160 seats, gaining 23.

Elections are for voters, not for parties

What can we conclude from the above numbers?

1) In a voting system such as PR where all votes were equal and proportional - that is, votes in inner London, rural Norfolk and Scotland all mattered the same - the three parties would win this many seats: Greens (78), Labour (163), Reform (160);

2) Labour seats would decline, but be reduced to a number proportionate to its voter strength, unlike in 2024;

3) Reform seats won would match its voter strength, again unlike in 2024 when its overall vote of 14.3% was far out of whack with its 5 seats won (namely 0.8%);

4) The way to oppose Reform is NOT to keep holding onto a bankrupt electoral system. That’s a fool’s way out.

5) A PR-based election would be an election held in the public interest, not an election to serve partisan interests. Like it or not, Parliamentary seats would match what voters wanted. A Daily Mail or Telegraph editorial might suggest this is somehow wrong, though would never frame it in such a way.

A lot more could be said about these results. The main point: A FPTP system based on 650 single-member constituencies and in which the each “winner takes all” (a seat in Parliament) is, by its very nature, unfair and undemocratic; PR is far fairer and more democratic as it ensures all votes count equally. Such a subversive idea!

Many factors favour FPTP’s demise

In the current conjuncture, many factors do favour the demise of FPTP. Among them: A new PM who says he supports PR; the fact that the seat totals in the previous election were the most disproportionate of any UK election ever; the old two-party system, which FPTP reinforced, is breaking down; legislatures in Wales and Scotland are elected by PR voting systems; a 2025 poll revealed only 36% of British voters want to keep FPTP; 66% of Labour Party members back PR, a 2026 poll showed.

But conversely, two inter-linked factors significantly weaken the chances of PR actually happening even if Labour is re-elected and Burnham is PM again. The remainder of this article looks at both.

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Burnham could “pull a Justin Trudeau”

Former Canadian Prime Minister ( 2015- 2025) Justin Trudeau

Many political commentators, such as John Rentoul of The Independent, predict that PR will likely happen. (He opposes such a move.) This assumes that if Burnham is elected at the next election, he will try to introduce PR.

There are, however, serious dangers it wouldn’t happen. Favouring electoral reform may be an attractive promise to make in an election manifesto. Tony Blair did it in 1997, won the election and then reneged. Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau made a similar promise in the 2015 election in that country. On page 26 of its 2015 platform, the Liberals promised: “We will make every vote count. We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system” and the same “last election” sentence was repeated many times during the campaign.

Except 2015 wasn’t the last election. Yes, Trudeau and his Liberals did win a sweeping victory in 2015 – his party went from third place in the polls into government - and supporting electoral reform assisted in their triumph. But in February 2017 Trudeau changed his mind and, in what was called “a major and surprise reversal” on one of his “primary promises”, his election pledge was binned. Electoral reform was history.

Why was traitor Trudeau able to get away with this? Although Fair Vote Canada is one of the most sophisticated electoral reform groups in the world and it was definitely NOT its fault, FVC simply did not have the financial resources or person power to maintain constant political pressure on Trudeau’s government for month after month in the post-election period. He was able to weasel out of a promise. Burnham could as well.

The lesson from New Zealand’s success in winning PR

Campaigners from the GET PR DONE! group outside the October 2023 Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

Phil Saxby says above that pro-PR forces were “bloody lucky” to win in New Zealand 33 years. Let’s be upfront: luck often plays some role in politics. Andy Burnham’s rise to power is Exhibit A. What’s more interesting to focus on is what the Kiwis got right in terms of strategy. (A 14-page Wikipedia entry gives a more detailed picture.)

Yes, the NZ pro-PR forces did have some allies in its Parliament, but its real strength was based on its support among often powerless and excluded sectors, especially the Māori people, women, and trade unionists, explained Saxby in our recent interview.

“Mobilising” the Māori people was particularly important, he stressed, and they had a high percentage turnout in the two referendums on PR in 1992 and 1993. As the 2023 New Zealand census revealed, Māori people make up 17.3% of its population. Like the Inuit people in Canada, they are structurally sidelined from politics by racism; implementing PR has increased their political power. (Interestingly, as New Zealand prepares for a November 2026 election, it is the Māori’s far more than immigrants who are in the crosshairs of its right wing and far right forces.)

Saxby also stressed how important winning over women was to the pro-PR cause in the 1990s, including more small “c” conservative women in groups such as Women’s Institute who tend to be based in rural areas.

Of course, New Zealand society in the early 1990s was quite different from UK society today. But this emphasis on building community roots is something electoral reformers here could learn from. Less lobbying of policians, far more grassroots campaigning. Such a base can also limit the chances of electoral pledges being broken.

Moreover, many of the reasons that New Zealanders chose PR 35 years ago are quite similar to the reasons we need PR in the UK… and asap. “PR gives us a chance at least to stop making ridiculous minority-based decisions,” Matt Phypers of the GET PR DONE! group told me bluntly on the weekend.

Yes, at least the chances of having a Liz Truss-clone as PM would be lessened if we had proportional representation. Who knows what other possibilities await.

In an upcoming issue, TLL will return to the PR question.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 123 in total) here

Suffolk’s Shingle Street ( Photographer unknown)

By Alan Story

So it’s the fag end of summer, people are sharing their courgette soup recipes online and I’m currently working on several longer term projects. Because of that, there are no original articles from me in today’s THE LEFT LANE (TLL). Instead, I’ve selected three articles, one video and one petition I’ve been reading and watching over the past few weeks. Here’s hoping you find them of interest – and, if you are still on the beach, you will have more time to look at them.

One of the projects I’m developing is a move towards a more accessible format for presenting multiple pieces in a single TLL issue. (Apologies for the errant emails that a few people got yesterday during the development stage.) Substack tends to use a fixed “one article after another” newsletter layout and that means readers, particularly those using a phone, may have to scroll an awful lot. In the past, TLL issues with multiple articles needed to be laid out like this or this. Clunky in my opinion. Today I am experimenting with a new TLL format. Do you like it? Perhaps comment below or send an email to: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

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TODAY’S PIECES (click on underlined word)

ARTICLE - The Carbon Footprint Scam

Slotted under the head “Corporate Greenwash”, leading ecosocialist Ian Argus explains how “focusing on working people’s consumption diverts attention from the real climate criminals.” Ian edits the online journal CLIMATE and CAPITALISM; paid and free subs HERE.

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INSTAGRAM VIDEO - The White Supremacist who got Jason Arday killed

In a brief and brilliant take down, Chelsea Hart of New York City exposes the racist bile being spouted by Nathan Cosnas which led to Arday, a Black Cambridge academic, killing himself last week. A bit more detail here.

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ARTICLE - Today’s arguments about disability benefits have been raging for 500 years

Notice the sign on the left.

Ever wonder where Nigel Farage and Reform get their backward ideas about how to treat disabled people? Try the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. As Professor David Fraser writes in his new book tracing 500 years of disability history, “since the first welfare systems emerged under the Tudors, disabled people have faced suspicion, bureaucratic hurdles and repeated battles to secure the support they needed.”

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ARTICLE - It’s time for movements to rethink social media

Political consultant and photographer Mehrank Khaliti is the thinking person’s activist. He challenges conventional wisdom. In this piece, he proposes that we use social media so that we get actual results and not just hits. Get back issues of Mehrank’s SUBVRT newsletter … and subscribe as I do.

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PETITION – Is the last chance saloon for Your Party?

With three further members of Your Party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) recently resigning, more members and former members of the party have concluded, as Chris Saltmarsh has written, that Corbyn’s “faction now appears intent on managing Your Party’s decline.” The pleas of YP true believers to “just hang in there a little longer” aren’t credible. YP’s controlling faction are simply not listening and no grassroots grouping has a credible plan to bring YP back to life. At least circulating this petition, which calls for the entire CEC to resign, would represent the first serious campaigning YP members have done Since the party was first announced 13 months ago.

File under: talk about a waste of space

After this bruising talking to from the UK’s new foreign secretary, we can be sure the Israeli government is quaking in its boots. It’s the “same old, same old” bs that Blair, Cameron, Johnson and Starmer have been dishing out for decades.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 122 in total) here

By Alan Story

A lot of politicians from across the political spectrum say they want to cripple the rise of the Reform Party and clip the electoral wings of its leader Nigel Farage. Here’s one way to do just that.

We should immediately add these caveats: over the longer term, two things are of much greater importance: 1) widen, ever widen, all forms of anti-racist agitation against the poisonous message of the far right; 2) change the current electoral system and abolish these ridiculous by-elections that are being used to manipulate the political system.

We’ve had two of them in the past few months - one in the north in Makersfield and one in the south - and, before the end of 2026, there is a very good chance of another one in the Essex coastal constituency of Clacton-on-Sea.

As for the short term, there is a very good chance that Reform’s Farage will win that by-election where he also triumphed on 13 August. Thursday’s electoral win occurred after Farage had stepped down as its MP, all the other major parties declined to stand against him in the by-election he triggered, and a man with a can on his head, Count Binface, was his main opponent as a “novelty candidate.”

The low-grade movie script ahead

Here is the low-grade movie script that has a strong possibility of dominating the front pages of mainstream media for at least another three or four months:

1) The parliamentary committee investigating a £5.0 million payment that Farage received in 2024 from a crypto-billionaire will decide he should have declared/ registered this payment. It resumed work hours after the Clacton results were announced early Friday.

2) Farage would then face suspension from parliament and, if it exceeded 10 days, another by-election would be called.

3) Farage, as well as all of his opponents - candidates for all of the major parties and bin man and the rest of the no-hopers - would run in Clacton #2.

4) Being split in at least 6 or 7 ways, the opposition might get, say, 60% of 70% of the total vote. Farage would need only 40% or 30% in such circumstances and he would become Clacton’s MP for the third time.

5) And who knows? The next general election is likely a few years away. There could be yet another by-election here after yet more of his financial skulduggery was uncovered, Farage would run again and win again. ( BTW - I visited here during the 2024 general election; a lot of people detest Farage and everything he stands for. )

In other words, the coming months would reveal the total inanity of our First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting system and its principle of “winner takes all” in single member constituencies. One poll shows 60% of Brits back electoral reform and only 36% support the current FPTP scheme created in the 1880’s. It is now used elsewhere in Europe in only Belarus.

Indeed, millions of us would favour a change to a proportional representation voting system ASAP because that’s where seats won match votes cast. It is far more democratic. Some more sophisticated PR systems, such as in Denmark, have even abolished by-elections as they are also relics of the days when women weren’t allowed to vote and child labour was perfectly legal.

Of course, a PR voting system could not be implemented in the UK in the next six months to manage the “Clacton issue.”

But that’s not to say nothing could be done to put a spanner in Farage’s demagogic works if a second by- election is called in Clacton after the parliamentary inquiry is completed.

Rather than Binface and all the other major parties running – and hence splitting the anti-Farage vote - only one candidate should run. History shows a Conservative Party candidate would stand the best chance of beating Farage in a one-on-one contest.

Clacton in Essex is not in England’s red belt. ( Source: Wikipedia)

Since the constituency was created in 2010, it has been won by an independent candidate, a candidate for UKIP, a Tory, and Reform’s Farage twice. As the chart above shows, no other party has done well in this part of Essex for a long time. The demographics are all wrong for these other parties. In the 2024 general election in Clacton, for example, the Liberal Democrats won 4.4% of the total vote and the Green’s only 4.2 %.

Sorry Zack: the Green’s won’t pull off another by-election triumph here as you did back in Manchester in February. Nor is Labour likely to win here with a full field of opposition candidates. By the time of any by-election, the so-called “Burnham bounce” may have run out of puff across the UK and may never make any traction at all in Clacton. This is hardly England’s red belt. As for Binface: hey! take a break from your labours and perhaps run against Kemi at the next GE in the other end of Essex.

Only one of 650 seats are at stake

My left-wing mates may say that forming a sort of united front behind a Tory candidate is quite a stretch. I agree. But what strategy do you have to knock off Farage electorally? These are special circumstances. And only one of 650 parliamentary seats is at stake.

Ditto for Labour Party activists. In large measure due to our blatantly unfair FPTP voting system, Labour now has over 400 MPs in Parliament. Would gaining one more really mean anything?

But knocking off Farage some fine day in November would mean something.

Now you might say all the parties could NOT cooperate and decide that none of them, except the Tories, would field a candidate in another Clacton by-election. They agreed that none of them would run on 13 August to undermine Farage’s re-election narrative. Follow the same principle again and, this time, have a political bloodbath on the right.

One thing is certain: that’s not the movie script smarty pants Farage envisaged.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 121 in total) here

By Alan Story

This piece is an analytical response to political implosions of the left in general and not to those which have occurred in any particular group or organisation (though Your Party is too obvious an example to ignore.)

It’s written by someone who has been in many left groups in three countries since the mid 1960’s. So it has been put together, no doubt, with a bit of an air of sadness about a phenomenon I have seen many times before.

Yet it is also based on an appreciation that not all disintegrations are negative. Some are long past due. Indeed from disintegration or “erosions of cohesion”, to borrow more academic language, can come rebirth and a solidly-based nurturing process.

If you’re not convinced by the arguments here, do give your views in the comments section below so we can make it a case of joint learning.

The five main reasons for repeated ruptures in left wing groups, I argue, here are:

1) We live in a competitive capitalist environment; 2) The past political experiences of members encourage rifts; 3) Members may have difficulty “unlearning” old narratives; 4) The original basis for unity was never fully solid ; 5) Certain flashpoint issues reliably trigger fractures.

1) We live in a competitive capitalist environment

Let’s begin with the idea in a Counterfire article of a few years ago that “our consciousness is shaped by our experience of living under capitalism, and this includes not only our experience of work but our existence in a society in which we are encouraged to view ourselves and our place in the world in a certain way.” In other words, ideas don’t just fall from the sky.

If you work in a hyper competitive world, you will be inculcated --- in fact, it just appears as normal and natural – to be hyper competitive yourself and to “understand your place” in this authoritarian and often oppressive world. (A place, it should be added, lots of us want to change).

In 2026 Britain, all kinds of ideas and behaviours are encouraged, indeed often praised and/or seldom challenged: consumerism, cut-throatism, bullshitism, individualism, militarism, neoliberalism, sexism, classism, ableism, and racism. It is no surprise then that such ideas are widespread among many of those who live in 2026 Britain.

And this is the world which those of us on the left grew up in and live in every day of our lives. So it is no surprise that those ideas and behaviours are also still widespread among many on the left, including far too often, among those who lead or who are members of left groups.

Take individualism, bullshitism, and barely disguised egotism. Do have a read of this article on the sectarianism of revolutionary sects in the UK if you want to appreciate how the leaders of many of these sects have acted politically. Their pronouncements are often careerism writ large. It is hard to imagine more preachy and more implosion-provoking words than when they suggest “the future of the British revolution” rests on their personal shoulders. Positively Trumpian.

Yet, on the other hand, “knowing your place” in the world of work leads, among too many “average members” of such groups, to subservience, passivity, and hero worship of group leaders. When a rift or fissure in a group is threatened, they often lack the capacity to step in and repair it.

So, yes, living in a competitive capitalist world is part of the explanation for these regular “erosions of cohesion”. But that is far too simple an explanation. We need to look deeper.

2) The past political experiences of members encourages rifts

Many of the activists on the British left, and especially the older ones, were or are members of the Labour Party and often for long stretches. Next to the sects, I cannot think of a better grooming ground for plotting and scheming and ultimately creating faultlines and rifts than experience within Labour. Of course some “good people” are members, but it is also it is a school for political operators and those on the make.

Between 2020 and the end of 2025, Labour lost 200,000 members through resignations. Your Party (YP), which is controlled at the top by people with long experience in leading Labour and being activists in its ranks, has lost far more that number of supporters in the past nine months. YP has not totally imploded --- at least not yet --- but there is a great dissatisfaction and dissension in its ranks.

Back in early November 2025, I wrote a piece for issue #100 of The Left Lane on Your Party titled: “A socialist party needs to be run on socialist values & based on a socialist political culture.” Labour gave YP a negative example to learn from; it has not.

The issue #100 piece didn’t stress the question of potential YP implosions or widespread resignations; after all, the party was not even formed until the end of that month, But the signs of trouble and splits were already obvious. The two unofficial leaders, former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, were already at each other’s throats and Corbyn’s team was regularly briefing in the mainstream media against Sultana.

Certainly no socialist culture exists today within YP and the events since then have been pure Labourism: the secrecy, the control freakery, the purges of dual members, votes of non-confidence ignored, not a syllable of self-criticism uttered, and so on. (This last failing reminds me of Tony Blair and his war on Iraq 20 years ago … and the precursor to a huge membership fall off in Labour’s membership.)

These then are all what we might call “the kindling for further destruction to come.” This is amplified by the failings pointed out in the next section.

Cracks and more cracks on the drought-stricken surface of the earth ( Creative Commons)

3) Members may have difficulty “unlearning” old narratives

A few days ago I read an article titled “The Science of Unlearning and Why Organizers Need It” from the progressive US publication TRUTHOUT. Most of the article has nothing to do with the theme of this piece and I actually disagree with some amount of it as well.

But one thing is needed if we are going to reduce further organisational wastage on the left. In my opinion, we all need to get much better at both learning and unlearning, at stopping being smug about the supposed correctness of our own ideas, and to embrace the wisdom of the group around us.

So here are a few quotations from the TRUTHOUT article:

“…real change rarely happens through debate or persuasion. Instead, transformation grows out of relationships, shared struggle, cognitive dissonance, and practice.”

“What you’re saying really challenges a kind of default political posture — the idea that change comes from proving someone wrong.”

“… there’s a lot of discomfort and disruption that is required in order to catalyze the unlearning or to put pressure on the places where it might be otherwise, especially for people coming at the unlearning from a place of privilege, it might otherwise feel and be very easy to continue to hold the same beliefs and worldview.”

In short, unlearning is not easy, it does not happen simply by reading a book, but the process is critical for our purposes if we are going to keep up with the times, work together as a team, and diffuse conflict. Sadly, some aren’t interested.

One final point on “unlearning old narratives”: what’s is often needed to prevent small conflicts ripening into a full-scale disaster is for people to speak up and not “let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong.” That is one of the messages in a short pamphlet called “Combat Liberalism “written in 1937 by Mao Tse-tung. A critical reading of it might be helpful if you see the same thing looming in your own organisation.

4) The original basis for unity was never fully solid

This is a brief but important point. When you form a new group, make sure you spend lots of time both building and actually testing your unity in practice.

Yes, it is very useful to have some type of political programme or written down set of principles and objectives to guide an organisation. But that is far from enough. If a rupture or implosion occurs, it is often because the original basis for unity, whether political or for the accomplishment of a practical task, was far too weak.

The text in a political programme doesn’t contain magic solving words as some on the left claim.

5) Certain flashpoint issues reliably trigger fractures

There are certain issues which can cause controversy and serious division on the left. The Ukraine war is one example. I know of several progressive people who take very different positions, including those who have changed their views on this conflict. I am one of them. “Right to die” legislation can also be a wedge issue among progressive people.

But no issue causes as much division and leads to more organisational implosions than identity politics / the “trans question.”

Back in October 2025, THE LEFT LANE published a lengthy interview with LSE Professor Chetan Bhatt that was titled “Identity politics is destroying the left and empowering the right.” No article has been more widely read than this one in the more than 2 1/2 year history of this TLL publication. But no article has received more pro- and anti-comments. A 2026 UK document giving a set of demands that was put together by the “Trans Liberation Group” provides the opposing point of view.

This is not the place to discuss the identity politics issue or how to deal with it in a less explosive way. But as you likely already know, it definitely creates rifts and conflicts that can be very difficult to heal.

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How to end on a message of hope? Two things are clear. The UK’s economic and political system will not be corrected by those who run it now and, here’s the positive bit, there are lots of us about who will take up the task ourselves. And we won’t let an implosion or two along the way deter us from doing so and from building our new world.

A brief endnote for readers:

In a few weeks, I will be calling an online Zoom meeting to discuss how more people can become involved in The Left Lane project. Details will be announced in an upcoming TLL issue.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 120 in total) here

DEAR SUBSCRIBER: A MID-SUMMER REPORT

By Alan Story

I hope that you, as one of 1170 subscribers to THE LEFT LANE, are having an enjoyable summer.

One good thing: at least the climate change deniers will soon be out of business. Mind you, as revealed in this recent US tv clip “Trump’s climate denial COLLIDES with America’s apocalyptic summer” , you know who and his mates are doing their best to uphold this supercilious and downright deadly stance on the current chaos. (For an alternative view, check out Climate and Capitalism).

A BRIEF UPDATE ON THE TWO LEFT LANES

Some readers may be slightly confused about the current state of play of THE LEFT LANE (TLL), though this is hardly surprising as there are two.

Let’s call this one - the one you are now reading - TLL #1. I started it as a mostly one-person Substack in January 2024 and it has had 119 issues; you can still read them all here. Early in 2026, I decided it would be good to try to find other socialists, writers and activists to work with and launch a new publication. And hey! I am aged 78 and thought I had done my bit as a solo journo and publisher.

So what I then viewed as the last issue of TLL #1 came out on 26 April . The first issue of the new publication – deliberately using the same name - came out on 1 May. Let’s call it TLL #2. It is based on a Wordpress website that you can access here.

TLL #2 had a good leg up from its very first issue. Building a regular readership is one of the toughest tasks facing a new publication. All paid and free subscribers to TLL #1 - likely meaning you - were emailed a weekly or twice weekly digest of the most important articles that had appeared in previous days.

I was the co-editor of TLL #2 and the publication had some successful points. Over its three months (about 90 days), more than 150 articles, some of them very good, were published by more than 40 writers and we had more than 15 weekly planning meetings.

In the later part of July, however, some very sharp political and editorial conflicts broke out among those directing TLL #2. Resolution was impossible. I will not attempt to summarise these conflicts here. But as a result, I have recently resigned as co-editor of TLL #2 and another one of the four TLL#2 board members resigned as well.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

That is uncertain.

About TLL #2

1) I am not sure of its future; I am not involved. If it continues in some form, I wish its writers well. It will need to adopt a new title as I have applied for a registered trademark in the name “The Left Lane”, a name I have been using for this substack since January 2024.

2) No more digests of TLL#2 will be sent out to subscribers of TLL#1.

About TLL #1

I will use the month of August to review various options. Thinking aloud, these may include:

1) Re-starting TLL #1 (that is this substack) as a group project of socialist writers and activists. Some mates and I are already chatting about changes of format and focus. Perhaps you might want to join in and we might even have a few group Zoom calls. Do write The Left Lane email below. Please put RE-START in the subject line. Inexperienced writers are welcome; we can teach you. So too are experienced illustrators and graphic artists.

2) TLL#1 might be re-launched as a solo project.

3) I might do some journalism for other publications, which does not preclude options #1 and #2.

A FINAL WORD

I am pretty sure I won’t just sit around and watch this oppressive world go by as a passive spectator. And I urge you NOT to do so either.

It is a cliché to say we live in turbulent times, but it’s helpful one. Remember the title that the great US social historian Howard Zinn gave to his autobiography: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

Zinn wrote: “We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness – embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television. This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.” Take up your responsibility.

As always, comments welcome below.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 119 in total) here

By Alan Story

Back in early 2024, when my son Alex suggested I start a Substack, I told him, “Yes, good idea,” though I had no real sense of how it would unfold. I imagined producing perhaps one issue a month. I rejected his proposed title—far too embarrassing—and settled instead on THE LEFT LANE. A mate in Sheffield, a graphic artist, designed the TLL logo you can see at the bottom of the page.

Once a month quickly turned into once a week, and this edition marks issue #119. It has kept me busy—very busy—and over the past 28 months. Over that time, writing and editing TLL has been my main contribution to the struggle for a less oppressive world. At times it has been frustrating (I am a painfully slow writer), but overall it has been deeply rewarding, and I have learned a great deal along the way.

Now it’s time for the next chapter. Working with more than 15 activists and journalists—and keeping the same name and logo—we will soon together launch the new LEFT LANE, this time under collective management. The relaunch is set for Friday 1 May.

TLL will shift from being a one‑person, once‑a‑week publication to a 24/7 rolling news and commentary website. Since January, we have established a steering committee, appointed section editors, incorporated as a non‑profit, built a new website, and raised just over £1,000 to cover our first year’s costs. Our thanks to all who contributed.

So we are ready to get moving—to build a socialist media project that amplifies the voices too often silenced, challenges conventional thinking, and, above all, remains genuinely engaging in difficult times.

The new TLL masthead

What does this mean to you as a reader?

1) If you are a TLL subscriber, we will transfer all of the current 1150 subs over to an email distribution system that we have just selected. So be watching for a weekly digest coming into your inbox in a week to ten days (and please make sure it does not end up in your spam folder.)

2) If you are a paid TLL subscriber, we hope you will want to keep paying £5.00 per month for what we think will be a far superior product. We will send personal emails to each of you about how to transfer funds to a new bank account that we are in the process of establishing. All funds paid under the current Stripe system and which go into my personal TLL account will be transferred into the new group account.

3) If you are NOT a subscriber and want to become one to the “new” TLL, click on this link: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe . We will transfer you over to the new system.

4) One final request: We will always be looking for people to write for us at the new TLL. Email us ( news@theleftlane.media ) if you would like to send us an article you have written or make a pitch.

Adios … and let the new LEFT LANE era begin!

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My three favourite TLL issues:

1)Today is a good day for a “good news” story of resistance

Erin of Pelican House, London, interviewing Peter Mertens of the Workers Party of Belgium in Novemer 2024.

Finding “good news” for progressive forces can be a tough search sometimes. But in this November 2024 issue we gave a quite full account of a meeting held in east London where the guest speaker was Peter Mertens, General Secretary of the Workers Party of Belgium. Almost 200 people attended.

Mertens is an optimistic kinda guy and looking out at the audience, he said passionately that “300 or 400 or 500 people can do a lot …what is small can become powerful if you’re united.”

Yes, in a country with a population one-sixth the size of the UK, it is amazing what this socialist and predominantly working class party of 25,000 members has accomplished. Think what 150,000 well organised socialists could do in the UK!

Read the issue HERE.

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Identity politics is destroying the left and empowering the right

Cover art to this October 2025 issue by Glyn Goodwin, a mate and a great illustrator who used to work for THE FINANCIAL TIMES and who did the cover art for at least ten TLL issues over the past two years. Thanks Glyn.

This piece which we brought out in October 2025 has been the most read and most liked article in TLL’s history; it also resulted in 20 new subscriptions. It features a lengthy interview of more than 4,000 words with Dr. Chetan Bhatt, the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics.

We won’t try to summarise its main points. But when you have a bit of time, do read the whole interview HERE.

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An open letter to COLLECTIVE leadership - PART 2

Two leaders of Collective, a forerunner of Your Party; Karie Murphy ( on the left) and Pamela Fitzpatrick (on the right).

On a Saturday in late January 2025, Collective was having a meeting in London and, as a dues paying member of this group, I wanted to come down from Norwich to observe the session. So I sent an email to two of the group’s leaders, Karie Murphy and Pamela Fitzpatrick, requesting the meeting’s location and time.

Murphy, who is Jeremy Corbyn’s main political operator, refused to tell me. Instead she sent back one of the nastiest and petulant emails I’ve got in some time. This 8 February TLL reprinted her email.

I’ve been writing about the Collective, later Your Party, since September 2024. This email is symptomatic of attitude that has prevailed in the upper reaches of this outfit right up until today. All the signs were already there that Corbyn has never really wanted to build a serious mass working class socialist party.

Read the issue HERE.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 118 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

A deal full of holes

by Alan Story

Ever-erratic and ever-dangerous US President Trump had posted on social media early yesterday (7 April) that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran agrees a deal to end the illegal war, a war which the US and Israel had started at the end of February and threatened to lead to global recession.

Trump’s deadline to obey his order was 8:00 p.m. US East Coast time (or 1:00 a.m. UK time)… and I am sure I was not the only one here in Blighty waiting up last night to find out if Mr. “We’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age” would try do just that. Or would it be the latest TACO moment (Trump Always Chickens Out)?

We didn’t have to wait til 1:00 a.m. to discover that WW3 – or something close to it – was NOT about to kick off. Just after 11:30 p.m. Trump posted that the US and Iran were “very far along” with a definitive peace agreement and that he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire. In return, Iran was to re-open the strategic Strait of Hormuz which ships 25% of global oil.

Trump got the headline he wanted. “Oil tumbles and stocks surge after Iran ceasefire agreed,” reported The Financial Times when the markets opened this morning. What Trump did not want to contemplate was that, in two weeks, the headlines in the same newspaper could just as easily read: “Oil soars and stock plummet after Iran ceasefire collapses.” After all, the price of Brent crude rules this depraved world.

Yesterday, the commander-in-chief of US imperialism escaped from a tight spot and that’s all that mattered. Or to quote Trump from the day before: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth labelled the Iran campaign “a decisive military victory.” Rather more objective military experts called it a “strategic military defeat.”

Did Trump even read the deal?

In any event, Trump’s deal is full of holes. Filmed soon afterward the “agreement” was made public, a panel discussion on the liberal US ZETEO network started to pull apart why this deal will NOT lead to a long- term peace. It is almost as if Trump had not read Iran’s 10-point ceasefire plan --- most of which seemed pretty reasonable to me – before calling it a “workable basis” for negotiations. The video is worth a watch.

You really think Mr. “Art of the Deal” will agree to what it says in the 10-point plan: “continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz”; “US military withdrawal from the Middle East”; “the release of frozen Iranian assets” or “A UN security council resolution making any deal binding”?

But for me, the even most important hole in Trump’s “cheese” is that there is nothing to restrain Israel. “Israel is always the spoiler,” said host Medhi Hasan in the panel discussion.

Netanyahu loves war (and especially war with Iran) more than any other world figure. Today Israel conducted its heaviest bombing raids ever in Southern Lebanon and hospitals were reported to be overflowing.

Same old, same old.

No cutline needed for these war criminal pals.

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We’re at 76% in our fundraiser

Next month THE LEFT LANE will be significantly expanded. To pay the assorted costs of the re-launch, we have created a “GO FUND ME” project and set a target of £1000.00. We’ve now raised £753.00. You can read more about our plans and make your donation, by clicking HERE or pasting this link into your browser:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-the-left-lane

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The Great Moving Nowhere Show

Looking back over Your Party’s History since it was first announced in July 2025, this article exposes how failing to follow proper democratic standards from the start fundamentally undermined this project…which now lies in tatters.

By Phil Pope

If you are going to call the organisation YOUR Party (YP) and make a lot of noise about grassroots democracy, it helps to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. People are not stupid. They can tell when democracy is being done as performance theatre rather than as a genuine exercise in decision-making. And this really does matter to socialist politics. Democracy is not just an organisational matter that distracts from the substance of policy. If a socialist society is to be self-emancipation and self-government, then the practice of democracy is the fundamental form on which everything else hangs.

It is a comforting ritual to take part in any mass process. Thousands still go to the Labour Party conference, though in their hearts they must know it ceased to be the place where any real decisions were made some time in the 1960s. It is now a tool for managing dissent, not for telling the powerful what to do. Occupational therapy for frustrated dissidents. Your Party was supposed to be different, a decisive break from the undemocratic behaviour that was demonstrated during the years of Corbyn’s Labour leadership. Instead the worst practices have been imported (and even built upon) by people who have spent their entire political lives manoeuvring in Labour and trade union bureaucracies. A velvet dictatorship fronted by Corbyn’s smiling face and backed by Karie Murphy’s iron will. This headline captures the results of YP’s first leadership elections in February 2026: (TOTALLY PREDICTABLE: Corbyn and his slate TOTALLY control Your Party’s top)

A “stitched up” founding conference.

Some people have said they were enthused by the YP conference in Liverpool before Christmas. I suppose if it were the first conference you had attended it might be exciting, but it was as problematic and stitched up as any conference I have observed. The problems with the conference have been much discussed: the secrecy around who was writing the draft constitution; the dubious consultation and amendment process, (Inside Your Party’s crowdediting tool and why transparency matters), What actually is Your Party’s founding process?) ; the abuse of the sortition principle in which some people appeared to be more equal than others (Your Party launch conference: the sortition of the 13,000 | Morning Star) ; and finally, the shameless framing of questions to give the answers that those in control wanted, most notably on whether existing socialist groups should be banned or banned until added to a ‘white list’. They may as well have asked the Socialist Party’s Dave Nellist if he would rather be kicked in the face or in the bollocks.

I would like to look here at four other problems that have received less attention: the secrecy and lack of transparency that permeated the whole project from the beginning; the pressure in favour of centralisation; failures of the Central Executive Committee(CEC) election process; and the factional control of the officers group. The main conclusion: all of these are serious failures that could have been avoided if, from the start, YP supporters and members insisted on democratic standards as a precondition of participating rather than hoping democracy would emerge at the end.

Establishing a democratic organisation presents a chicken-and-egg dilemma that can only be resolved by starting with a group of people who are NOT elected in a way that would be understood as fully democratic i.e. an electorate voting to select a group of decision makers. There must be a self-selecting group that takes the initiative. There is, however, a right way and a wrong way to do this. All sorts of clubs and societies run by allowing the existing members to propose additional members who may be admitted by unanimous decision and, conversely, with unsuitable people being blackballed to veto their membership. If it is found that nearly every proposal is being blackballed, it would be time to relax the veto and to require more than one blackball. Or a group could move to the next stage of establishing a membership and elected leadership model. This can work well for small- to medium-sized groups but it requires that everyone is open about who is in the group and everyone is told about proposals for new members.

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An example of the YP rot: triumphalism personified

A weekend Facebook meme by Your Party CEC member Sam Gorst of Liverpool and headed: “No time to mourn, we have a Party to build.”

……………….

Think of it as “triumphalism personified” … with the dictionary telling us that this 50 pence word means : “excessive exultation over one’s success or achievements (used especially in a political context).”

For an election winning candidate to create and publish such a meme about a losing candidate or slate of an another party would properly be considered pretty cheap and tawdry. To publish such an image about a candidate or slate in your own party is really beyond the pale, a sacking offense. And when that party is supposedly a socialist working class party, well…words fail me.

Hey Sam: perhaps you need to brush up on the words of what we thought was your favourite football club. You know: “You’ll never walk alone.”

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YP’s formation controlled by insiders

What we saw last year in The Collective group (from which YP emerged) was that very few people knew who was already in the group and, furthermore, that asking to join was controlled by gatekeepers who would reject applications without even telling everyone else that new groups wished to join. (I know how this Collective-controlled system worked; I was in one such small group, the Network of Independent Socialists, which considered joining in early 2025). This sort of information asymmetry --- everything depended on a thumbs up or down from Murphy or others on Corbyn’s staff --- established from the beginning that a few insiders were really in charge and the only people who allowed to join were those that at least tacitly accepted this. It was a stacked deck.

Of course, successful centralism in a large organisation is a difficult thing to achieve and there aren’t many examples that spring to mind of it being implemented from the start. Large organisations usually form from the merger of existing medium-sized organisations, the unification of smaller established local groups, or by a long process of building membership size from small to large. If anyone can suggest examples of centralised parties of tens or hundreds of thousand being successfully established from scratch, it would be instructive to look at those.

We need to learn from our history

To be clear, support for centralisation doesn’t necessarily indicate commitment to the success of the organisation. For example, several decades ago the Socialist Workers Party argued strongly for centralism in the Socialist Alliance but then used their centralised control to mothball and then shut down the organisation (The Socialist Alliance: An early failure to build a left party over six years). Conversely, those arguing for looser or federal arrangements can be committed to long term success and even more centralisation at a later date. You might hope that forcing people into the big tent will result in them being inside and pissing out, but instead they are inside delivering an unwanted golden shower to the other occupants.

Fear of sects abusing federalism to push their own politics or those of independent candidates is saying very little of substance. If the YP project had been successful, the sects would have been overtaken by a wave of mass membership. But this fear made people jump from the frying pan of federalism into the fire of centralism. Forcing Corbyn into a centralised organisation has not made him move forward. Instead, it has put him in a position where he and his aides can hold everyone else up. For example, nearly nine months after YP was first announced, there is not a single official YP branch.

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I Ain’t Gonna Work On Karie’s Farm No More!

013 - (Sub-Islington Airstream Blues) - Dan Gmaj – 2nd April 2026

Have a read HERE of Dan’s recent substack.

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On establishing a national membership list.

Driven by the same top-downism, a general desire for democracy and a premature decision to implement centralism resulted in the mistaken proposal to establish a national membership list. Once everyone assumes that there should or will be a national membership, there is the incentive to make a pre-emptive strike and launch a membership platform before anyone else does. Without pre-existing formal structures and a culture of trust, the membership list becomes The Ring bringing out the inner Gollum of even the best people in the struggle to control it.

As for the key issue of internal YP elections, Deborah Foulkes has provided a very good summary of the myriad problems with the February CEC elections. (1) Your Party CEC Elections 2026: An Electoral Systems Analysis . I would go further than her on one point: we can say with certainty that use of the Imperiali quota led to the Grassroots Left candidates losing seats in the North East and East Midlands, and very probably in the North West also. This is unfair on both the losing candidates and on the successful ones who have been elected by a biased system not of their choosing.

But it should never have come to a scrabble for two positions in each region. Men and women were not elected separately in each region, but the last woman could not be eliminated from the count to ensure that at least half those elected were women. The same method can be used for regional representation - voters may vote for any candidates from across the country, but the last two from each region cannot be eliminated. Although it was a (mistaken) political decision made by those participating in the elections, the way that YP implemented regional representation did everything to encourage a polarised fight between two opposing slates rather than a multi-issue election fought between myriad different candidates. We see the results in the CEC votes.

In the same vein, a committee with a permanent majority united around one slate is already problematic as the committee members are more likely to act in concert with their slate colleagues to ensure that they remain in favour with those who decide who gets to stand on the slate. This increases the likelihood of groupthink and reduces the chances of making conciliatory decisions that are for the good of the entire organisation.

Factionalism and cliqueiness are exacerbated if officers are elected in the wrong way. There’s always a fundamental problem if a small number of officers are elected from a much larger committee. The officers will then discuss between themselves what should be done and then view the rest of the committee members as unimportant rubber-stampers. This doesn’t even seem to be an unintended flaw in the YP constitution, but rather one deliberately designed-in.

Tends to amplify factional majorities

When the officers are each individually elected by first-past-the-post it only amplifies factional majorities existing on the committee. In the worst case scenario, one faction takes complete control of the organisation. Many people are not that bothered by this because it has been normalised by the same practice being used in the parliaments of liberal democracies. But it’s actually a terrible system if you expect people to unify and implement decisions together - particularly if the organisation is a voluntary association which people can just leave. This even more likely if it is a new organisation with no track record of success and no reason for members to feel loyalty or affection toward it. Calls for unity in this situation are merely calls to obey authority. That’s hardly what is wanted in a mass working class socialist party.

So, those are the most obvious problems that YP has run into. It is impossible for any democratic system to perfectly capture the preferences of the electorate to perfectly express those preferences between different candidates. That is not to say, however, that there are no measures which can both greatly improve the democratic outcomes, and - importantly - that are simple enough that most people can understand the process and agree that it is a good idea.

In the next part of this article, I will discuss some workable solutions to these problems and discuss why the left generally is so bad at practicing the democracy it talks so much about.

Phil Pope is a long-time socialist activist who lives in Bristol and writes regularly for THE LEFT LANE.

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THE LEFT LANE video on the Greens

On 23 March we held an “open mic” session that debated the topical question: “How should socialists respond to the Green Party’s surge?”

Click HERE to watch an edited video of the event.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 118 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Just four brief posts today as, right now, I am up to my neck preparing for Mondays’ debate on socialists and the Greens – see item #2 – and also working on the new THE LEFT LANE (under collective management) – see item #3. And I am about to have a brief vacation. Yippee!

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By Alan Story

Item #1 - The US-Israeli war on Iran: an imperial impulse.

Graphics from Military Summary magazine

At The Left Lane (TLL) deadline time (Sunday at 7:00 a.m.) it was uncertain what would be the next steps in the illegal US and Israeli war on Iran, a war that now has entered its fourth week. This morning’s headline: “ Trump tells Iran it has 48 hours to open Hormuz or US will ‘obliterate’ its power plants.”

On Saturday (21 March), Trump announced that he was thinking of “winding down” US military operations, but “ even as his administration deploys 2,500 additional marines to the region and asks Congress for more money to fund the war.” Trump wants a whopping US$200 billion. “It takes money to kill bad guys,” his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth informed us.

So who knows what Trump and Netanyahu will do next.

Reports say 1400 Iranians have been killed, (plus more than 1,000 in Lebanon and over 1,000,000 displaced ), fossil fuel prices are going through the roof, and some are predicting that “the Iran War Could Lead to a Crash Worse Than 2008” And for what? To create another stepping stone towards world war three? So Netanyahu can step up, like Trump did, and claim he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

I am NOT the only one who is saying: the way for this illegal war to end (and to re-open the Strait of Hormuz) is for the US and Israel to halt it. TODAY!

Meanwhile, BBC News claimed this week it is “clearing away the fog of war.” Some of us beg to differ. By comparison, Richard Seymour in THIS BRIEF PIECE dated 19 March in New Left Review’s Sidecar publication sketches out the imperial impulses behind this monstrous military misadventure. Richard’s article is titled: “Cognitive Dissonance.” It is worth a read.

Item #2 – “How should socialists respond to the Green Party’s surge?” Click in on 23 March.

New Green Party MP Hannah Spencer who recently won a Manchester-area by-election.

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The question in the headline above will be the topic up for debate / discussion on Monday evening ( at 19:00) during an online session put on by THE LEFT LANE.

The event was first announced in the most recent issue of TLL which you can read HERE. The Zoom link for Monday’s event is HERE. No registration required.

Or copy and paste this link into your browser: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81144118389

We’ve had quite a lot of interest in this “open mic” session. We kick off at 19:00 sharp and we hope you can attend as it promises to be lively.

A video of Monday’s session will be available about mid-week on our YouTube channel, THE LEFT LANE PRESENTS, which you can access HERE.

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Item #3 – We’ve reached 53% of our target for THE LEFT LANE fundraiser (under new collective management)

For a socialist publication that promotes events such as Saturday’s march in London against the war in Iran. And reports on them, and assesses them and discusses how we can all work to create more such marches across the UK. And fighting on the side of tenants, of workers on strike, and of people opposing the menace of Farage and Reform. And debating the best ways to build a socialist UK.

As we also mentioned in the most recent issue of THE LEFT LANE, big changes are soon coming to this publication. We are keeping the same name and logo and basically the same political direction, but forming a co-op, expanding the staff (unpaid) from one person to at least fifteen, and transforming our entire editorial output.

Tentative launch date is 20 April. You will continue to receive your TLL by email and , in the coming month, you will receive more news on the transition. For now, three things:

1) To pay the assorted costs of the re-launch, we have created a “GO FUND ME” project and set a target of £1000.00. After six days, we have raised £521.00, which is 53% of the total. You can read more about our plans and make your donation, by clicking HERE or pasting this link into your browser:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-the-left-lane

2) Two TLL posts (and others) remain unfilled as of 22 March: a) a second co-editor for our “international news” section; b) a social media “manager” to be in charge of TLL’s social media platform and YouTube channel.

3) If you would like to chat about either of these posts or become a TLL writer --- we always will need MORE writers! – and join our friendly team, write us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Item #4 - Branches, branches, what about those Your Party branches?

Today (22 March) in the late afternoon, the recently elected central executive committee (CEC) of Your Party (YP) will be holding its third meeting.

The results will be closely watched. The main question: will the CEC take immediate steps to allow the rapid creation of “official” branches? At present, there are as many as 200 YP proto branches across England, Scotland, and Wales.

Needless to say, many local YP activists are unhappy – and downright angry -- at how the new CEC is performing. Numbers are quitting. Some reports last week said the “branches issue” will not even be on the CEC agenda for today’s meeting. The phrase “member-lead” is becoming a cruel joke.

Although almost all candidates in the recent CEC elections promised they would create branches at the earliest possible opportunity, nothing substantial on this subject was accomplished at the first two meetings. Jeremy Corbyn’s The Many slate has monopolised all seven positions on the all-powerful YP Officers Group.

On Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. more than 30 YP delegates from London’s proto branches met to discuss the way forward. Creating actual/ “official” branches was one of their priorities.

The question: is anyone listening at YP HQ? Or are they about to carry on in the same old Labourist fashion that has betrayed us for decades?

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 116 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

A Green bus roaming the streets of Manchester before the 7 May by-election in Gorton and Denton won for the Green Party by Hannah Spencer. The question of the hour: should socialists across the UK also hop aboard this bus?

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On the Green surge

by Alan Story

Three things are true about the current situation of the Greens…or the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) to use its formal name. (Scottish Greens have their own party.)

First: support for the GPEW is skyrocketing. The party’s membership now tops 200,000, some recent opinion polls put the Greens in second place behind Reform, and, earlier this month, the GPEW convincingly won its first ever by-election in a Manchester-area constituency.

Second: Zack Polanski, its leader since September 2025, deserves credit for helping to propel this growth as a consequence of a high-profile mainstream media campaign. The Greens’ growth has occurred over the very same period as the glow has dimmed significantly around Your Party (YP), which bills itself as a member-lead, mass working class socialist party.

That glow has so diminished that more and more people, including numbers of YP members, are suggesting the last YP “flames” are now flickering and fear it may implode or split by this summer. (Note to readers: I remain a YP member. I am NOT pleased at all that such a terrific opportunity to unite anti-capitalist / pro-socialist forces may very well have been squandered. As we argued last week, the undemocratic moves and lack of transparency by the YP tops have been off-putting, to understate the matter. Read, for example, the “Wisdom of the Bees” substack by Deb Foulkes or check out the reports on the 8 March Central Executive Committee meeting.)

Third: the surge in the Greens fortune is a burning subject for debate on the left. That’s why THE LEFT LANE will be holding an online discussion/ debate on the theme: “How should socialists respond to the Green surge?” The date and time is Monday, 23 March from 7:00 (sharp) to 8:30 p.m. More details and the Zoom link are below.

Our session will occur just before the Green’s spring conference – to be held online, in large measure due to the increased numbers - which will give some idea if the Green Party is now a “ completely different party” as a result of its “membership boom” as at least one recent media report suggested.

At the 28-29 March GPEW conference, there may be significant votes held on Zionism and on a motion to abolish the party’s often abused “no fault suspension” system that is offensive to anyone who believes in basic due process; see HERE. Meanwhile, the GPEW’s powerful standing orders committee is still tightly controlled by party insiders, GPEW members told TLL last week. (HERE is a long report on its deeply undemocratic role at the 2024 conference; TLL was banned from entering the 2025 conference after being invited to attend.)

So there are plenty of issues for us to look over on 23 March. If the Green Party is on the up, should socialists vote for it? Join it? Avoid it? Critique it? Campaign side by side with Greenies over similar issues? Can Greens convince others - that is, us - to switch? What is the Green’s record in office - pro-working class or just more of the same?

Or is Oliver Eagleton correct when he writes that the Greens are becoming “ the main vehicle for the progressive vote” in England and Wales? And speaking of elections, which is now the overwhelming focus of the GPEW’s work, can we talk about a “Green Party road to socialism”? And is that even the GPEW’s objective? Or should it be?

We are hoping for a congenial but frank session on 23 March. Isle of Wight socialist Darren Galpin will be in chair. After TLL editor Alan Story makes a few brief remarks, we will have 80 minutes of open mic discussions.

Who is welcome to come? TLL readers, Your Party members (past and present), Greens, Labourites, and independent socialists. Farageists are less welcome. (TLL will send out personal invites to attend to a number of GPEW members we know.)

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The Zoom link for 23 March discussion

The Zoom link for 23 March is HERE . There is NO NEED to register.

Or copy and paste this link into your browser: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81144118389

We are expecting a good-sized crowd of discussants and observers. We will open the Zoom front door at 18:50 and aim to kick off at 19:00 sharp.

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A woman sits on rubble across from a residential building damaged last Sunday during the U.S.-Israeli air campaign in Tehran, Iran, Thursday, March 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

If a poll was taken on 17 March…

TLL does not have time today to do a piece on the illegal and outrageous war being waged against Iran by two partners in crime, Israeli Zionism and United States imperialism.

Below is the polling data on the war from Brits as of 2 March and 9 March. I would wager that, if a third poll was taken on 17 March (today ), “opposition to US (and Israeli) military action against Iran” would rise by another 10 points to 69%.

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Yes, huge crowds are expected for this march in London in ten days. GOOD! Our question: what’s being done to fight the far right on the other 364 days of the year?

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Transforming/ expanding THE LEFT LANE

Created in January 2024 and now with 1109 subscribers, big changes will soon be afoot at THE LEFT LANE substack.

Starting in late April, we will be undergoing a major TRANSFORMATION and EXPANSION. It will be a case of “THE LEFT LANE (under new collective management)”… but still using the same name and logo.

So far, about 12-15 of us have come together as an editorial team and we will be putting out an online socialist newspaper from a WordPress website… and no longer using substack.

We won’t be coming out 24/7…. but 12-15 of us will obviously be able to put together a far more in-depth and comprehensive editorial “package” than can be created by one person. So an exciting development, I think.

All subscribers will automatically and seamlessly have their subscriptions transferred to a new e-mail subscription service. So there is NOTHING you will need to do, except watch for an email message in a slightly different format.

In coming weeks, we will explain more details of the changes to come. We are ACTIVELY recruiting new members for our team, members with a wide range of talents and interests. Write us (theleftanepolitics@gmail.com) and we can send you our mission statement and work plan. And then chat on Zoom. Please put “PLAN” In the subject line.

One last thing. The new and the current TLL are both non-profit operations. But we do have certain costs and so we have just set up a “Go Fund Me” site HERE. If you could send us a few quid in the next few weeks that would be most appreciated.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-the-left-lane

Alan Story, editor, THE LEFT LANE (the current one.)

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 116 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover photo: Your Party leader MP Jeremy Corbyn.

Sharing power not on the YP menu

By Alan Story

If you want to take control of a new left‑wing political party, the tactics are straightforward and well‑worn.

You promote the idea that the social democratic / Labourist approach —one also used by the Conservatives and Reform— is the best and only route to power: hold a leadership election, and make sure you win it. That is one ‘theory,’ if we can call it that, of how to build a working‑class socialist party.

Here’s how you do it … and you use quite different tactics if you have a different objective, such as building strong party branches anchored in their communities. First, you choose the best‑known politician in your ranks. You build a slate of candidates behind him or her—mostly former Labour/union insiders and longtime left‑leaning “officials.” You then run an election whose fairness is, at best, questionable (see THE LEFT LANE and reporting from elsewhere over the past month). You warn members that the new party will collapse unless your faction wins (see HERE and HERE). And—no surprise—your slate or faction triumphs.

Less than ten days after the results, your group now fully controls the top of the party. In fact, you and your allies are effectively the tops.

A Lego-block fortress is built

In broad strokes, this is what has happened inside the new left party, Your Party (YP) announced last summer. The final pieces of its structure were snapped into place on Sunday afternoon in London at the second meeting of YP’s 24‑member central executive committee (CEC). A new political fortress – a Lego-block fortress perhaps - has been built.

Ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn,76, was voted the party’s leader in Parliament and, for all practical purpose, is its leader everywhere else. He was unopposed. At the same meet, members of his THE MANY (TM) slate, which controls the CEC, elected themselves to all seven seats in the “Officers Group.” None were left over for any of the ten non-TM slate members.

It was just one more example of how elections can create further divisions in a party already fractured. Collective leadership has been ground into dust. “Member-led” is mostly a PR catch-phrase.

Setting up official branches was on Sunday’s agenda, but was never discussed. So power, yes. Legitimacy is another matter. Is it unfair to ask: are we a fan club or a serious party aimed at building class power?

[In the same vein, do read two detailed accounts of Sunday’s CEC meet: ONE by Niall Christie, the CEC rep for Scotland (congrats to you and your partner on your new baby! ) and ONE by Sam Gorst, CEC rep for the North West of England. The common theme: we (TM) won, you lost, get over it. A third report from the Grassroots Left slate is expected later on Tuesday. ]

Now if your exclusive focus is top-down control, then yes, elections are one route to take. And in certain contexts and in particular circumstances, internal elections can be a way to build unity within a fractured party, to heal divisions, to create a widely-respected leadership corps armed with individual and collective political judgement, and, most importantly, to start to firm up that party – from top to bottom - as an effective fighting force for working class justice.

There is just one problem. NONE of those possibilities have existed in Your Party since mid-September 2025, and especially if you traveled along the “internal elections are the only way forward” route. At that point, although the party’s 800,000 supporters were in buoyant spirits and eager to campaign against war, racism, political repression, and the many forms of capitalist oppression, the first cracks appeared between the party’s two high-profile figures, former Labour MPs Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. A crack soon became a chasm.

Playing with matches around a petrol tank

Two slates were created. Opposing slates are NOT necessarily a bad thing. But in a new party with no collective history nor a repository of trust, creating slates was like playing with matches around a petrol tank.

The tensions only deepened as YP membership plummeted to about 40,000 sub payers as of ten days ago. What also got worse were even more frequent media briefings against opponents, threats of lawsuits, personal nastiness, red baiting, divisive tactics by the far left sects, purges, disputes over identity politics, and radically contradictory visions of YP.

Much was invested in the CEC elections of recent weeks. In fact, these elections were the first and only serious party-wide campaigning YP conducted in its seven-month history.

But did anyone think to ask two questions: What contradictions and what specific problems did and does YP face? Is a leadership election the best way to overcome them?

No. They simply relied on their own narrow experiences and defaulted to familiar Labourist habits. Full speed ahead to the online ballot boxes.

As we will explore in a minute, there are other ways to build a party.

Elections can inflame tensions

Look at the bigger picture. A quick scan of the political science literature reveals that internal elections can, in fact, exacerbate divisions within a political party. We’ll skip the examples here.

Some number of factors can or may inflame tensions, including:

a) the elections are unfair and give some candidates major structural advantages;

b) the rules are opaque, distrusted, or administered by non-neutral officials;

c) losers are punished;

d) major rifts erupt between leading party figures and/ or slates;

e) the winners make no effort to include opponents in decision making and “lord it” over losers;

e) the party itself lacks respected internal bridge-building institutions with a positive track record in reconciliation;

f) the absence of a unifying vision or programme.

As THE LEFT LANE and others have explored in recent weeks, every one of these factors was present front and centre in the recent CEC elections. The fact that THE MANY slate chose, less than 48 hours ago, to monopolise ALL seven of the CEC officer posts was done in the same nasty and small-minded way as was the earlier decision taken to conduct the elections themselves under the notoriously unfair “Imperiali” quota system. ( See HERE , HERE, and HERE).

The term THE MANY is a misnomer. Its aim was not to benefit the many; instead, its target was and is to benefit already-existing insiders, a.k.a. the Corbyn cabal.

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Is this woman an employee of Your Party and/ or its next General Secretary? No one is allowed to say

Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s long-time aide and political fixer

At its meeting on Sunday, the Your Party CEC also voted for a secretariat of unelected members to manage key party functions, including staffing, finance, and disciplinary matters. However and as confirmed Monday by two members of the CEC, its members are not permitted to reveal the identities of any of these unelected officers, and “face disciplinary action” should they disobey instructions.

Karie Murphy ran Corbyn’s Leader of the Opposition office for some of the time while he led the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020.

We suppose that, if you are Corbyn’s long time fixer, you can get a clause included in your employment contract which says “no one, especially members of the CEC, are allowed to say whether or not I am a paid staff member of Your Party.” Talk about special treatment.

Later today, THE LEFT LANE will be writing to our CEC member for the East of England to inquire if “no one” includes party members who are journalists. I would hate to be expelled for doing my job.

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As far back as early September 2025, the strategy and tactics to build Your Party could have been and should have been quite different. That approach would have started with the recognition that organisational control of the party’s summit was NOT the main aim of this party-building project. Hence, the role of the CEC elections would have been dramatically downplayed.

If you wanted a strong and dynamic base to the party, you would have given primacy to forming up strong branches rapidly rather than leaving so many of them as homeless and lifeless orphans. My local branch here in Norfolk has met a mere three times since July 2025 and two of the three meetings are most accurately described as “chaotic.”

If you wanted to build a sense of solidarity, comradeship and hope within party ranks – as well as draw in new people from outside traditional activist circles - you would have put out the call: “CAMPAIGN LOCALLY AND NATIONALLY AS IF THE PARTY’S LIFE DEPENDED ON IT.” It did and it does. No call ever came.

Or if you wanted to try to ensure that Your Party did not make the very same mistakes as have been made by numerous previous attempts at building socialist parties over the past 25 years, you would have called in the experienced speakers and found the texts to spark debates and discussions. Again, nothing of substance was done.

So to quote that well known aphorism and an apology for the status quo: “we are where we are.”

Last night I sent a text to a YP mate asking him what he thought of Sunday’s CEC meeting and the party’s future. I have just read his reply: “Dead as a dodo.” Perhaps a bit too bleak, but only a tad.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 114 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover photo: TOP ROW ( L to R) : Mel Mullings, Andy Walker, Deb Foulkes. BOTTOM ROW ( L to R): Mike Weaver, Niall Christie, Michael Mulquin.

NOTE to those reading via email: This article exceeds the length that can be sent by Substack to an email account. Solution? Please click on the cover page headline (“Six YOUR PARTY members ….” ) and it will take you directly to the Substack article in your browser. Or click on “View Entire Message” down the page.

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In today’s THE LEFT LANE:

1. About Iran: Let’s have regime change elsewhere.

2. Weighing in on YP’s internal elections

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About Iran: Let’s have regime change elsewhere

As Israel and the US launched missile strikes on Iran with regime change the clear objective, Trump told Iranians on Saturday: “Take over your government.”

THE LEFT LANE (TLL) isn’t the only one asking: Why can’t we have regime change somewhere else? How about others “take over” their governments as well?

Obviously, a one-person operation such as TLL that comes out about once a week cannot provide updated coverage of this fast-moving story involving a US military assault on the seventh country since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. What we can do is provide links to articles and documents that will provide you with background and a wider context to what is happening… and that you are unlikely to hear about on the Laura Kuenssberg programme on the BBC.

In no particular order (and with thanks to my mates Mat and John), here are eight somewhat eclectic links:

1) Iran, A world-war in one country / Brian Green / 24 Feb. (HERE) “ We are closer to midnight than at any point in our history.”

2) Iran: Neither turban nor crown but Woman, Life, Freedom / Maryram Namazie/15 Jan.(HERE ) . An Iranian woman living in London explains the key role of women in the struggle and why many do not want the return of the son of the much-hated Shah of Iran.

3) A petition launched by YOUR PARTY (Sign HERE) - Among other thing, it calls for an end to UK arms sales to the USA.

4) Statement by Canadian PM Mark Carney on 28 Feb. (HERE) - Mr “New World Order” has lined up 100% up right behind Trump.

5) Dubai’s Mirage Collapses / Kathy / 28 Feb. / (HERE) / “Dubai has spent years pretending it lives above the region it sits in… The UAE has always sold itself as untouchable. That story didn’t survive the morning.”

6) U.S.-Iran – A War Of Aggressions Which Aims Can Not Be Achieved / Moon of Alabama / 28 Feb. (HERE) In the US-Iran diplomatic talks last week, “the U.S. however was not interested in a nuclear deal.”

7) Brief video clip of US foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer, 27 Feb. / (HERE) “There is no military solution… delusional.”

8) Tehran to Trump: Strike Iran, ignite the region/ Mohamad Hasan Sweidan / 25 Feb. ( HERE) “ Iran is signalling that a US strike would not stay limited, but would ripple across West Asia in ways Washington may not be prepared to absorb.”

No cutline is needed.

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Weighing in on YP’s internal elections

Your Party (YP), the new socialist party founded in late November, recently held elections for its top leadership body, the Central Executive Committee ( CEC). HERE is the list of all the candidates for the 24 CEC posts.

The results were announced on Thursday, 26 February. The Jeremy Corbyn-led THE MANY slate took 14 positions and Zarah Sultana’s GRASSROOTS LEFT slate won 9 posts. Three independents also won. Below are their names.

A chart nicked with permission from YP member Steve Price. ( Note: There is one typo here: It is Jo Rust, not Joe Rust.)

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THE LEFT LANE asked three questions of six YP members:

Q #1) What are your reflections on the CEC elections, either as a candidate or a voter?

Q #2 ) What do you see as BOTH the main strengths and weaknesses of YP at this moment in its history… and how do you think we got here in this project?

Q #3) What should be YP’s priorities and the CEC’s priorities in the next six months? (Be specific. If you answer, “build the branches,” say how.)

Here are their answers in a maximum of 500 words each.

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“It’s what comes next that really matters”

by Niall Christie ( CEC member)

Ordinarily when political parties wrestle internally for control, they aren’t having to deliberate over internal democracy, party policy, bureaucratic practice, and the organisation’s culture all at the same time. Add to this the added scrutiny of the wishful thinking of many to our right, willing Your Party to fail, it was almost inevitable that the experience of the CEC elections was going to be less than pleasant.

So when reflections on the past couple of months are written - the key issue that needs to be remembered is that there was always going to be friction. That was natural. But it’s what comes next that really matters. As a newly-elected member of the CEC myself, that’s a responsibility I take very seriously.

In Scotland, myself and my competitors worked together to raise significant issues facing Scots, and Your Party north of the border: the democratic deficit on the CEC, the looming election challenge for Holyrood this May, and the need to set up branches and the leadership of the Scottish party. We showed it was possible to have constructive discussion and debates about these without it bleeding into the public eye. And fundamentally, we did so knowing we were all doing so to, in our own way, move the party forward.

For me, there are key priorities that should be tabled immediately at the first meeting of our CEC. A motion, drafted with myself and comrade Lizzie Bailey in Wales, who finished second to Maria Donellan of the Many, sets these out clearly. Beginning the formal and legal transfer of membership data to the devolved national parties. Establishing a system for devolved national parties and regional branches to send out emails to members. Setting aside funds for a Welsh conference in line with the similar event in Scotland. These are key, but fundamental, steps that must be taken for the good of the party in all three nations.

More specifically in Scotland, the decisions taken in Dundee earlier this month must be respected, and as soon as possible. Namely - our elections for the Scottish Executive Committee must begin without delay, and planning meetings for where and how we stand in May’s elections have to be called within days. That is the seriousness of the situation in Scotland. This must be addressed, and I hope CEC members of all stripes (and slates) can recognise this.

For Your Party, we are now in the most stable position as a party since our inception. We have leadership. We have a constitution. And we have an active, motivated membership who want to make a difference in their communities. Now is the time to reach others - including other parties, large and small, who we can work with to fight the coming tide of the far-right.

Pride cannot get in the way - Your Party is not (yet) the 800,000 strong vehicle we’d have hoped. But it can still be a key player in politics in every corner of these islands - only if we use this as a point to begin the work of establishing and building Your Party in earnest.

Niall Christie is Your Party CEC member for Scotland. He is a journalist, socialist and activist living in the Southside of Glasgow.

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“Our power is in the rank-and-file”

By Mel Mullings ( CEC Member)

Q#1 - My main reflection is one of immense pride and real hope. Travelling across London to visit our branches, I was met with the kind of hospitality and warmth that defines the best of our movement. From North to South, our members aren’t just names on a list; they are dedicated neighbours and organisers. It reminded me that our roots in the capital are solid and ready to grow.

But we have to be real about the mess at the top. The way the STV model was rolled out was a joke. Nobody knew the rules until the last minute, and that confusion didn’t just happen; it disadvantaged the independent candidates who don’t have a big machine behind them. If we claim to be intersectional, our processes have to be transparent from day one. Our members deserve a system that’s as inclusive as the welcome they gave me on the ground.

Q#2 – Strengths: Our power is in the rank-and-file. The branches I visited across London are the heartbeat of this project. We’ve built a home for the “abandoned”; those who left Labour because they were sick of being ignored. We are a party of the “shop floor”: unapologetically socialist, anti-Zionist, and anti-racist.

Weaknesses: We’re currently held back by a “top-down” culture. The membership portal rows and disqualifying socialist candidates right before the vote were huge mistakes. It signalled division when we should be building the intersectional alliance we need to survive.

How we got here: We’re here because socialists refuse to stand with a party that supports genocide. We won’t watch our communities’ money be stripped from schools and healthcare to aid and abet war globally. We are the shield against the rise of the far right, the Farages and Robinsons who exploit working-class anger, and a response to Labour’s total failure. Even the Greens don’t have the class-conscious “belts and braces” to actually take on this system.

Q#3 - We need to stop the games and empower the people actually doing the work. Recognise the Branches: Stop telling us branches “aren’t ready.” That’s a lie from faceless bureaucrats to keep control. The CEC must release the data and the money now. The branches are ready; the centre is the one lagging behind. We need serious talk with the unions. It’s time they disaffiliate from Labour and affiliate with us. We’re the only ones who’ll use the Employment Rights Act 2025 to actually back workers, not just manage their decline. We need to “rubber-stamp” our candidates early with a unified banner and full legal support for May 7th elections. We need a permanent Election Protocol and a “Notice Standard” for all events so there is clear inclusivity. We must formalise a Reparatory Justice Framework as a core economic pillar, not a side issue. Our young people are being priced out of their own city. We need rent controls and a mass programme of council housing now. We must empower our youth to lead, not just “consult” them.

Mel Mullings is the successful Grassroots Left CEC member for London. She is an intersectional socialist, trade unionist, RMT Bakerloo Secretary, Women’s Advisory Chair, BLM Croydon Co-Founder, campaigns for climate justice, reparations, and Black women’s transport rights.

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I Dream of the Stars…

By Deb Foulkes

An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. NASA is developing a tiny spaceship that can hurl itself at future asteroids heading towards us, to stop us experiencing a similar fate.

Your Party is another brave spaceship, directed at the forces of war and civilisational collapse bearing down upon us. Together, we designed a fantastic blueprint for our spaceship, the founding documents. But someone messed with that blueprint. The elections for the astronauts, who are to guide our beautiful ship, were rigged, and it might explode in a ball of flame in midair like the Challenger disaster (See HERE) unless we act rapidly, and restore the original design.

The ship’s framework is twisted and warped - by bizarre STV quotas, a leaden ball of unconstitutional endorsements, and exclusions from the ballot on shady grounds, without evidence or due process. The elections must be scrapped and rerun. Our starship must shine brightly once again in the hearts of all those who boldly dream of a socialist utopia, to give hope in these dark times, to lift up all who are heavy of heart... ...including ourselves.

Our supreme strength as a party are those marvellous blueprints, our party’s bones. They contain uniquely innovative elements, at the cutting edge of the science of collective intelligence, of high-quality team decision-making. Truly, our assemblies and our local branches springing up like green shoots, irrepressible, all over the country, our grassroots movement, is something we can be proud of and build upon, despite the batterings we have had in recent months.

Our main weakness is our lack of a caring culture. Capitalism is a harsh and predatory thing. Its progeny are violence of both word and deed. And all of us have been bathed in that. It has tainted our souls.

Richard Murphy speaks of the need to transform our economics into an economics of care. But to do that we must first embody it ourselves, in the way we speak and debate with each other. We must make our movement a joyful and welcoming place for the weary and oppressed. We must be kind to each other. We must resist division. And be mindful that there will be some among us who have been sent to deliberately disrupt and undermine us...

The single most important thing our first CEC astronaut crew has to do is to commit a form of altruistic hara-kiri, and dissolve itself with new elections in six months, to restore the original blueprint and stop a flameout. And until then?

- Appoint a neutral CEO and task them with appointing non-partisan staff.

- Get professional training in nonviolent communication to model the cultural change we need.

- Commission a governance and financial audit.

- Create workgroups with a mix of CEC members, branch delegates, and sortitioned ordinary members to a) sort out dual membership; b) develop a Rulebook; c) decide how to establish branches; d) develop policy manifestos for upcoming elections.

Love and solidarity to all! Let’s get to work!

Deb Foulkes writes about politics and collective intelligence at her Substack ‘The Wisdom of the Bee.’ (HERE) She taught journalism and translation at a German university, and is a multilingual poet. She was blocked from standing as an independent candidate for the Northwest after she was falsely accused of dual membership, but was reinstated after appealing. Deb has just released a detailed study of the YP CEC elections that can be read HERE. [ Editor’s note: this is definitely worth checking out. ]

TLL EXCLUSIVE! A photo of the first meeting of Your Party’s Central Executive Committee.

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Where are the 800,000 now?

by Andy Walker

I stood as an independent candidate for the Your Party CEC (North East region) because I believe that the party has the potential to change the face of British politics, provided that we engage fully and proactively with our grassroots members and alliance with other politically aligned people in our local areas and nationally.

As a lifelong socialist and labour movement activist for more than 40 years, I also wanted to bring my political and organisational skills to the leadership of Your Party, skills which include more than three decades working as a journalist and a communications expert in a range of national and regional third sector, not-for-profit, charitable and campaigning organisations.

Reflecting on the CEC elections, I was really disappointed (though not surprised) that the two main slates of candidates – The Many and the Grassroots Left – saw fit to attack each other, often in an uncomradely and sometimes abusive way. My position during the campaign has been that the factionalism and division that have plagued Your Party since its troubled launch has to stop. If it doesn’t then the party will not succeed. It’s why I was keen to stand as an independent candidate in the election.

More than 800,000 people originally signed up to register their interest in Your Party. 800,000 people said tell us more. That was a massive potential army of advocates for a better politics and a better future for this country - but what happened to those people?

Where are they now? Tens of thousands have probably drifted away to the Greens and thousands more have just left, put off by the squabbling and splits that have plagued Your Party in recent months.

The key priority as a matter of urgency following these elections has to be to build Your Party’s membership infrastructure. That means enabling access to data, access to resources and access to funds so that members can form and register official party branches now, not at some distant time in the future. The new CEC members should report back to all members in their regions in the next two weeks with a plan to make this happen.

The party needs to pull together and unite. Some things are much bigger than purity politics and who can be the most left wing, or the most ‘sensible’. And I say that as someone who has made a principled opposition to capitalism as a key tenet of my politics for as long as I can remember. The griping and sniping needs to stop right now or Your Party will fail. But the party also needs to start engaging with members and involving them too. As the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election shows, other options are available on the left.

Andy Walker is a Your Party member based in Durham. A labour movement activist for more than 40 years, he is also the secretary of the Newcastle branch of the National Union of Journalists. He stood as an independent candidate in the North East region.

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“Two different approaches to the role of Your Party”

By Michael Mulquin

It’s been a messy, hard-fought election, as part of a messy, hard-fought set up process for Your Party.

It could have been much smoother if the party had spent time to thoroughly debate and check all the details. However, we didn’t have that luxury, with Reform on the rise and a Labour Party that has betrayed its values.

Given the speed at which things have been done, its amazing things have worked as well as they have. In eight months we have gone from a standing start to an elected leadership based on an agreed set of foundational documents.

We can raise all kinds of objections about the process, but, overall, the result is a good one with, I suggest, the right mix of candidates now part of the CEC. And we now have a group of people who are democratically accountable to take Your Party to the next stage.

Both the key strength and the key potential weakness of Your Party is that, as a broad generalisation, within both the membership and the CEC we have two different approaches to the role of Your Party. Some see Your Party as a way to bring together the many parties of the left. Their focus is to move forward with clear ideologically driven goals and maintain a membership that is committed to that approach. Others focus on growing a large and open membership and building bridges with other groups with which we may not completely agree with the aim to build the momentum needed to remake this country for the many and not the few.

We need both. We need to be known, not first and foremost for our ideology, but for our ability to tackle effectively the challenges that face our country. But we need to be constantly challenged from within to make sure we don’t drift and become wishy washy in pursuit of political power. With good will from all the newly elected members, we can bring these different perspectives together to build a solid foundation for the future.

The key priority for the next six months is to build strong roots in local communities, not only to grow our membership, but also so that people see us as a party that campaigns effectively on the issues important to them. We are going to be under attack from the very beginning by the media and other political parties. However, the impact will be minimal, if people everywhere can see that we are on their side.

The branches are key, but the priority should not be on building bureaucracies that simply bring motions to conference, but rather branches that stand alongside trade unions and other sister organisations, and support local and national campaigns that align with our values. In some areas the local elections will provide a great opportunity. Existing Your Party groups will provide a good source of leadership, but we are building a mass movement for change and so must involve all members from the very beginning.

I can’t wait!

After many years in community development, Michael Mulqin now works for an international smart city network and chairs an international Smart City standards committee. He was a candidate on The Many slate in the East of England.

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The Game of Slates

Another chapter closes in the political lives of everyday UK lefties in Britain. A recap.

By Mike Weaver

The murphs were hatching plans for a new mass left wing party. The mousers were arguing for a broader alliance. An impetuous upstart unveiled the plans ahead of schedule and promoted the concept as grassroots run rather than a mass party. In most corners of the land rooties emerged from their dens and gathered together in support of the project. The murphs were not happy and spent the next few months ignoring the rooties and running the administration as they saw fit. The mousers gave up arguing and left the building. A while later, after more impetuous behaviour by the upstart and a solidifying of ranks by the murphs and rooties, an election process was started, run by the murphs rather than an external body as originally agreed.

When some among the rooties formed an electoral slate the murphs responded with their own fronted by the beloved JC. With communications between the candidates and their electorate narrowly restricted, and with JC to sway the faithful, the outcome of the election was no surprise. The murphs had more sophisticated weaponry and, occupying the castle keep, the advantage of being uphill from the rooties all along.

Now read on…

Outside of the castle positional skirmishes are likely to continue, as a mass party cannot operate without willing support at a branch level and that is where resistance to the murphs’ domination is concentrated. Will the murphs find a way to neutralise the influence of dual members without losing the support of unaligned socialists, or they will have to magically convert a good percentage of the inactive membership into competent branch organisers? It’s one thing to get unseasoned enthusiasts to staff a phone bank in support of their idol. It’s another to get them committed to the mundanities of running a local branch.

There is little sign that the murphs will relax their hostility to the vestiges of the 3rd and 4^th internationals. A reasonable resolution would be to allow an open ordinary membership but restrict all positions of responsibility to sole YP members. Unlikely since compromise is not valued among the murphs.

The murphs’ strength is in their single-minded cohesion and their command of the loyalty of the JC fan club. But it may be that their Westminster focused plan, if not redundant, is so much reduced in momentum by the loss of support to the Greens that they will have no more than a gadfly role in Parliament with little hope of growth.

The rooties may have failed to gain power this time round but, before and during the election process, lateral connections and bonds have been formed which if built on could give them a source of growing strength. The grassroots driven strategy is a longer route but has the potential to go much further than the murphs’ Westminster focus. The top-level alliance with the Greens will never be as strong an accretion of alliances forged at a local level. And alliances are what are now needed, with trade unionists, community and campaign organisers, and members of other parties, putting socialism not at the fore but in the core of a broad grassroots coalition.

Mike Weaver is a YP member in Southwest England. He says: “I am a rural beast, who never really adapted to city ways, but learned some by and by.”

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Five questions from THE LEFT LANE:

In two recent issues, THE LEFT LANE examined at length the YP CEC hustings and the overall state of this party. You can read those issues HERE (11 Feb.) and HERE (`14 Feb.)

Going forward as the CEC takes over, we pose five questions in our 350 words.

1) As one journalist put it: “It’s settled: Your Party is a Jeremy Corbyn joint.” Yet YP members voted last November for a collective leadership. How will these two positions be reconciled? (Corbyn has already said he wants YP to adopt a single-leader model.)

2) In the same vein, will the small circle around Corbyn, which has controlled YP HQ for months and who “guided” the recent CEC elections, remain in charge? (Five of the six YP members above are sharply critical of the lack of transparency and basic democracy that have characterised its operations.)

3) A decision on “dual membership” with other parties looms. Again Corbyn wants to overturn a conference decision. How will the CEC - and ultimately the wider members – respond? (Ending dual membership would, over coming months, set off a purge of the YP left, despite many in the left (including myself) not belonging to any so-called “far left” parties.)

4) The main (but not exclusive) demographic / social base of YP is about 40,000 mostly older Corbyn supporters who did not flee YP when up to other 750,000 activists walked away. What campaigning strategy - and especially by the scandalously neutered branches (see point #2) - will transform YP from being a party of mainly ex-Labour activists into a mass socialist party with a working class base? This is far from a simple question.

5) The Greens have now decisively eclipsed YP in influence, especially following Thursday’s b-election victory in Manchester. What will be YP’s stance toward the Greens? ( That’s just one of many strategical and theoretical issues that YP must take up; others include ecosocialism, (and HERE), identity politics and Labourism/ social democracy (see last section HERE.)

The jury is still deliberating if YP will succeed.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

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In today’s lengthy The LEFT LANE, two pieces:

1. IRAN, A WORLD-WAR IN ONE COUNTRY.

2. PART 2 – 10 QUESTIONS NOT ASKED AT YP HUSTINGS

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Say “No” to any Trumpian war on Iran

USS Gerald R Ford, called “ the most powerful warship in the world”, is steaming ever closer towards Iran. Credit: Gerard Bottino/SOPA Images

“The above chart represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.” ( Words by Professor Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, specializing in security affairs. Founding Director, Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST).) SOURCE:

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IRAN, A WORLD-WAR IN ONE COUNTRY

by Brian Green

(Associate editor of THE LEFT LANE and author of THE PLANNING MOTIVE blog HERE)

With the US ramping up its air and sea power to record levels near Iran, this piece assesses the dangers of a wider “big power” war of the US vs China.

HERE is his blog:

Brian’s brief introduction:

“For the first time China is stepping forward to militarily confront the USA. Evidence suggests China is shipping to and setting up serious defensive assets in Iran alongside Russia. On the other side the US is pouring weapons especially F35s into the region to assure dominance. The Iranians have warned about a regional war should they be attacked, but this is shaping into a big power war”.

His conclusion:

“Countries only go to war when it is too costly for them not to go to war. The US endgame is based on two perspectives. Firstly, to keep on securing its hegemony, and if this is not possible, to prevent another hegemon from rising. The US declared economic war on China in 2018 when the Chinese challenge first emerged as China transitioned from being the workshop for Western Imperialism to developing an independent economy. Seven years later that economic war has failed. China has conquered one technology after another and progressively eliminated technical bottlenecks. Any technological lags, for example in chip fabrication and jet engine production, are being quickly eliminated. The USA survives not because of the dollar but because of its remaining technological hold on the global value chain which provides it with the monopoly profits keeping its economy upright. Strip that away and the USA becomes a super-sized failed state.

If China triumphs economically the US loses socially which is why war is inevitable. Unless you fully appreciate what is at stake, the tumultuous events shaking the world remain inexplicable. The US is fighting for its hegemonic life, and it is losing. That makes our world a very dangerous place. Empires do not go quietly into the night; they set the night on fire. In the next two weeks it will become clear whether a boxed-in and increasingly unpopular-at-home Trump retreats or sets the Gulf alight. What is different about today compared to 2003, is the absence of the massive anti-war protests, some over two-million strong, that were staged in London and Rome at the time. This needs to change. We are closer to midnight than at any point in our history.”

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PART 2 – 10 QUESTIONS NOT ASKED AT YP HUSTINGS

By Alan Story

This is PART TWO of a two-part series. PART ONE, which contained questions 1-5, was released in THE LEFT LANE (TLL) on 11 February and can be read HERE.

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Just as I was about to start writing this piece, I happened across two quotations below. One is by a leading Canadian singer-songwriter from my era and the other is by a Polish German Marxist revolutionary who was murdered by a far right paramilitary group more than 100 years ago.

“Gotta kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight”

Bruce Cockburn

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”

Rosa Luxemburg

With these words as a guide and inspiration, it was time to get to work and say some things that I think need to be said about Your Party (YP), which I signed up to in late July 2025, that is, almost seven long months ago.

YP, which has an estimated 200 proto branches across England, Scotland and Wales, has just completed a series of hustings for candidates seeking election to 24 posts on its soon-to-be-created central executive committee (CEC). Voting ended yesterday (23 February). The results are supposed to be known on 26 February and the new CEC could take charge as soon as the next day. (HERE is the schedule).

Just as chain stores dominate shopping centres and more and more of our high streets these days, most observers of the CEC elections expect candidates from the two slates will win a large majority of the seats. The slates are headed by MP Jeremy Corbyn – his slate is THE MANY (TM) – and MP Zarah Sultana – her slate is Grassroots Left (GL).

As was explained HERE on 11 February, the very structure of these elections favours slate candidates.

Voting system chosen is highly undemocratic

Moreover, as TLL just discovered, the method being used to count and rank the online CEC ballots over the next 48 hours – it’s called the “imperiali” system – is seldom used anywhere else in the world as it is considered one of the worst indicators of the choices made by voters. Some Cockburnian “darkness.”

Its problems are explained in THIS helpful article from Michael Barker’s “Thoughts of Leicester Socialist” blog which quotes extensively from GL candidate Graham Jones. Too bad YP HQ did not reach out to a knowledgeable YP member such as Graham before imposing “imperiali” as the decider of which candidates the possible +50,000 YP voters actually want to lead them until 2028.

YP HQ also could have checked Wikipedia. Its entry on “imperiali” concludes this voting system “primarily aids more popular parties [ e.g. slates] as they may get more seats with the same votes.” A check with the AI system “Claude” gave an identical answer. Math wizards can do the numbers themselves.

In fact, the decision by YP HQ to choose the most undemocratic Single Transferable Vote (STV) system possible may very well have been deliberate. I did want to do my journalist duty and get a response from YP HQ or the tops, but they do not regard TLL as a legitimate media and do not even respond to registered letters (as has been pointed out here several times.)

As for whether slates are helpful in building badly-needed YP party unity, independent CEC candidate Sam Gorst of Liverpool wrote in a recent Facebook post criticising the “tribalism” in YP: “We know that slates weren’t necessary, magnified the obvious divisions and injected a further dose of unfairness into a brand new socialist Party.” [ Just to add: being “independent” is not the only characteristic we need in good CEC members; some of the indys, not Sam, are very weak in my opinion.]

TLL has already asked in Question 1: “Will the results of these CEC elections halt the crisis in YP?” and suggested “everything depends on the context.” The context --- more weeks of factionalism and none-too-subtle “my way or the doorway” messages from Corbyn’s TM slate (see Question 7 below) --- is hardly favourable.

As to whether there is “a crisis in YP”, consider these two facts:

1) On 14 August 2025, a total of 67 YP supporters on the Isle of Wight attended a YP meet. A few days later, TLL ran a brief story and a photo of that event, which you can read down the thread HERE.

2) Yes, it was a rainy and windy night last Wednesday (18 Feb.) but only six people attended the most recent YP there. SIX!

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There were 67 people at this Your Party meeting on the Isle of Wight in August 2025… and six at the latest one on 18 February 2026.

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Without any joy, TLL will continue to ask: “what conditions caused this woeful – and yes, it is woeful – drop in the level of support?” all across the UK and “who is responsible?”

It is an important subject many want to duck. Consider it another Bruce Cockburn moment of “darkness” not confronted or resolved by a mere “I am sorry” from either MPs Sultana or Corbyn … or anyone else. ( To her credit, Sultana makes some good points in this 21 Feb. video; this video by Inacio Vieira contains the depressing revelation that there are up to four competing proto branches in Cambridge alone.)

In today’s TLL we ask five more questions that got very limited or zero attention at the hustings we watched:

6) Exactly what is the purpose of YP?

7) Do we want a party of hero worshippers?

8) How will the branches function?

9) Can we have some straight talking about the small “left” groups? (this question is answered in a lot of detail, perhaps too much).

10) Last but not least: is Starmer the only thing wrong with Labour?

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6)Exactly what is the purpose of YP?

The International, written in 1871 and adopted as the anthem of various anarchist, communist and socialist movements worldwide, is not sung that often in the UK these days. Some consider its words a bit dated. They are certainly from another era. Nevertheless, its lyrics do contain some valuable watchwords as we consider the important issue: exactly what is the purpose of YP? And a corollary question: if YP continues along the current course, where will it likely end up?

Consider these words from the second verse:

We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

(PS: If you need a boost, listen HERE to a rousing version of the International in French. It would make Macron shiver!)

CEC candidate Chloe Braddock took up the same theme in her 11 Feb. substack which began with these words:

“One of the central principles of modern socialist thought is a belief in the self-emancipation of the working class. The transformation of society we need cannot be delivered from above but must come from below; this is the logic, unspoken or not, behind all initiatives that seek to politically organise the working class, including Your Party. As opposed to the capitalist way of doing politics, where party members are measured in terms of their ability to knock on doors and hand out leaflets on behalf of this or that charismatic politician, our movement aims to develop the self-initiative of our class to be able to intervene in politics at all levels, from local to international.” Right on Chloe!

Is this YP’s direction of travel? Has this been YP’s main purpose from late July 2025 kick-off until late Feb. 2026? Has mobilising the membership been an organising principle of the MPs who form the YP “Interim” leadership team?

Definitely not. In fact, exactly the opposite. They want YP members to be an audience, not agents. As TLL and others have reported, the focus has instead been on: a) repeated media briefings against leadership opponents; 2) factional battles and threats of bringing in lawyers; 3) regional assemblies that could have been so much better; 4) a founding conference which mostly offered false binaries and tried to settle major political questions in less than 20 minutes.

As for the recent hustings themselves: the candidates were asked vetted, pre-screened and non-threatening questions and those watching were muted for 90 minutes. A chance to have a serious debate about what is the purpose of YP? Of course not. “Self-emancipation of the working class?” Hardly.

YP HQ and these MPs understand one thing above all else: information means power. And so they hoard every possible shred of information they can, whether it is about who are YP members or how OUR monthly dues are being spent. For example, there MIGHT be 3 or 4 members of YP who live on my street here in Norwich. Yet I am in the dark on that one. They do know, however, on Fonthill Road in north London at YP HQ. “Self-emancipation of the working class.” Hardly.

What is being offered up to YP members --- unless it is dramatically changed by the CEC in a political cultural revolution --- is a top-down, centrist social democratic party that will mostly operate as an electoral “machine” --- mind you, missing hundreds of thousands of moving parts, oops supporters, who have already walked away --- and controlled by a bureaucratic elite as was explained in this recent Red Mole blog.

All across Europe roughly equivalent social democratic parties have crashed out in recent years. Think of the Socialist Party of France which elected France’s president in 2012, but its candidate in 2022 received a mere 1.75% of the vote. Or think of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was trounced in the Feb. 2025 elections after leading a coalition government ; see two articles in THE LEFT LANE at the time. Or think in our own county of Labour. Enough said. YP is hardly insulated from such political developments. Saying YP won’t be Labour 2.0 doesn’t make it so.

From the start, focusing on class politics and building a party based on socialist values have NOT been at the forefront of YP’s agenda. And to repeat for about the fifth or sixth time: without a theory of party building and a guiding strategical vision, YP will remain in a quagmire, a ship without a compass. YP’s organisational strategy doc is next to useless.

Sadly it get worse in these turbulent times, globally and in the UK. See the question and answer that is up next.

7) Do we want a party of hero worshippers?

Jeremy Corbyn has a small circle of people around him who think he is, well, “the bees’ knees” as a political leader and someone who is simply irreplaceable. Its members want to recreate in 2026 in Your Party what occurred in the Labour Party in 2015 when he was elected its leader. The mainstream media labelled it “Corbynmania”; the phenomenon even has its own Wikipedia entry.

This circle, which is directed by his wife Laura and by Karie Murphy, who ran Corbyn’s office for several years while was Leader of the Opposition before 2020, think that the ONLY way to build YP and make it a serious political movement is to focus almost exclusively on Corbyn’s supposed irreplaceability. Without Corbyn at the helm, YP will collapse, they claim. (We will get to their messaging in a minute.)

THE LEFT LANE begs to differ. Their approach reproduces the type of personality politics and “great man theory” of history and politics that bedevils the capitalist world.

I witnessed this hero worship of Corbyn first hand back in late November 2024 when I was an observer at an online Zoom meeting of a group called The Collective, a precursor to YP.

Murphy, the chairperson, arrived late. She was clearly very distraught. Evidently, she had recently held a meeting with Corbyn and he had told he was not sure whether he wanted to help set up a new party. ( A leak to The Guardian two months earlier said Corby had spoken at a new party planning meeting.)

Without Corbyn leading such a party, Murphy told the November 2024 Zoom session of about 30 activists that a new left party simply “wasn’t possible”, I remember Murphy telling them. (It took Murphy until July 2025 to convince Corbyn he should be involved.)

Of course, Corbyn had a certain following back in 2015 and still has one today. (The explanation for this would require an article by itself.) But in 2025-26, that “following” has obviously become much reduced in both its numbers and intensity. If it was the same today as in 2015, the numbers of YP supported would not have plummeted from 800,000 to 50,000. His political “power”, if that is the most accurate word, has been significantly reduced.

Moreover, to blame YP’s decline or its disunity solely on Sultana --- as this group often does --- is simply not credible. BOTH Corbyn and Sultana have made serious political errors. There are also other factors at play in the failings, to date, of YP.

But Corbyn’s circle still think he has some type of special political magnetism. Below is a photo and excerpts from messages sent out in the past two weeks from his Peace & Justice project.

A poster prepared and circulated widely Corbyn’s team last week.

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As reported earlier, two weeks ago his team leaked this story to the media headed: Survival Of ‘Your Party’ At Stake As Leadership Voting Opens. A source is quoted as saying “There is only one way this party can survive: a victory for The Many.”

The same threatening tone, as well as the overall lionising of Corbyn and portraying him as a victim, is revealed in a flood of emails from P & J. A few examples:

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Email of 18 Feb.

Dear Alan,

“Politicians of all the parties have accepted the Mandelson settlement, which means handing political power to rich men”, commented the journalist Peter Oborne at a recent event in London. “The one person who hasn’t has just joined us in this room…”

He was talking, of course, about Jeremy Corbyn.

Tonight (Wednesday) at 7pm you’re invited to a special online event with Jeremy Corbyn on the Epstein-Mandelson-Starmer nexus and what it reveals about power in Britain…

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Email of 22 Feb.

Dear Alan,

Jeremy Corbyn needs your help.

Throughout years of abuse and attacks by the establishment, Jeremy never abandoned his unique approach to politics: always welcoming, always seeking to build the broadest possible support without wavering on his socialist convictions. He is, above all, relentlessly focused on the issues.

Your Party began with the same approach. But now it’s in real danger of becoming something very different — an angry fringe party that conducts purity tests at the door and rails against potential allies. And once again, Jeremy finds himself the target of abuse….

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Email of 15 Feb.

Dear Alan,

The future of Your Party is in the balance…

Find out who to vote for where you live

And then cast your vote!

Vote now

If The Many are elected, they will:

· elect Jeremy Parliamentary Leader…

Alan, the future of Your Party really does hang on this election.

In solidarity,

Peace & Justice Project

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Perhaps such messages and photos “turn the crank” of Corbyn’s inner circle. But a few people I have shown them to say they are “embarrassing”, “excruciating”, “so 2015”, “a desperation tactic” and “not the way a socialist campaigns for a party office.”

They would likely give an even harsher response if they had watched hero worshipping videos, as I have, such as ones where a woman holds up a series of signs saying “everyone loves Jeremy.” Or read the vilest and embarrassing social media messages and new substacks from unidentified authors who suggest Corbyn is truly a political leader without equal in our era. I cannot bear posting links… so TLL won’t. ol,

Why Corbyn doesn’t tell him to cease is beyond me. Are we about to face months more of this?

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Perhaps you may be asking at this point: why, Alan, are you even remaining a member of this party? It is a question I ask myself regularly. Friends also ask me this question. The short answer: I hate capitalism and imperialism with a passion. I’ve been a socialist for almost 60 years. In the last year, I’ve met a number of excellent socialists in YP ; many are also despairing. A YP-related project I am involved with is working together quite well in a comradely fashion. Moreover, I think I can make a contribution, however minor, to the struggle for socialism. I am an optimist. We do badly need a socialist party. No one I know of has come with a viable Plan B.

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8) How will the branches function?

Although YP leadership and party documents say that the party will be a member-led party, there was very limited discussion in the hustings about how branches, which will be the main operational forum where 99% of members will do their political work and interact, should function. That was unfortunate.

The basic functioning of YP branches is covered in Section 3 d) of the party’s constitution, But details here are sparse and raise several issues. A “YP guide” to operating a YP branch is a priority, but it should not be too prescriptive or squelch creativity.

Obviously establishing as many “official” branches as possible must be a top priority of the CEC. (As mentioned above, there are about 200 proto- or interim-branches in existence in rural and urban areas of England, Scotland, and Wales.)

A few questions I would raise here:

1) Section 3 d.ix states that “all branches shall be properly resourced.” This is certain to be an area of conflict. What is considered “properly resourced” by YP HQ (and the CEC) may be very different from what is considered necessary by those on the ground.

There was an amendment at the Liverpool conference to establish a straight 50/50 split in the dues between the branches and the centre. But unfortunately, this amendment was never discussed. TLL suggests that the CEC pass a motion stating that a 50/50 split will be interpreted as meaning “properly resourced” as this could save a great deal of wrangling and unnecessary disputes.

2) There is no mention whatsoever of the importance of branches holding their meetings in locations that are accessible to our disabled colleagues. This is a serious failing and should be rectified immediately. In the same vein, branch meetings should not be held in pubs or bars as some YP colleagues do not wish to go to them for religious reasons.

3) How branches will function in many other areas remains unclear. At a minimum, the CEC should establish an internal party discussion bulletin so that best practises can be shared and so that there can be greatly increased lateral discussion between branches across the UK.

This answer only scratches the surface of the issues that need to be discussed.

9) Can we have some straight talking about the small “left” groups?

Within YR circles, this question is discussed under the heading of “dual membership”. Is it possible for an individual to be a member of both Your Party as well as some other party? The “other party” in question is usually a left wing formation such as the SWP, the Socialist Party (SP)or George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain (WPB).

Several thousand words could easily be written on this subject; today we will only make six relatively brief points.

1) Very much against the wishes of Corbyn and his circle, the founding YP conference in late November approved constitutional clause 4.xii which states:

“Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the Party’s values, to include those with whom the Party cooperates electorally. The approved list shall be subject to ongoing CEC review and annual ratification by National Conference.”

2) As the YP CEC has not yet met, one reading of this clause (there are others!) meant, for example, that two well-known socialists, Chris Williamson of the WPB and Dave Nellist of the SP, were barred from standing in the CEC elections.

This disqualification decision was made by the thoroughly-discredited YP elections officer ( see HERE), appeals of his decisions were permitted …. but to Corbyn’s former sister-in-law ( see HERE), a supposed Members’ Oversight Committee is cloaked in mystery and is itself the subject of a petition( see HERE) and these CEC elections are NOT being conducted “ by a trusted independent, third-party company” ( as members had been promised in Section 3 of YP’s approved “first year organisational strategy” (See HERE) In short, they were not member-led decisions on the disqualification of Williamson and Nellist.

3) YP “insiders” are totally flummoxed about how to deal with cases such as that of Nellist, a member of the SP for more than 25 years and head of TUSC. At the YP Conference in Liverpool, THE LEFT LANE conducted an on-the-record interview with Len McCluskey, the former general secretary of Unite the Union, the partner of Karie Murphy, and the longtime political associate of Corbyn. Saying he knew Nellist “quite well”, McCluskey said the problem of his membership in YP would be solved “if Dave just resigned from the Socialist Party.” Well yes, Len, that is one solution. TLL did not have time today to contact Nellist but assume his response would be along the Iines of “fat chance of that happening!”

4) Corbyn himself has already said he wants to get rid of the possibility of dual membership for YP members. If that occurred, a purge of at least 1,000 YP members – perhaps more -- would ensue later in 2026. Is that what supporters of The Many slate really want?

The hypocrisy of Corbyn is stark. Back in the spring and early summer of 2025, Corbyn was a regular speaker at numerous events organised by Trotskyist groups such as the SWP and SP. TLL, for example, covered a 29 March 2025 event in London put on by a SWP front group “We Demand Change” ; HERE is a photo and a brief report on that event. Now in 2026, Corbyn wants to send them packing.

5) There is another hypocrisy in the stance of Corbyn and his supporters. One of the main arguments they make against small left groups and parties is that such organisations are “outsiders” trying to manipulate and control YP. The fact is, however, --- and as was pointed out in the answer to question #7 above --- the MAIN non-YP organisation intervening in the CEC elections was Corbyn’s own outfit, the Peace and Justice Project Ltd.; its corporate listing with Companies House is HERE.

In the 10 days alone, I have received more than 4 emails from Peace and Justice telling me, as a YP member, to vote for Corbyn and his slate in the CEC elections. I have heard from P & J a lot more times than I’ve heard from a group known as the Bolshevik Tendency. (Apologies: no Wikipedia link for that group is available.)

Build “a party of the whole left”

6) Sultana has opposed these expulsions forcefully and says she wants to build “a party of whole left.” That is positive. Yet she and others in the Grassroots Left slate have some critical questions to answer about the role of these groups in YP … and in other contexts:

a) Why have they been deathly silent about the concerted campaigns of groups like the SWP to expel socialist feminists from the WhatsApp groups of some proto-branches, such as in Sheffield? Or, as we pointed out HERE , to control the lists of branch contact names, as in Norfolk? Or to engage in splitting tactics in the Cambridge branch and elsewhere?

Such tactics only provide ammunition to those on the right of YP who want to expel many on the left who are dual members. Many socialist activists already criticise the SWP and its front groups, such as Stand Up to Racism. HERE is a blog last summer by David Renton. Why can’t Sultana and the YP Grassroots Slate do the same?

b) Have they studied the past role of parties like the SWP and SP in the collapse of previous attempts to build a left-of-Labour socialist party? Phil Pope has written HERE on the extremely negative role of these two parties 20 years ago inside the Socialist Alliance, a sad failure after a history of six years.

c) Do they appreciate that some of these “left groups” actually do NOT want YP to succeed? If YP becomes a robust, dynamic and confident working class SOCIALIST party in the next 3 or 4 years --- and that is still possible! --- one can confidently predict that a significant number of these small “left” parties and groupuscules would wither and die.

Some humility please.

d) Might they (and we) ask for a wee bit of humility from some of these groups and parties when they’re dishing out advice willy nilly about how to build unity and how to build new socialist parties?

Take the case of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) which publishes the Weekly Worker and is active in the Grassroots Left slate. You would need more than a Wikipedia entry to sum up its history over the past three decades (and more). But THIS ONE, which is not nasty nor mean-spirited, gives you a quick overview. In 2025, its last attempt at unity building --- and this time with another communist group called “Talking About Socialism” --- collapsed after some months. The group remains minuscule in size.

Speaking of the Jeremy Corbyn Party (JCP) before YP had its official name, Jack Conrad, the organisation’s leader for yonks, wrote in August 2025 in the Weekly Worker, that “We openly seek to transform the JCP into a Communist Party.” Thanks for being upfront, Jack, but not sure that task is on the agenda of more than 1% of YP’s 50,000 members. At least for now, having a dynamic real SOCIALIST party with a significant working class base would satisfy many of us as a real step forward… and even Lenin might concur if he was alive today.

In summary, the “dual membership” issue has been badly handled by both sides.

10) Last but not least: is Starmer the only thing wrong with Labour?

The short answer is no. Nor is it -or was it – Peter Mandelson, to mention a current Labour baddie of the moment. Nor Tony Blair, who is making a name for himself these days fronting Trump’s latest plan for Palestine.

All three of them are easy targets if one thinks the main problem with Labour is a few bad eggs. In fact, Labour and Labourism are based on ideological construct that aims for “better” social management of capitalism, not its social transformation.

Given that such a high percentage of YP members are former Labour Party members and given that so many in YP say it MUST NOT become Labour 2.0, one might have thought - perhaps naively! - that “What is wrong with Labour and Labourism?” would have been a prime question to ask at the recent hustings… that is, if questions from the audience were allowed!

At least the answers given would have told voters which CEC candidates were mere pretenders and reformists AND which candidates were actual socialists and wanted to clean break from the current morass of so-called “left politics” in the UK.

To assist candidates in the latter category, we asked the AI system “Claude” this question: what did political scientist Ralph Miliband (1924-1994) say was wrong with the Labour Party?

Ralph Miliband ( in a old family photo published by The Guardian) with his two sons, Ed and David. When it comes to politics, sons did not follow father. Too bad.

We’ve pasted in below the answer we got back. Think of it as possible speaking notes (of 300 words) for such candidates, as well as a few ideas that YP branches might use if they want to kick off a few internal educational sessions. In order words, THE LEFT LANE is just trying to be helpful ( ha! ha!)

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What’s wrong with Labour?

By “Claude”

Ralph Miliband, a prominent Marxist political theorist, was highly critical of the British Labour Party. His analysis, particularly articulated in his 1961 book Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, argued that the Labour Party was fundamentally a reformist and non-revolutionary political force that accepted the capitalist system rather than challenging it.

Here are the key points of Miliband’s critique:

1. Commitment to Parliamentary Reform

Miliband argued that the Labour Party placed excessive faith in parliamentary democracy and gradual reform. He believed this approach made it unable — and unwilling — to bring about profound socialist transformation. Instead of dismantling capitalism, the party sought to manage and humanize it.

2. Moderation and Respectability

He observed that Labour’s leaders consistently tried to appear respectable and moderate to appeal to the middle class and capitalist institutions. This meant avoiding radical socialist policies and suppressing grassroots demands for structural change.

3. Distance from Working-Class Radicalism

Although the Labour Party originated from the trade union movement, Miliband argued it increasingly became detached from working-class activism. Party elites (MPs, officials, bureaucrats) prioritized discipline and electoral success over the democratic participation and radical aspirations of the rank and file.

4. The “Tragedy” of the Labour Movement

Miliband famously called Labour’s history a “tragedy” — not because it failed to gain office, but because it squandered the potential of the working class to transform British society. Even when in power, Labour governments largely left existing capitalist structures intact.

5. Reformism vs. Revolutionary Change

For Miliband, Labour’s reformism was not simply tactical — it was ideological. The party accepted the legitimacy of capitalist property relations and the state apparatus. As a result, it could never be the vehicle for genuine socialist transformation.

In summary, Ralph Miliband saw the Labour Party as a party of social management rather than social transformation — one that had consistently failed to challenge capitalism at its roots.

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The next TLL, which comes out on 1 March, will be focused on the results of the CEC elections. It will feature responses from candidates on THE MANY slate and on the GRASSROOTS LEFT slate, two independent CEC candidates, one woman improperly blocked from standing, and one “average” member. Should be lively!

To make sure you get a copy, why not take out a subscription… which can be either free or paid. Click HERE.

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CHECK THIS OUT:

National Demonstration at RAF Marham ( near Kings Lynn in western Norfolk)

For all of the details, including transport, of this important NATIONAL demonstration on Saturday, see HERE.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 114 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover artwork: THE JEVONS PARADOX by artist/ writer/ activist Gordon Liddle.

NOTE to those reading via email: This article may exceed the length that can be sent by Substack to an email account. Solution? Please click on the headline (“The Jevons Paradox… “) and it will take you directly to the Substack article in your browser. Or click on “View Entire Message” down the page.

Explaining THE JEVONS PARADOX

Flooded fields near Burrowbridge, Somerset after Storm Chandra blew through.

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This is a good week for THE LEFT LANE (TLL) to step back from its coverage of the internal elections in YOUR PARTY (see most recent issue) and look at something really important: CAPITALISM & CLIMATE CHAOS.

I’ve just read that the “Reading has seen rain fall every day for a month as the town experiences ‘unprecedented’ rainy weather”, a record matched only once since 1908 when records began. Flooding is widespread across the West Country. The link with climate change is clear.

A United Nations study reports that “severe, long-term droughts across the Global South—specifically in Southern Africa, South America, and parts of Asia—are intensifying due to climate change, severely impacting agriculture, water supplies, and food security. Nearly 1.84 billion people were affected by drought globally in 2022-2023, with low- and middle-income countries bearing the brunt.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who calls climate change “a hoax” and “a scam”, last week wiped out America’s “landmark decision” which concluded that that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming. Watch this Channel 4 news clip. Starmer’s favourite word is “growth.”

TLL certainly does not write enough about ecosocialism; we’ve done only one report HERE in the past year. It had a relatively low readership. Neither Your Party nor even the Greens give enough attention to the ever-deepening climate chaos.

Today we are publishing a provocative article on the “Jevons Paradox” and how gains in efficiency in technology, for example in car engines, result in increased consumption, for example in petrol. We hope you like it and share it with a friend.

A recent drought in Ethiopia has killled livestock (Photo credit: Silvya Bolliger)

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By Gordon Liddle

A special GUEST POST

I want to tell you a story about a painting. A large painting I finished two years ago, part of a Series of works called Gaia, Sixth Extinction Series. I want to tell you why this painting is very important, and how it relates to the Left, how it relates to Green issues and how it relates to the writings of Marx.

The painting is called, The Jevons Paradox. When I showed the finished painting in a discussion on X in answer to a post by Michael Mann, director of the Centre for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania - much quoted on Climate Science (the Hockey Stick Graph) - he, to my huge surprise, blocked me, and the ensuing discussion between other scientists pushed my painting to number one on Google, where it still is; see cover art.

Since then, I keep being lectured by progressives and Bright Greens on how Green Energy is growing and we are transitioning away from Fossil Fuels and why do I keep blaming Capitalism? That Green Energy is the way forward and by transitioning to Net Zero all will be well and the system can carry on. Business as usual, BAU. That by my suggestion that all is not well with Green Transition is playing into the hands of Climate Change Deniers who, paid by Fossil Fuel Companies, use the same arguments to muddy the waters and pour scorn of transitioning away from their fuels.

Well they do this, I have to acknowledge, but facts are facts, and physics is physics, simply wishing for something is not the same as working toward a solution in reality instead. At this moment in time, our chance of reaching Net Zero as an actual reality, by 2050, is not feasible. It is a scam. Not true, not achievable, it is not going to happen, no matter what the shuffling of spreadsheet figures say, or whatever computer models or AI engines predict (more of AI later).

Now we are being told by those who should know better that we can replace the historic ghost acreage (fossil fuels) with new technology, basically a Green New Deal. Green Energy. A Green Transition. And we are also told that to question this mantra is to be siding with Fossil Fuel corporations, their propaganda arms and their Think Tanks. This is to be far from the truth.

The manufacturers of these items have much to do with the same companies. The wind turbines are made from polymers and steel made from oil, and with the ghost energy from oil and gas. The bases are huge concrete structures made using the same processes. The solar panels are mined using the same energy sources and manufactured in the same manner. Huge dams for hydroelectricity that destroy rivers and their ecosystems. Clearcutting more forest with the same energy gobbling muscle machines to grow more food or bio-crops to use more ghost acreage. And, the resulting energy derived from these methods, is simply added to the previous ghost acreage, the historical bank drawdown.

In short, no matter how much ‘new’ energy we find or create, or how much efficiency we squeeze from whichever course, we will use it to do more stuff, destroying the ecology and remaining life of the planet in the process.

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Portrait of William Stanley Jevons 1835-1882 ( Credit: HERE)

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So who was Jevons, and why does his work apply today? William Stanley Jevons was a bureaucrat at the height of the Industrial Revolution. He was tasked by the government of the day with finding out how much coal we had left to continue and if making steam engines more efficient would make it last longer. He wrote a book, The Coal Question. It’s very boring but let me explain. What Jevons found out was, that the more efficient we made steam engines, the more coal we used.

“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” -- William Stanley Jevons, 1865

We used it do more stuff. And we used more wood, the previous fuel. Since then, we have added oil and gas, but coal and wood use still went up. Then we added nuclear, Hydro, every available fuel, but none of the previous went down. Now we have added wind and solar, but the others previously used still go up. You can see this in the graph from Our World in Data! ; see below. Whatever energy source we find, we add it to the mix. This is why we haven’t even begun to address Global Warming and never will. Our civilisation is built on energy and tempered toward rampant consumerism. Add this to the ignorance of our political elites, the wilful lies from the fossil fuel industries and corporations, it’s why we are already in the early stages of Collapse.

A good example of this,

A 2 MW wind turbine is made up of:

260 tons of steel requiring

300 tons of iron ore

170 tons of coking coal

rare earths including Praseodymium (Pr), Neodymium (Nd), Terbium (Tb), and Dysprosium (Dy)

fibre glass

resin

plastic

aluminium

…. all mined & produced using hydrocarbons. And all leaving a trail of destruction as they are mined, extracted and manufactured.

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A mate of mine in the Greens calls this the “scariest graph in the world.” No wonder. Study it.

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The other thing we have to remember is that Climate Change and Ecological Destruction is class war. The extractive industries which feed the production of commodities such as solar panels, which are to be installed in the Global North, have consequences, the results of which will be felt by the poor and indigenous before it encroaches on the rich. The frontline of the extraction industries are the Global South, and the ones to experience the first consequences are the same populations, usually poor, in colonial hands, or subject to colonial sanctions.

Running alongside these positions, there is an element of the Left, of what I would call Blue Labour, or the Socially Conservative Left, who think of Climate Change as either a non-issue, or are actively sceptical. I put George Galloway in this category, where political issues rise above all else, and planetary custodianship is seen as a non-issue. This is a dangerous position and sets political beliefs above and beyond physics. This has to be confronted head on.

For the avoidance of doubt, just let me underline my position here on Climate Change. It is very real and CO2 is a main driver, but not the only one. Climate Change is only one symptom of our impact on the planet, Overshoot (of earth’s resources), destruction of eco-systems, pollution and biodiversity loss, all walk hand in hand. Climate Change denial is rife as the fossil fuel corporations and their owners have deep pockets and can pay huge amounts of cash for propaganda.

Marx himself new of the pollution effects of industrialisation and what it would do when he wrote the Grundrisse.

Marx maintained his view that nature is the “inorganic body” of humanity—a source of life that must be maintained in a “continuous interchange“. He argued that capitalism breaks this connection, separating humans from their natural conditions.

The “Metabolic Rift” (Stoffwechsel): The Grundrisse foreshadows the “metabolic rift” developed in Capital, describing how industrial agriculture and capitalism disrupt the “circulation of matter” between humanity and the soil. Marx noted that capital “robs the soil“ of its nutrients, which are shipped away in food and clothing, preventing their return and leading to the “exhaustion“ of soil fertility.

‘The whole of [Hegel’s] Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is nothing for itself… and that only nature is something.’ -Karl Marx

1. The Core Ideas

Jevons Paradox (1865): Named after economist William Stanley Jevons, this is the observation that increases in the efficiency of resource use (e.g., coal) often lead to an increase, not a decrease, in the overall consumption of that resource. A more efficient steam engine made coal more cost-effective, which spurred more widespread industrial use, ultimately increasing total coal consumption. It highlights how efficiency improvements can backfire at the systemic level by expanding the scale of production.

Marx’s Central Thought: Capitalism is a system driven by the relentless pursuit of surplus value (profit). This forces capitalists into perpetual accumulation and expansion of production. The system’s internal logic—competition, the need to reinvest profits, and the drive to dominate markets—makes infinite growth a necessity, not a choice.

2. The Direct Connection: Capitalism’s “Growth Imperative“

The Jevons Paradox isn’t just a quirky observation about efficiency; it’s a symptom of the very dynamic Marx identified.

Efficiency as a Weapon of Competition: For Marx, a capitalist who adopts a more efficient technology (like Jevons’s better steam engine) gains a temporary advantage. They can produce goods cheaper, undercut competitors, and capture more market share. However, this forces all competitors to eventually adopt the same or better technology to survive. The result is not a one-time saving of resources, but an overall expansion of productive capacity and output. Ergo, more energy use.

The “Rebound Effect” on a Systemic Scale: Marx would see Jevons Paradox as a classic example of the “rebound effect” inherent to capitalist competition. The savings from efficiency are not pocketed as a net reduction in resource use for society. Instead, they are reinvested into further accumulation—building more factories, producing more commodities, and finding new markets. The efficiency lowers the cost per unit, which can stimulate new demand, exactly as Jevons observed.

Falling Rate of Profit Connection: There’s also a link to Marx’s Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. One counter-tactic against this tendency is to increase efficiency and productivity (what Marx calls raising “relative surplus value”). But this very process requires more massive investments in machinery and raw materials (increasing the “organic composition of capital”), which, in the long run, can exacerbate the crisis of profitability and compel even greater expansion to maintain mass profits.

3. The Deeper Philosophical Alignment: Critique of “Technological Solutionism”

Both Jevons and Marx, in their own ways, challenge the naïve idea that technological progress alone can solve systemic social and ecological problems within capitalism.

Jevons showed that a purely technical fix (a more efficient engine) fails to curb consumption because it doesn’t account for economic behaviour.

Marx would argue more fundamentally that technology is not neutral; it is developed and deployed within specific social relations of production (capitalism). Its purpose is not to save resources or labor for the benefit of society, but to increase profit and control. Therefore, expecting the same system that creates ecological and social crises to technically innovate its way out of them is a profound contradiction. The Jevons Paradox is an empirical demonstration of this contradiction in the realm of resource use.

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Who knows where this is? And when? Photo credit: AI

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4. Key Difference in Focus and Prescription

Their conclusions diverge sharply:

Jevons remained a classical economist. He saw the Paradox as a policy dilemma, particularly for resource management (like British coal reserves). His concern was about scarcity and economic sustainability within the capitalist framework.

Marx saw this dynamic as part of a deeper, irreconcilable contradiction. Capitalism’s need for infinite growth on a finite planet (though Marx didn’t use that exact phrase) creates what today we’d call an ecological crisis, alongside its social crises (exploitation, alienation). For Marx, the Jevons Paradox-like behaviour is not a policy bug but a systemic feature. The solution, therefore, is not better regulation alone (though that might help), but the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production itself and its replacement with a rationally planned system (socialism/communism) where production is for human need, not profit, and where efficiency could genuinely reduce toil and resource use.

How They Relate:

The Jevons Paradox can be seen as a specific, empirical economic mechanism that operationalises Marx’s broader historical-materialist critique of capitalism’s expansionist logic.

Marx provides the “why”: Capitalism’s engine runs on the compulsive pursuit of profit, requiring constant expansion.
Jevons Paradox illustrates the “how” in one critical domain: How the drive for efficiency (a key competitive tactic in that pursuit) can perversely lead to greater overall resource consumption, thwarting hopes for sustainable management.

Thus, modern ecological Marxists (like John Bellamy Foster) frequently invoke concepts like the Jevons Paradox to argue that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable by its very nature. It cannot “decouple“ growth from environmental impact sufficiently because its internal logic constantly seeks to overcome limits, turning efficiency gains into new avenues for accumulation. In this view, understanding Jevons Paradox is essential to understanding the ecological crisis as a crisis of Capitalism. In this sense, the green transition as an intensification of the dynamics of neoliberalism

An Addendum: The question of AI

As an addendum to this, we have to mention AI and a word most of our political elites seem not to understand, ‘exponential’. We are at the early stages of AI implementation and this has huge ramifications across societies, not least in job replacement and redundant workers, but also in another respect much more pertinent to the Jevons Paradox. AI uses huge amounts of energy, so much so that Google are re-opening one of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors in Pennsylvania USA just to power part of their AI data centres. These data centres also use and compete for huge amounts of water for cooling the hardware stacks, having huge implications and competition for other water use, such as drinking water and crops.

But the word that is never understood by our peers is the most dangerous one of all. AI growth, particularly as it becomes more widespread and ravenous, will become exponential. It’s need for more and more energy will simply illustrate the Jevons Paradox as a constant in our civilisation once again. Our civilisation is energy! The Left has to separate itself from Bright Greens who are addicted to civilisation as it stands, albeit with some small ‘tweaks’ to make it, in their words, ‘sustainable!’ This is a perversion of the actual. The Left also has to understand that clinging to re-industrialisation and avoidance of sustainability, of not understanding the ecological imperative of defending biodiversity and avoiding the ravages of Climate Change, which will lead to Overshoot and Collapse, has to be at the forefront of any movement for change. It cannot be an afterthought.

The Left, whilst it still exists at all, has to be Greener that the Greens, whilst at the same time understanding our ‘civilisation’ has to be fundamentally restructured by, as Marx would have put it, a new ‘dialectic’, on class struggle and planetary protection. Gaia needs a voice!

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Gordon Liddle is an artist, poet and writer of geopolitics and the environment. His earlier works can be seen at www.pictorignotus.com. He is currently working on a Series of works called Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series.

Gordon Liddle

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Please assist:

THE LEFT LANE)(TLL) distribution has again been severely restricted on Facebook by blocking my personal FB account. The usual BS: “stopping spam” and protecting “community standards.” Meta clearly wants TLL to open a paid advertising account. Can’t do, WON’T DO.

How can you assist?

1) Take out a TLL subscription. Click HERE. Can be a free sub.

2) Share TLL issues on social media. (We have closed the TLL Twitter/ X account. We think other progressives should too)

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 112 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

NOTE to those reading via email: This article exceeds the length that can be sent by Substack to an email account. Solution? Please click on the headline (“Ten questions NOT asked… “) and it will take you directly to the Substack article in your browser. Or click on “View Entire Message” down the page.

In today’s particularly in-depth issue of THE LEFT LANE:

1. Part One: Questions 1-5 that were NOT asked at the Your Party hustings across England.

2. Reflections on the founding conference of Your Party Scotland ( 7-8 Feb.)

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The questions not asked in the YP collective leadership elections

by Alan Story

This article asks five questions and attempts to answer them:

1) Will the results of these CEC elections halt the crisis in YP?

2) Are these elections fair and well prepared?

3) How were the slates created? Are independents the answer?

4) Why has YP done almost zilch external campaigning?

5) Why no audit of the YP books?

It is a cliche to say that a lot of people --- well, progressive people at least --- are alienated by the oppressive state of politics in our country and our world. And bloody angry about it. I know I often am.

Think of the names that dominate mainstream media these days: Epstein, Trump, Mandelson, Starmer, McSweeney, Sarwar, Streeting, Farage, Musk, Netanyahu, and Putin. Nary a one brings a smile to the faces of people I know and love.

A system in deep crisis

In a sentence: sexual exploitation + male ruling class power + imperialism+ the threat of war + political intrigue + racism + greed and gross economic inequality + genocide = a capitalist system in deep crisis.

Or as US podcaster Joe Rogan has said more colloquially: “the game is so rigged” and “there’s, like, a whole group of people that feel very unrepresented in the world.” (See the current issue of THE NEW YORKER)

Now it would be an exaggeration to say that the majority of the 60,000 members of Your Party (YP) are also “bloody angry” with the current state of play in their party. (Full disclosure: I am a YP member, a very busy and very critical one.) This new socialist party was announced late July 2025, soon attracted + 800,000 supporters, and then slumped in its numbers very badly. At present after a late November founding conference, YP is now deep into elections to choose elect its first 24-person central executive committee (CEC). (See HERE for the timetable and candidates.)

But without doubt, some YP members are angry about what has occurred since last July. Certainly many that I talk to feel alienated. Other words would be: “very, very sad” ( as one TLL reader commented last week ) in alluding to Lenin’s well-known 1920 pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Others underscore the thin reformist gruel being served up as “socialism.”

“Frustrated”, “I’m watching and waiting, thanks” or “perhaps something good is around the corner” are other phases I’ve heard of late.

I am generally an optimistic kinda guy. But only the foolishly optimistic would attempt to rationalise the current screwed-up state of YP by suggesting that “creating a new party is always messy”, as one candidate on Corbyn’s THE MANY (TM) slate said at a CEC hustings on the weekend. Get over it: well-known people have made mistakes, serious mistakes, and shown poor, very poor, political judgement. The same CEC candidate said electing her to a “stable CEC” would help bring back the missing 700,000 supporters. If only it was that simple.

YP: “a crisis” and “a public mess”

Yet at least some CEC candidates are critically examining YP’s reprehensible political state. At the same East of England hustings, independent candidate Scott Seton said YP was in a “crisis” and had been going through “a public mess”. At least some of us appreciated his forthrightness. But we never got to the key question: WHY is there a mess?

As well, more and more grassroots YP members are seeing through some of the highly contentious decisions made by chief electoral officer Andrew Jordan. ( See TLL of 7 December HERE for more on Jordan, former president of a notoriously undemocratic “left” party.)

Wrote one member in a WhatsApp group: “Still a bit salty that Dave Nellist was effectively expelled but they let cranks like Piers Corbyn run in the CEC.”

Nellist, a former MP, is a high profile and long-time member of the Socialist Party who was blocked from running in the West Midlands. The Wikipedia entry for Piers Corbyn , who is on the CEC ballot in London, says he is “a British weather forecaster, anti-vaccine activist, conspiracy theorist, and former politician.” The thought of him becoming a “current politician” is chilling to the bone.

Cease the factional battles

MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana

In 8 February “statement of principles”, the Democratic Bloc group wrote that “ the factional battles headed up by Jeremy and Zarah cannot be allowed to continue on the CEC” and, among other things, it called for a “commitment to establishing very quickly, a mechanism for branches to submit motions to the CEC and to conference and a transparent process for how they are dealt with and by whom.” YP’s lack of transparency and member leadership have been YP weaknesses from the start.

At the same time, another group called “Platform for a Democratic Party” which is composed of number of lefties once very close to Corbyn ( for example, film maker Ken Loach) released a statement saying “ We have been very disappointed with the pronouncements from The Many slate and its supporters, including disdain for democracy, transparency and accountability” and give specific examples of divisive tactics. Corbyn’s own image has definitely been tarnished in recent weeks.

For example, as you can read below, more and more information is leaking out about how the two slates, Corbyn’s The Many and the other, Grassroots Left (GL) headed by MP Zarah Sultana, were actually picked. It was not pretty.

In the numbers game, the Greens are doing rather well. Last week’s TLL headed This former Your Party (YP) activist has had enough. “Why I have joined the Greens” was the most read TLL issue in some weeks. Phil Cartledge-Burton was voicing criticisms of many who haven’t left YP. But YP has yet to develop a coherent response to the Greens.

A blog came out 10 Feb. titled “Your Party is barely alive.”

A news article obviously initiated by one of Corbyn’s advisers claims that “there is only one way this party can survive: a victory for The Many.”

This election is starting to make the Brexit referendum campaign look like an exercise in truth telling. What’s next? Busses travelling the roads with signs offering X-hundred extra beds at your local hospital if your town jumps on board the Corbyn express.

On and on it goes. And, honestly, it can be difficult some days to keep “your chin up” as my 89-year neighbour told me today as Norwich faced yet other day of rain.

But at the same time, a YP-related project that I am deeply involved in is powering ahead, many YP members are showing amazing fortitude, and some YP proto-branches – but definitely NOT all – are getting better organised. A member-led Assembly in London on the weekend was definitely a positive step forward; see the brief piece below.

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Good turnout at Sunday’s London Assembly of YP delegates

A total of 62 Your Party delegates from 22 of the 26 YP London interim branches attended a cross-city 8 February assembly. There was also a member-led hustings where those attending were allowed to ask questions. This wasn’t allowed at the YP HQ-created “official” London hustings ( or any other regional hustings) set up by YP HQ. ( Photo by GD)

By Graham Durham (Guest Post)

I thought Your Party comrades around the country would be interested in the first London assembly of London interim branches held yesterday ( 8 Feb.) in Homerton , Hackney. 22 of the 26 interim London branches sent delegates and a hustings for 8 candidates for the CEC occurred in a comradely fashion ( although the two candidates from the For The Many slate did not respond to an invite .)

Whilst the biggest cheer of the day greeted news of McSweeney’s resignation, the assembly focused on core issues like the dire housing need in London with demands for an end to council house sales and a massive council house building programme .

The issues debated are too many to list here but I was inspired by the ability of all the socialists present to work together to build Your Party. All achieved without any financial or organisational support from national Your Party which illustrated the need for the incoming CEC to power up local branches and advise all YP members of their local branch .

First published on 9 February by Graham as a Facebook post…and reprinted with permission.

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Against this mixed background, today’s THE LEFT LANE examines five questions that are being ignored or much downplayed at the YP CEC hustings and in the campaign generally. (In the next TLL issue, we will look at another five issues.) The online ballot became available on 9 Feb. and the election results will be released on 26 Feb.

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Question 1 – Will the results of these CEC elections halt the crisis in YP?

Internal elections in a political party can both heal and exacerbate political differences. Often acting as a double-edged sword, such elections can provide democratic legitimacy to the winner, but they can also formalise existing factionalism within a party. Everything depends on the context.

Some politicians, especially vote winners, think elections have some kind of magical healing power. Trump obviously thinks this. So do those on the winning side of our own 2016 Brexit referendum. So also does the Starmerite wing of the Labour Party citing its own 2024 election sweep…on 34% of the overall vote.

But none of the winners of these voting contests can possibly claim that ALL elections necessarily lead to unity, will heal conflicts and lead to compromise. For a start, none of their own “victories” have done so.

What then is the all important context of the current YOUR PARTY CEC elections? Will they lead to unity? (Unity is far more possible result if the elections themselves are fair. We look at this in question #2. Given that these elections are blatantly unfair and being poorly organised, the chances of unity are further diminished. Remember the words of Joe Rogan.)

Among the more important contextual factors:

Almost constant and very public bickering

1) Since September, YP has been characterised by almost constant and very public bickering between the two leading MPs, Corbyn and Sultana … and their followers. Corbyn’s followers control YP HQ. (Actually who controls this shadowy and unelected outfit is something you can only learn about in substacks such as this ONE … and it would be a highly pertinent question to ask at a hustings, that is, if questions were allowed! )

We won’t depress or bore you with repeating the details of this conflict. Or by citing leaks and wretched briefing incidents to THE GUARDIAN or THE SUNDAY TIMES that were obviously straight from HP HQ. They occurred again less than 72 hours ago.

In this context:

Does it make sense to hold an election dominated by two slates headed by these two MPs? On 26 February if Sultana’s slate wins, is Corbyn or Karie Murphy, his main fixer, going to say: “Zarah, you were right all along?” Conversely if Corbyn’s slate wins, will Sultana say similar words?

Instead, a serious split in the ranks of Your Party is, sadly, highly likely.

2) It is painfully obvious that there is no political theory on party building which is directing the creation of Your Party. The so-called “first year organisational strategy” document is simplistic, filled with platitudes, and has already been breached. As they used to say, it could have been written on the back of a fag packet. On a quick run through, I found a least ten breaches over the past two months.

This blog by Inacio Vieira points to several breaches. A petition has been launched by Vieira because YP HQ is not even following its own document or the YP constitution. This recent article in The Canary points to related problems.

“I don’t want Labour 2.0”

One of the favourite campaign slogans of many CEC candidates is that “I don’t want Labour 2.0.” But there is no critique about how internal elections have been or are run in the Labour Party. This should come as no surprise. The political history of almost all the leading lights in Your Party has almost exclusively been in the Labour Party. And while they may have left the Labour Party, the Labour Party hasn’t left them. It is Labourist ideology which is directing these CEC elections.

Its name is even essentialist Labourist, except Labour’s top governing body is called the “National Executive Committee” first created on 27 February 1900. Please tell me it is a mere coincidence that YP’s CEC will come into being on 27 February 2026.

3) The so-called “far left” in Britain --- not a term I like --- is more fractured and factionalised than almost any other left in Europe or North America. If these elections result in another split, many of these groups will not be too upset. They thrive on factional infighting. (We will come back to this point in Part 2).

Meanwhile, Corbyn has announced during the campaign that he wants to overturn the YP Conference decision allowing dual memberships in YP. If his plan is agreed at the November 2026 YP conference, it will result in the “purging” --- and there is no other word for it --- of several thousand YP members.

So much for elections overcoming “crises” and cementing unity. And because the official YP hustings are so undemocratically run, the possibility of a purge is not even being discussed.

4) As a deliberate tactic, the hundreds of Your Party proto-branches/ interim branches have been kept in limbo for many months. They can’t get access to any party funds nor the names of party members (let alone former supporters) in their local areas. Yet 99% of MP members will relate to YP primarily via their local branch.

This is supposed to be a member-led party, but for over six weeks, almost the entire YP organisational effort is being devoted to elections that will strengthen the top. The priorities are entirely misplaced.

Elections stimulate competition

5) By their very nature, elections stimulate competition between groups and individuals. They tend to make you think your ideas are best. And internal elections stimulate internal thinking.

The fact that Your Party Had done almost zilch campaigning externally reinforces these tendencies. (We come back to this issue in Question #4).

Conclusion: It is difficult to predict what will be the results of the first election in Your Party. One thing is pretty certain. If the results are basically even between the two slates, the existing conflicts will merely be paused.

Of course internal elections are a standard and even necessary tool for many organisations to resolve conflicts. But they are also at best a short-term solution. As one article I read on the subject said, such an election “requires skilled leadership to turn it into a long-term healing process.”

My question: does your party possess such a skilled leadership… or will it as a result of the CEC elections?

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This poster for THE MANY slate in the South West shows the central importance of MP Corbyn to this slate. His side claims that, if THE MANY does not triumph, YOUR PARTY will collapse. Do you buy this argument?

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Question 2 – Are these elections fair and well prepared?

The short answer to this question is NO. Here are five reasons why this is so:

1) The power/ weight of your vote depends on where you live. There are 18 geographically based CEC posts on offer in 9 regions. In other words, 2 posts for each region. The regions in England, however, have vastly different populations and numbers of YP members.

TLL has not had time to do all the maths, but the East of England is far smaller in population and has far fewer YP members than Greater London. Why should my vote - I live in Norwich - count three or four more times than the vote of someone who lives in Hackney?

Yes, the YP conference decided on region-based elections. But then this question was discussed for only a brief time in Liverpool and there was a very pedestrian debate about this issue. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember any serious discussion about the underlying unfairness of holding region-based elections in unequally populated regions. As well, region-based elections favour slates. A single individual based in one town in a dispersed region, say the North East, will not find campaigning easy. No prob for a slate that may have a campaign team of several hundred activists.

2) Astoundingly, there are no spending limits on how much a candidate (or a slate of candidates) can spend of his/her own money to try to win a CEC post. If you wished --- and were a bit sad! --- you could spend £10,000 of your own money to win a CEC post for yourself. Check out the rule 28 HERE carefully. Again, slates are favoured over individual candidates.

All candidates should be given campaign funds

In any event, elections in socialist parties should not be determined by the size of your bank balance. If YP wants the very best candidates to win, all candidate who reach a certain threshold of endorsements should be given the SAME amount of money from party funds (say £250.00) to use on their campaigns.

3) The number of endorsements required to get onto the CEC ballot ---namely 75 --- was also very high. Here again slates were favoured.

Once a candidate reached the threshold of 75, why wasn’t that fact made public and then no more endorsements would be publicised? But those running the two big slates wanted the public endorsement process to continue and hence this process became mock elections in themselves.

4) Given that they have so For given that they have so much more person power, slates are able to flood YP-related Facebook groups with posts. This is obviously unfair.

There is only one Facebook group TLL knows of that has put a cap on how many posts per day are permitted in a group on behalf of a slate or an individual candidate. That’s Your Party Liverpool. Well done! Let’s hope there are more.

5) There is a lot more that could be said about the unfairness of these elections, but we will end here on the question of the effectiveness of the “official” YP hustings.

Hustings are supposed to give voters sufficient information to make an informed choice at the ballot box. The “official” YP hustings miserably failed to do this.

Here is what happened in East of England hustings. (All the CEC videos can be viewed HERE).

The sessions all followed the same format across England. The candidates were first given two minutes to make an opening statement and then asked five questions.

It is the question-and-answer section that gives you the best insight into the capacity of potential CEC members and allows you to really rate them.

Q & A supposed to be “main event” at good hustings

The Q&A sections – supposedly the main event - were, however, a huge let down. All of the questions asked at the hustings were vetted, pre-known to the candidates, and safe ones asked by a moderator.

None of the candidates were asked questions about the past and current big problems in YP. (One assumes YP HQ, which set the questions, does not think there are any big problems in YP. The last thing HQ wanted was any criticism of its own role in creating such problems!)

Instead, the candidates were asked “easy questions” --- or “thrown lob balls” as they say stateside --- such as “what would be your priorities if you elected to the CEC?” Everyone replied: “strengthen the branches.” Yawn.

But the greatest weakness was that those watching the online sessions live were blocked from asking any questions that they wanted to ask. Zero.

To find out how a Norfolk-based candidate, who is one of leading figures in my local branch here, might act if she was elected to the CEC, I wanted to ask her two questions: a) Do you think it is proper that another party, namely the Socialist Workers Party, has exclusive control over all of the WhatsApp groups and contact details of those in our YP proto-branch here? b) Why has the YP Norfolk held only three meetings in the six months since it was launched? Totally fair questions to test her democratic credentials.

But I was not allowed to ask my questions. Nor was anyone else. Significantly, in the member-created hustings in London on Sunday, those participating in person or online WERE ABLE to ask questions.

The verdict of several people who watched the hustings here? Not informative, “safe”, downright dull, unhelpful and “uninspiring”. As someone I know from Suffolk texted me afterwards: “They’re all so out of their depth; mere fodder for the seasoned London mob around Corbyn.” Sadly, too true.

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Question 3 – How were the slates created? Are independents the answer?

(Dear reader: This piece is getting too lengthy; the final three sections will be much briefer.)

There is not the space here to get into the important question of whether slates should be allowed, and especially in a new party? YP does need to return to this question. Mind you, if the two slates win overwhelmingly on 26 February, it may never be raised.

a) Here is some reliable evidence (or at least first-hand evidence from two people I trust) on how candidates were picked for THE MANY slate and how YP staffers tried to have candidates stand down to favour the chances of this slate. Once, again it sounds so much how Labour or the Tories operate.

Person X was once close to Corbyn and was being considered for his TM slate. A week ago, X texted me: “Karie controlled THE MANY slate without any discussion. It’s Karie’s slate.” (“Karie” is Karie Murphy who ran Corbyn’s LOTO office at Westminster some years ago and who is the most powerful person at YP HQ.) X is now standing as an independent candidate in Southern England.

A recent substack by Deborah WA Foulkes made clear that YP office staff are not being “strictly neutral” in the election process as required in YP documents already cited.

Foulkes wrote: “I attended a Zoom meeting for a small subset of a WhatsApp group I belonged to, with staff member Karie Murphy and one other office member, in which those of us who were independent candidates in the CEC elections were asked to stand down in order not to ‘split the vote’ for the Corbyn slate. At this meeting, these staff also described how they had tried to persuade another independent candidate to stand down, Crispin Flinthoff. This demonstrates that the staff team, in contravention of the stipulations of the Year One Organisational Strategy, were not ‘strictly neutral.’” (Her entire substack is worth reading.)

TLL did consider contacting Murphy for comment, but she told me in February 2024 never to contact her again, so I declined.

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This chart created by a mate ( with help from Gemini) gives one rough projection - based on numbers of endorsements - as to what MIGHT be the results of the YP CEC elections. The two slates would be almost equal and in total control. The results could be SIGNIFICANTLY different based on voter turnout and how voters choose their preferences on their ballots.

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b) On how the Grassroots Left slate was chosen, sources have told TLL that candidates were chosen as part of “a deal” between Sultana’s reps and reps from the Democratic Socialists YP. A proposal by the Democratic Bloc to open up the process and hold open online primaries and then conduct an internal election among a wider group of lefties was flatly rejected, other sources have told TLL.

It would be helpful to have an in-depth investigation of how these two slates were created. Unfortunately, the Members Oversight Committee (MOC) that is supposed to oversee the election process was appointed by Corbyn’s side of the party. The MOC’s secretive nature has already sparked a petition already mentioned above.

c) If asked whether electing independents to the CEC is the answer, I would answer: “not necessarily.” It depends on two things: a) the political stance of a given independent candidate; b) do they have the experience and resilience to challenge Corbyn and Sultana when required, as well as much greater numbers of CEC office holders from the two slates?

I personally know two independent candidates who fit the bill. I also know several who, in my opinion, do not.

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Question 4 - Why has YP done almost zilch campaigning externally?

These elections have proven that YP members know how to campaign. That’s no surprise. Many are long-time political activists. But my question is this: Since August 2025, why hasn’t all political experience been put to good use in external campaigning, in starting to build roots in working class communities?

Such external campaigning - on issues such as housing or racism or the threat of war or cost of living - will be central for YP’s work in coming months and years. And although some YP branches have done admirable local work, YP has done zilch as a national body. For example, at the most recent pro-Palestine march in London, a contingent of at least 5,000 YP members could easily have been organised to march behind large YP banners. Or why wasn’t a team of those in YP with lots of experience in external comms assembled to do exciting and mobilising agitation productions on social media where, besides videos of Corbyn and Sultana, YP has no profile whatsoever?

That would have required, of course, that YP HQ reach out to YP members across the UK and to admit that there are other “actors”, besides itself, with key roles to play in the building of YP as a political force.

Besides being a positive activity in itself, external campaigning has many side benefits for a political party. It builds esprit de corps, it create a sense of collective identity and solidarity, and to steal a phrase from Zack Polanski (who stole it from Obama who stole it from Clinton) it helps to build “hope.” Moreover, such external campaigning can act as a counterweight to the tribalism that can often result from internal elections and especially when two rival slates predominate.

All of these answers to question 4 are simply the ABCs of basic political organising. Some of us with a bit of experience in left politics simply scratch our heads as to why the YP tops have not recognised this. If they had, the history of the first six months of YP would have been very different and YP might not have lost hundreds of thousands of supporters.

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Recent poll shows intentions of younger voters

Of course, this is only one poll and only one voting “snapshot “ … but Greens are the choice of 45% of voters aged 18-24, while Your Party are part of “other” on a laughable 1% in this recent You Gov poll. Back in September, YP led the Greens.

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Question 5 – Why no audit of the YP books?

Let’s keep the final answer even briefer. Since September 2025, there have been almost non-stop controversies at the top of YP as to how hundreds of thousands of ££ have been spent, who controls the money, how much has come in, and who is authorised to spend it. Remember: no one at the top of YP has any elected authority.

All of these controversies have only further darkened the image of YP.

Yesterday, TLL saw new election-related posts attacking Sultana on financial issues.

Although 99.9 % of YP’s 60,000 are totally in the dark about the party’s finances, TLL has not heard any candidate at any hustings raise the issue of why there are not been a professional audit conducted of the books of YP (and associated organisations). It is a basic issue of transparency.

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Part Two of this two-part series will come out next week. As always, comments are most welcome.

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Please assist

THE LEFT LANE)(TLL) distribution has again been severely restricted on Facebook by blocking my personal FB account. The usual BS: “stopping spam” and protecting “community standards.” Meta clearly wants TLL to open a paid advertising account. Can’t do, WON’T DO.

How can you assist?

1) Take out a TLL subscription. Click HERE. Can be a free sub.

2) Share TLL issues on social media. (We have closed the TLL Twitter/ X account. We think other progressives should too)

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Reflections on the founding conference of Your Party Scotland ( 7-8 Feb.)

Photo credit: Your Party Scotland

Above is the platform of this past weekend’s founding conference of Your Party Scotland held in Dundee. It was a well-chosen location. As AI helpfully informs us: “Dundee has a profound and long-standing radical history, often referred to as a “Radical Toun” for its history of political disaffection, worker militancy, and support for international causes. From the 1792 Tree of Liberty riots to the 1983 Timex strike, the city has a strong tradition of leftist politics, including significant Communist Party, anti-apartheid, and Irish republican activity.”

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About 300 Your Party members attended the two-day initial conference of Your Party Scotland which made a number of key decisions. Speakers included MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Glasgow Councillor Dan Hutchinson, who defected to YP from the Scottish Greens in October, gave the welcome speech. Details of all votes, debates and speeches at this weekend’s Founding conference can be found HERE

Here are the reflections of a YP Scotland member and a reader of THE LEFT LANE.

By Bob Goupillot (Guest post)

I attended both days of the inaugural conference of YP Scotland. My impression was that it was very well organised, open and democratic with a diversity of views being heard and no voices supressed. Debates were conducted largely in a comradely and democratic manner with robust chairing facilitating this. This contrasts with my view of the Liverpool YP conference at the end of November.

There was, however, a preponderance of white male voices and this will need to be addressed. Scottish Socialist Youth (SSY) made a full contribution to the organisation of the conference and to the quality of the debates and they should be commended for this.

In my opinion, there were at least five crucial votes that will have significant ramifications for the future of YP Scotland and YP UK.

The first of these was the decision to negotiate with YP UK to become an independent sibling party affiliated with YP UK. I predict that YP UK will resist this and at least one of their representatives (not Corbyn or Sultana) made threatening noises about this from the platform. I further predict that this will encourage Welsh comrades to create YP Cymru. These developments will in turn provoke identity crises for comrades in England alongside a feeling of losing control amongst some of the bureaucrats.

The second of these was the vote to become a pro-independence party. Now whilst I welcomed this, I am concerned that this is framed as a unionist vs separatist debate. My view is that this debate needs to be framed within a material analysis of the rise and decline of the UK monarchical state and empire, its strengths and weaknesses. From this republican socialist perspective, Scottish independence can be seen as part of the democratic dissolution of the UK state. This, in turn, points to the need for allies in England, Cymru/Wales and Ireland as well as further afield. In this sense, it is far from a nationalist/separatist perspective.

The third of these votes was in favour of dual membership for socialist groupings. I think that this is better than bans and proscriptions. My hope is that organisations like the SWP and Socialist Party Scotland (SPS) can rise to this challenge, form open platforms within the party and use their considerable energy, organisational ability and talents to make Your Party a success in Scotland. I say this as someone who had their political fingers badly burned by some of these groups when I was in the Scottish Socialist Party. Perhaps a triumph of hope over experience. [For an assessment of the Scottish Socialist Party by Gregor Gall, see HERE.]

The fourth of these votes was to allow the current Conference Organising Group (COG) to become a temporary Scottish Executive Committee (SEC). The COG displayed a wide political and geographical diversity and proved that they were able to work together effectively to produce the conference. This SEC will I hope to provide a shield against some of the centralising control emanating from those around Corbyn. Despite having this mandate, I doubt it will be able to get the membership contact list or finances held by central- a frequent demand from the conference floor – and as I understand it, in England and Wales as well.

The fifth significant vote was in favour of standing in the Holyrood elections. I voted against this on the grounds that we have no programme, candidates or more than shallow roots in many of the communities that some members wish to stand. My preference would be to do more work on the ground and prepare for the local authority elections in 2027. I appreciate that there are merits on both sides of this argument but I think that it will be a real error to stand for the list vote as opposed to standing in carefully selected constituencies. My view is framed by the need to prevent Reform strengthening its foothold in Scotland and in Holyrood. Our standing in the lists may take votes from parties such as the Greens and allow Reform to take seats more easily. Standing in working class communities long abandoned by Labour or SNP and largely impervious to the Greens but perhaps fertile ground for Reform would be a much more fruitful strategy in my opinion. [ See HERE on the electoral system in Scotland which operates much more favourably for voters of smaller parties. Two decades ago, the SSP elected six MSPs.]

To conclude. Overall the conference was much better that I had hoped but there is clearly much work to be done in particular providing a real alternative to Reform in despairing working class communities and defending vulnerable groups from the threats from the fascist right. All shoulders to the wheel comrades.

Bob Goupillot is a long-time Republican Socialist based in the Edinburgh area

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Editor’s note: TLL is reaching out to YP colleagues in Cymru/Wales and will discuss in a future issue as whether it was correct decision by the England-based YP leadership to block the formation of a YP party in Northern Ireland.

You can read another view on this founding conference in Dundee HERE in THE RED MOLE substack.

Thanks to YP Scotland for being so helpful to THE LEFT LANE. This compares with how we were treated by YP HQ in our coverage of the YP conference in Liverpool back in late November. Despite posting three registered letters over the space of three weeks and sending several emails - none were answered – THE LEFT LANE was refused press credentials for Liverpool. The Daily Mail and The Daily Express had no such issues.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 110 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover photo: Phil Burton-Cartledge, Derby-based political activist, blogger and academic.

Introduction

Back in the summer of 2025, when Your Party (YP) was announced, the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) had about 60,000 members.

By December 2025, that number had jumped to 180,000 and THE LEFT LANE (TLL) has seen reports of the Greens now approaching almost 200,000 under its new leader Zack Polanski. Meanwhile, YP, which had a +750,000 supporters in September, now has slumped to a reported 55,000-60,000 members.

Yes, Polanski has used mainstream media very well and is still in his “honeymoon phrase.” Some are speculating that the Greens may win their first by-election - and their first seat in the north - at the end of the month in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton.

So where have those +130,000 new Greenies come from? Is it all explained by Polanski’s media profile? Or by green shoots sprouting spontaneously? Accurate statistics are not available, but it is clear that is significant number of them are ex-YP members and ex-YP supporters.

And most are displeased – to understate the matter – at how YP’s leadership has “botched” the first five months of its launch - again to understate the matter. While YP HQ keeps sending out “upbeat” emails on how much progress is being made by this new socialist party, many in the YP grassroots are very dissatisfied. “I’ll wait and see what happens” is a common place sentiment. (To put my own cards on the table, call me a YP member who is deeply unimpressed).

Among the YP leavers: former Newcastle mayor Jamie Driscoll, who once was close to the YP’s Jeremy Corbyn and especially Zarah Sultana just a few months ago, is the best-known defector to GPEW ranks. Mish Rehman, formerly in Momentum, is another. Andrew Feinstein, once a high-profile supporter of YPer in London ( and someone who ran against Keir Starmer in the 2024 general election as an independent) told TLL on the weekend that “ I never actually joined YP” ; he has not joined the Greens. Earlier, left wing economists Grace Blakeney (who was once close to Corbyn) and James Meadway had earlier turned green and never featured in YP.

The latest “big name” on the left - well, not that big – to join Green ranks is Phil Cartledge-Burton, a Derby-based socialist and YP member, blogger, and academic. Here is his reasoning:

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Why I have joined the Greens

by Phil Burton-Cartedge

While defections are in the news, there’s another that might be worth reporting on. My own. Yesterday I cancelled my Your Party membership and signed up to the Green Party. The local party meets next week, and I’m looking forward to becoming actively involved. For those interested in such things, here’s the politics bit.

Binning off Your Party wasn’t a difficult decision. Joining that was more a duty than anything approaching enthusiasm. Never has the left outside of Labour been handed such a golden opportunity, only for it to be squandered by prima donnaism and control freakery. Without re-litigating what happened in depth, Zarah Sultana should not have unilaterally launched the membership. The timing was right, but had she acted with the pre-party collective and abided by its ad hoc discipline the momentum would have still been there when it did go live, which was about a fortnight later. But once the die was cast, Jeremy Corbyn and his minions should have swallowed it - just as they did in the summer when Sultana announced that the new party was happening - and rode the wave. Doing so would have avoided bad blood and, most crucially, would have built on the 800,000 that signed up the mailing list. A party of more than 200,000 was in reach ... and Corbyn blew it because his helpers would rather run a much smaller, tightly controlled outfit that guaranteed them a living. Labour Party mk II not in name, but certainly in form.

As if the YP conference never happened

And things have not improved. Despite handily winning positions aligning Your Party with an inclusive conception of class and democratic organisation, it’s as if the conference votes never happened. Exclusions of members of left groups still stand, and candidates for the Central Executive Committee have been barred if they are suspected of paying subs to another organisation. Funny how there were never any complaints when the likes of Michael Lavalette, for example, was travelling around the country stumping for the new party and encouraging people to sign up. This is a violation of the spirit of what was voted on in November, and a big up yours from the unaccountable cabal that runs Corbyn’s show to the membership. It now looks like this bar will be affirmed, assuming that Corbyn’s slate of loyalists and idolaters sweeps the members’ CEC ballot. Which it is likely to do. On top of that, there is the utter stupidity of the party’s name, which alone demonstrates Corbyn’s lack of political nous. And, let’s be frank, Sultana’s absence of political judgement. From childishly calling the awful Tory London Assembly Member Susan Hall a “boomer”, boycotting the first day of her own conference, wanting to “nationalise everything”, and being unnecessarily spiky toward the Greens is just daft. No confidence in the Corbyn clique, no confidence in Sultana, and no confidence in the prospect of Your Party becoming anything other than a shrine to St Jeremy. It didn’t have to be this way.

But the Greens? It’s doing rather well, and unlike Your Party has not bungled its opening. As the class composition of this country has changed, as recounted in the book, countless talks and podcast interviews, and on this blog on many, many occasions, politics has shifted too. A shift that the Greens are handsomely benefiting from.

Key to this is the growing importance of immaterial labour. In the post-war period in Western societies, the expansion of the state saw millions of workers taken out of private employment. Their jobs were less about producing material goods for private profit, and shifted toward producing services the public consumed. Education, welfare and social services, health care, the administration of the growing state at all levels. To use the old language, large sections of the work force were paid a wage to reproduce the conditions of capitalist production. They were tending to the gaps in the system, paving over the cracks, cleaning up the messes, making people broken or maimed by the system better, looking after those it discarded, and preparing generations of children for life under it. Alongside this the increasing complexity of production and the division of labour created similar roles within businesses. The expansion of management, the need for planners, logistics workers, technical specialists, office workers, cleaners, service-oriented work has come to absolutely dominate most advanced economies in terms of people employed and volumes of capital tied into and produced by services. Alongside this, postwar affluence kicked off mass consumption and the rise of privatised leisure activities. The casualties of this, at least in Britain, was declining church attendances, the withering away of the millions-strong political parties, and an erosion of working class community culture - which accelerated following the Conservative attacks on and defeats of the labour movement in the 1980s. But the expansion of immaterial labour selected for certain traits. In service work based on the production and maintenance of social relationships, sociability, knowledge, patience, and care were the key forces of production increasingly mobilised by the emerging post-industrial economy. Despite the privatisation of many state services and the intrusion of commodification into all facets of life, this “immaterialisation” of labour has continued apace.

Generation Z the “most radical”

The consequence for culture and politics has been profound, but to stop this from becoming another book, there are two key developments that are reaching fruition now. Because the nature of labour has changed with the object of work being the production of social relations, care, knowledge, social roles, etc., which in turn places a social premium on relatedness and sociability, this has resulted in a long-term tendency toward tolerance. Or, in other words, the gradual replacement of social conservatism by social liberalism. Each generation becomes increasingly comfortable with difference as they are socialised into and experience life as an immaterial worker. The generational differences we see in values surveys are not a reflection of lefty schooling or an essential tendency toward conservatism as we age, but a class cohort effect. There is a direct link between class, of being socialised into and working for a living in the post-industrial economy, and accepting socially liberal values as the everyday commonsense. Generation Z are the most radical, most socially liberal generation so far. And are likely to surrender that title to the younger people coming after them. The mores are cumulative, and we’re now at the point where social conservatism is a minority outlook, and one that shrinks by the year.

The second consequence of this is overtly political. Faced with a politics that tries screening out the interests of the rising layer of workers, a typical mass response is disengagement and abstention, but for others it’s a marked tendency to vote centre left or left. The first coming of Corbynism and, for a period, the rapid passage of the Labour Party from a husk to a true mass party - and then the 2017 general election - was the first mass electoral flex of the political conscious sections of the new working class. Though Corbyn lost badly in 2019, his real achievement, buried under the self-serving rubbish about the worst result since the 1930s, was hitching Labour to a new political articulation of class relationships. And one the party needed to build on for sustainable success. Unfortunately for Labour, it elected Keir Starmer whose project ever since has been to disperse this coalition to the point where his party courts extinction. But that dispersed support doesn’t simply disappear. This is not 1997, it does have somewhere to go. Your Party looked like it could have been it, until they derailed themselves. And so, the Greens. A socially liberal party with left wing positions on a raft of issues that speaks to the class interests and outlooks of immaterial workers, stands up against the scapegoating and racism of the mainstream, and being the only party that really takes climate change, energy challenges, and the green transition seriously, Zack Polanski’s leadership and his adroit interventions have catalysed and coalesced mass support around the Greens.

Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, campaigning over the weekend beside the party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer. HERE is a very detailed blog on this Thursday, 26 February vote written by Manchester political scientist Rob Ford.

Two types of Green Party

As argued here previously, there are two types of Green Party. The so-called realists, who elevate members to high office and inevitably disappoint - much to their cost. Like the German and the Irish Greens. And those parties that go down a Nordic path, that are to all intents and purposes Green-Left radical parties. This is currently the trajectory GPEW is on - the Scottish Greens being their own, somewhat different, thing - and is likely to draw in more members and more supporters on that basis. Far from the petit-bourgeois party as labelled by the little Lenins, the Greens are being taken over and getting filled out by our class, our rising class, and are inhabiting it as an instrument of our collective interest. It is a party that is becoming, a symptom and driver of a wider politicisation. It is occupying the position Your Party could have taken, but rejected. As Labour under Corbyn was one moment in developing the generalised political consciousness of a class, this is another. That task has fallen to the Greens. These are my reasons for joining. And why you should too.

This piece appeared HERE on 27 January in his blog, “All that is Solid”, which has 6,000 followers. Phil B-C is a long-time leftie and a political sociologist at the University of Derby.

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A few follow-up comments by the TLL editor

1) There is not the space here to comment on Phil’s views about the question of immaterial labour. Nor will we talk about here about the illusions some Green newbies may have about how the GPEW operates internally. For starters, read this THE LEFT LANE piece which gives the inside story on the 2024 GPEW conference … or this recent blog from THE GREEN LIGHT on who runs the Greens. Look below the surface and “member controlled” is not the conclusion that comes to mind about what some may think is a warm and cuddly operation.

2) TLL re-posted Phil’s blog above because of the mostly valid criticisms he has made about the first five months of YP’s history. And because, as we have read on Facebook in YP-linked groups and watched in the current hustings for the parties first leadership team, many of its members are suffering from we can best call “collective self-deception.” This article is meant as a wakeup call if we want to build a mass working class party … and not an activists’ party/ sect. Far too many YP members and candidates don’t want to talk about WHAT went wrong in the party’s early history, what is going wrong NOW, and/ or WHO is responsible for those mistakes. In other words: “Don’t mention the war.” To do so is considered disloyal or doing Labour’s (or the Green’s) work for them. TLL fully expects to be called a “traitor” for re-publishing Phil’s blog.

3) Within the YP ranks, there is “let-bygones-be- bygones” view that is quite widespread, an attitude that criticism and/or self-criticism is wrong, and that the party should purely look to the future based on typical politician-like promises that “if you elect me, I will set up YP branches” or “I will build a democratic party which members will run.” We’ve been hearing the phrase “member-led” ad nauseam since late July 2025.

4) For example, few are asking, as one YP central executive committee (CEC) candidate Alex Fox did, why, after six months, no local YP proto branches have yet been given the contact details of hundreds of local YP members and supporters in their area. Said Fox, an IT expert, at one hustings : “The technical pipe work is there to be able to invite people at a constituency level... The problem is that it was completely deliberate that we weren’t allowed to do that…” YP’s leaders need to be called out for their errors.

5) A suggestion: one of the first tasks of the new CEC should be to set up a “truth commission” at which former YP members can tell the party why they left (or never joined.) We need to hear from people like Andrew Feinstein, Phil Burton-Cartledge and many others. The important thing is to be good at learning.

6) At the YP hustings, who is asking: “what theory of party building is directing the work of Your Party?” When candidates say they are socialists, what do they mean? Or does anyone actually think that holding internal elections (for 24 leadership posts) that is mostly pitting two slates against one another (each headed by an MP that has been squabbling with the other for many months) is the best way to build party unity? Does anyone actually think that, when the votes are counted, the losing side will say to the winners (and mean it!) “ok, you’ve won, we will follow your lead”? Instead, the dangers of a post-election split or even greater turmoil are very real.

7) Or, given the financial controversies that have plagued YP for months, is anyone at the hustings asking: “can we please have a professional audit of the YP books”? Or without suggesting there has been any financial impropriety, is it proper for Jeremy Corbyn’s former sister-in-law to be YP’s treasurer? Or, to come back to the question of the party’s overall approach, should its economic strategy be based on Zarah Sultana’s slogan that YP wants to “nationalise everything”?

8) Some may ask: why remain a YP member? My answer: there are many excellent socialists in YP. The group of YP members I work with on a YP members’-based project all despise capitalist oppression and war with a passion, all want a party based on socialist values ( see HERE) and, as one said last night at our planning meeting on Zoom: “we all want Your Party to succeed, right?” The rest of us nodded.

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CHECK THIS OUT

Poster of the week

From the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (HERE)

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Upcoming meetings in the next week

1) YOUR PARTY SCOTLAND Founding Conference

Your Party Scotland’s first conference will take place at Bonar Hall in Dundee, on the weekend of 7th and 8th February 2026. Times: 07/02/2026 at 10:00 a.m. and 08/02/2026 at 10:00 a.m.

All Scottish members will be able to take part. There will be workshops and discussions on the Scottish party’s founding documents, policy, its community organising plans, as well as debates and votes on our stances towards key national issues, and the upcoming May 2026 Holyrood elections.

For more info, email: conference@yourparty.scot

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2) On Fidel Castro’s legacy:

As Trump ramps up the pressure on Cuba

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For the latest on South America, the stuggle against U.S. imperialism and the “Donroe Doctrine”, read:

Craig Murray in Caracas Venezuela last week.

Being There – IN VENEZUELA – By courageous former UK ambassador (not to Venezuela) Craig Murray who got sacked for telling the truth.

On 26 January, Craig wrote: “I have now been in Caracas for 48 hours and the contrast between what I have seen, and what I had read in the mainstream media, could not be more stark… . “Relaxed” is a word I would use for Venezuelans. You could forgive paranoia, the country having been bombed by the Americans just three weeks ago and many people killed. You might expect hostility to a rather strange old gringo wandering around inexplicably snapping random things. But I have experienced no sense of hostility at all, from people or officials.” Read his full report, with photos, HERE.

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Latin America Pushes Back Against US Intervention

Nuestra América Adopts the San Carlos Declaration

Washington’s line is: “He might be a drug trafficker, but he’s our drug trafficker.”

Read a report HERE on a recent emergency conference in Bogota Colombia.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 110 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

In today’s THE LEFT LANE, two stories:

1) Notes on the Burnham saga

2) “MELT THE ICE”

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Notes on the Burnham saga

by Alan Story

Just before starting to write today’s THE LEFT LANE (TLL) on the Andy Burnham saga, I read these words from the now deceased US newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann (1889 -1974) who some called the greatest journalist of his age. “What kills political writing”, Lippmann wrote, was the “absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man [or woman] making notes on what you think.”

With this context setter in place – and an idea that might be heeded by some of the more pompous commentators in the press and on social media - here are my notes about a story that we are all supposed to be engrossed in. This is NOT a brilliant utterance … but do hope it shines a few rays your way.

The heads to these notes:

1) “Never outshine the master”

2) The explanations by Starmer and Co. are BS

3) What it says about the Labour Party

4) The Greens, Labour and opposing Reform

5) What it says about Your Party

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Here are the basic facts of this story: With a Labour MP resigning last week in the Manchester area constituency of Gorton and Denton, the party needs to call a by-election … and it’s expected in February or early March. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham was an obvious candidate. If he won, Burnham might be able to challenge PM Starmer as Labour Party leader…and hence become Prime Minister.

But the party’s top bosses in the top rung of the National Executive Committee (NEC) – Starmer is a member - have barred him from running. The NEC stated on Sunday it wants to save the party and the taxpayers money. (A byelection for Manchester mayor would cost X thousands of £.) Usually, local LP members have at least some say in who is short-listed. So Burnham will be remaining as mayor at least for now.

In an overnight development, about 50 Labour MPs have signed a letter calling on the NEC to change its ruling as there was “no legitimate reason” to block Burnham.

1) “Never outshine the master”

We begin more than four hundred years ago with the worldly wisdom of a Spanish Jesuit priest Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658):

He wrote: “Avoid outshining the master. All superiority is odious, but the superiority of a subject over his prince is not only stupid, it is fatal. This is a lesson that the stars in the sky teach us - they may be related to the sun, and just as brilliant, but never appear in her company.”

This is chosen as Law #1 in a 1999 “self-help” book called “The 48 Laws of Power.” It is a book that one review said, “teaches you how to cheat, dissemble, feign, fight and advance your cause in the modern world.”

It’s a book which I am sure (ha! ha!) Starmer keeps by his bedside. Indeed, he probably has had personal readings from Donald J Trump. This book dispenses the kind of handy dandy and pithy advice that helped Starmer become Labour leader and PM in 2024.

Burnam is the most popular Labour politician in the land – see graph below - and the last thing Starmer wanted was a strong rival in the House of Commons. (A Labour leader must be an MP.)

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Hence, there was some wisdom in the words of former Labour leader and retired MP Harriet Harman when she said in a BBC interview that Burnham should have known he would never have been allowed to stand by the NEC. Harman didn’t use the phrase “never outshine the master,” but she knows how her party and mainstream politics work generally. There is a good chance Burnham knew he was scuppered even before he tried to apply; he also appreciates how Labour works.

Actions such as blocking Burnham reveal, once again, that Labour is an authoritarian hot house of competing cliques and back stabbers. It is run like a nasty mid-sized capitalist corporation. I am glad I was never a member.

For Labour’s NEC to claim that the decision was all about money (see #2) - and has nothing to do with the Starmer-Burnham rivalry - is so absurd and cynical that even a political novice could see through it.

We now await to see if Starmer and the NEC next decide to apply Law 15 of the 48 laws of power: “Crush your enemy totally.” Wait for the next episode. For example, is expelling Clive Lewis on the cards?

But unless you believe in the discredited “great man” or “great woman” theory of history, the issue goes far beyond whether Starmer is a strong or weak leader, which has been the preoccupation of the mainstream media since this story broke.

Let’s look next at how Labour is governed.

2) The explanations by Starmer and Co. are BS

The NEC runs Labour with an iron boot, decorated, of course, with a red rosette tucked into its laces.

Without fearing in the least a rebellion in the ranks, it expelled veteran Labour MP such as Diane Abbott for 14 months in 2023-24. In 2023 Labour members voted overwhelmingly in favour of ditching our archaic first-past-the-post voting (FPTP) system and changing it to the far more democratic proportional representation (PR) voting system. Now in office with a huge majority on 34% of the vote, the NEC is giving no hints at all of abandoning FPTP. Neither is Starmer. Screw what LP members want.

In barring Burham with a decision that is non-appealable, the Starmer-controlled NEC said it barred him for two main reasons: a) if he was allowed to stand in Gorton and Denton, a subsequent byelection for Manchester mayor would cost taxpayers too much money, b) Fighting that byelection would, as well, cost the party too much money.

It is all so much BS.

A byelection costs too many ££ for taxpayers? This is the 6th richest country in the world. One can only imagine how much two state visits of Trump (see photo below) in his first term and in 2025 cost us taxpayers. We have just ramped up defence spending by billions. If this government wants to splash the cash, it regularly does.

Trump and his partner Melanie beside Starmer and his partner Victoria during the US president’s second state visit in September 2025. The cost? Undisclosed.

Moreover, the city of Manchester is ALREADY having council elections in every ward in May 2026. How much does it cost in ink and paper to print up mayoral ballot papers for use at the very same polling stations in the city? (TLL hasn’t had time yet to check the precise voting schedules for the rest of Greater Manchester.)

Too many ££ for the party to campaign in a mayoral byelection? These financial resources are “needed elsewhere,” said Starmer on Monday. One wondered: would a NEC insider soon appear on TV with a begging bowl?

You would almost think the Labour Party had the bank balance of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. (Their story from the 2024 General Election? 24 candidates fielded in 650 constituencies; a total of 5,814 votes tallied.) It is just a mirage. Labour is a BIG party.

Moreover, there are spending limits in mayoral contests. Multi-billionaire Trevor Chinn , aged 90, regularly transfers huge wads of cash to Labour and its biggies as this Declassified UK video reveals. (Who knows? Perhaps Labour is a beneficiary in his will; Labour Friends of Israel likely is as well.)

One phone call from Starmer to Chinn would pay for a heck of a lot of leaflets, Facebook ads, and rented office suites in any Manchester mayoral byelection campaign of a Burnham successor.

As well, how much cash would Labour need for a mayoral byelection? In the mayoral 2024 election, Burnham won 421,000 votes out of 664,000 cast. A Tory finished second with a paltry 69,000 votes. Has Labour’s support in 2026 plummeted so badly in less than 21 months that the party would need to buy a May 2026 byelection?

Once again, the NEC (and whoever in the party supports its “Bar Burnham” decision) has won a red ribbon in the cynicism sweepstakes by claiming this issue is about cash. It is not. Is it any surprise so many people are turned off politics completely? And have also been turned off Labour.

3) What it says about the Labour Party

Unsurprisingly, the NEC decision has been opposed by sections of what are often called the “soft left” of Labour and some unions.

Speaking of the party “we all love,” Nottingham East Labour MP Nadia Whittome has accused the NEC (which includes Starmer, who also voted to block Burnham) of promoting “factionalism.” A spokesperson for the Transport TSSA talked of the damage this incident had done to “the future of our party.” In the same Morning Star article, Andrea Egan, the newly elected head of UNISON said, “this isn’t the way any democratic organisation should be run” and talked of how “control freakery in the Labour Party… has done our movement nothing but harm.”

I have not read yet the views of my own MP Clive Lewis, a Burham ally, but in The Guardian on 26 January, his political colleague Neil Lawson, head of Compass, wrote that the CEC must reverse its decision and get back to “collaboration” and “pluralism.”

It is time for all of these people to ask themselves these questions: is the Labour Party “a democratic organisation”? Is it a friend of the workers’ movement? Or Palestinians? How much more “control freakery” are you going to take?

More broadly, while these people on the left call themselves socialists, is the Labour Party socialist…or can it become so?

No matter how many times Starmer or former deputy leader Angela Rayner remind us of their class background, Labour is neither a socialist party nor a workers’ party.

Ralph Miliband (1924-1994) Ed’s dad and the best Marxist political scientist in this country’s history, argued that the belief that the Labour Party could be transformed into an instrument for building socialism was “the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone”.

He believed that instead of the left capturing the Labour Party, the Labour Party tended to “capture the activists” and blunt their radicalism.

Ralph Miliband,Ed’s dad, but very different politics.

You can read many of Miliband’s writings HERE. His best book, THE STATE IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY in 1969, is available in a PDF HERE. Miliband’s writings are very accessible. I have recommended the latter to a number of mates over the years and more than one person has said it is the best book on British politics they have read.

The idea that Andy Burnham, who is a centrist social democrat and not even a socialist, would make big changes in the Labour Party if he became its leader is another crippling illusion.

Yes, he is slightly to the left of Starmer just as Wes Streeting, another Starmer rival, is slightly to the right. But that is saying very little. Starmer, Burnham and Streeting all hold to the view that Labour’s main task is to manage capitalism, not to transform it. Thatcher got their first with her TINA slogan: “There Is No Alternative.”

THE LEFT LANE has used this quote from Tony Benn before. But it bears repeating. “The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England.”

The conclusion? UK definitely does need a mass socialist party, but more on that in a minute.

4) The Greens, Labour and opposing Reform

There was media speculation that Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) and a councillor in London, might run in the Gorton and Denton byelection. Polanski has nipped that speculation in the bud and won’t be a candidate.

Polling in the constituency reveals that the Greens are on 24 per cent here, with Labour on 29 per cent and Reform on 27 per cent. The accuracy of that poll is in doubt, with neither Burnham nor Polanski now offering, no other candidates announced, and with the political situation in flux.

A GPEW source says that party sees the byelection as “a Reform-Green battle.” Whether other progressive voters, including Labour voters, see it in that way is still to be determined.

Labour MPs and party insiders think a Burham candidacy would have had the best chance of topping what is likely to be a strong Reform challenge in Gorton. Who knows? It is fair to say that Labour’s chances of winning here are now weakened. (One instant poll of locals showed that less than 10% of those asked agreed with the NEC’s decision to block Burnham.

But it is living in cloud cuckoo land to believe that the best way to beat far right forces is to line up, in constituency after constituency, behind whatever candidate has the best chance of beating Reform. To endorse Labour at the ballot box is to line up behind a party that has done more than other to breed the conditions and anti-immigrant ideology nurturing Reform’s growth.

This is a question progressives and socialists will need to come back to in coming months and years.

5) What it says about Your Party

Your Party (YP) has taken some pretty wild steps in recent weeks. Although a strong belief in electoralism has taken hold in the ranks of YP in recent times - at the expense of the need for organising and internal political education about what socialism is ( or a theory of party building ) - one can be pretty confident that YP will NOT attempt to field a candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection. Or one can hope.

After all, YP has neither a functioning ELECTED leadership body nor any functioning official branches. Campaigning and local base building are almost non-existent. Here in Norfolk, there have only been two deeply flawed meetings of the proto-branch, as is called, since August. And yet one of the proto-branch’s leading lights, a long-time Labourite who expels people she does not like, is a member of one of the two slates hoping to take over the running of YP’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) as a result of its forthcoming CEC elections. Mercy please.

Yes, the Burnham saga gives us reason number 47 why we need a mass anti-capitalist / pro-socialist party all across the UK. Whether YP is up to this task remains in doubt.

We should not forget, for example, that YP is in grave danger of splitting into two bickering factions, each led by a former Labour MP … and one with more than 40 years inside and once leading the Labour machine.

The type of values that have precipitated Labour’s turmoil over Burnham are the very same values that are widely prevalent inside YP.

Thankfully, there are also a significant portion of YP members who oppose such values and other long-failing approaches to politics.

TLL will come back to these issues when we devote two issues to coverage of the YP CEC elections and look at why YP dropped from a reported +800,000 supporters in early September 2025 to about 60,000 members today.

Amazingly, no authenticated figures of membership nor an audited financial statement of the party’s accounts have ever been provided to its members. Trust us, says YP insiders with a Starmerish smile.

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“MELT THE ICE”

Federal agents execute Alex Pretti and then envelop the people in a cloud of tear gas. (Photos from the Oakland Socialist)

Like me, you have probably been closely following the cold-blooded killing / murder/ execution on Saturday (24 Jan.) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by armed ICE agents.

The Trump administration has moved into overdrive to try to cover up Pretti’s brutal shooting. And campaigners, braving temperatures of -25 degrees Celsius, are now also in overdrive and uniting behind the slogan “ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA.”

Below are links to four articles and videos you may not have read or seen:

1) A CNN-edited video which provides the best reconstruction I have seen of the actual shooting of Pretti. It is HERE.

2) A context setting 90-second video by leading progressive US journalist Chris Hedges titled “Imperial Boomerang.” It is HERE.

3) Coverage of the shooting, its wider political implications, and the growing movement of resistance by the Oakland (California) Socialist newspaper. It is HERE. [This is an example of the kind of publication we on the left need in the UK. Thanks to John Tummon for locating this good coverage.]

4) A substack titled “Letters from an American” by a liberal American author, Heather Cox Richardson, who provides some insightful coverage of the reaction across the United States. It is HERE.

Looking ahead, it seems likely the growing protests in Minnesota will continue despite the Arctic-like temperatures. They have already brought results.

On Tuesday (27 January), Gregory Bovino, head of Trump’s anti-immigrant Border Force, and some of his armed guards will be leaving Minnesota. It is a move now labelled as a “TACO” - Trump Always Chickens Out. Oppressive state power and racism haven’t.

SOLIDARITY FROM THE ACROSS THE POND

A slogan you might want to take up: “MELT THE ICE.”

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 109 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover photo: Recent picture from the streets of the Iranian capital of Tehran.

In today’s THE LEFT LANE:

1. A special report on the crisis in Iran.

2. All hail the brave hunger strikers after winning an important victory in support of Palestine Action. Elbit Systems on “stolen time.”

3. Join “THE REPORTER”

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Neither turban nor crown but Woman, Life, Freedom

A guest post by Maryam Namazie

INTRO by AS - Women have long played a key role in the Iranian resistance movement. And they are doing so again during the current wave of protest that began in late December and which has resulted in widespread deaths – estimated between 2,000 and 12,000 – in more than 180 cities across this important country of more than 90 million people.

So while Donald “Mr. Yankee Liberator” Trump is being allowed to hog the headlines in the mainstream media, as per boringly usual, over Iran, THE LEFT LANE is very pleased to reprint an insightful assessment by a leading Iranian-born / UK-based campaigner and writer Maryam Mamazie. (Read of her life and accomplishments HERE.)

Maryam is very good at summing up a situation with a word picture. When I asked her early this morning (15 January) about what she was hearing from her homeland about the often-violent protests, she stressed that reliable and accurate news is thin on the ground.

“But I do know the regime is employing its usual tactics. An official comes to a person’s door and people are being asked to pay for the cost of the bullets --- say, one or two or three bullets, shot perhaps into someone’s eye --- that have killed members of their own family earlier that same day,” she said in a Zoom interview with TLL. That’s an image that definitely makes you pause when in eating your porridge at 7:20 a.m.

As for Mr. Liberator’s on again/ off again threats of US armed intervention in Iran, Maryam repeats what she had said some hours earlier on the Andrew Marr show on LBC Radio (HERE) : “I have yet to see a situation where US militarism has had a positive effect on the rights of people.”

First published on 12 January 2026.

In Persian: نه به عمامه و نه به تاج

A new nationwide wave of protest has spread across Iran since 28 December 2025. Initially triggered by acute economic collapse (currency freefall, sharp price rises for basic necessities, and renewed scarcity), it has rapidly become a wave of openly anti-regime protests—as has been the case with previous uprisings. Inflation, unemployment, and shortages are products of corruption, security-state monopolies, and repression as governance. The state has responded with its familiar repertoire: lethal force, mass arrests, threats to prosecute detainees as mohareb (‘enemies of God’) and sweeping internet blackouts. The shutdown is not incidental; it is designed to prevent coordination, cover up killings, and isolate people from one another while repression escalates.

A horrifying video circulating online, reportedly taken on 8 January from outside the Kahrizak Forensic Medicine Centre, shows rows of bodies laid out as families search for missing loved ones—and all the while, more bodies arrive by truck.

For over two weeks now, people across Iran have continued to take to the streets to demand an end to the Islamic regime. These protests are a continuation of the 2022 uprising that followed the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, an uprising that permanently altered Iranian society. Disregard for compulsory hijab, open contempt for clerical authority, and the normalisation of public anti-regime speech were among its lasting gains. But the ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ or ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ revolution has unfinished business.

In September 2022, Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, was murdered by the country’s morality police after allegedly not wearing the hijab in the proper fashion. (Read more HERE)

If you follow much of the mainstream and diaspora media, however, you would think that ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ has been replaced by ‘Long Live the King’ and that material demands for a better society have been replaced with branding and spectacle.

This pattern is chillingly familiar. During the 1979 revolution against the Pahlavi monarchy, slogans such as ‘Independence, Freedom’ were steadily replaced with ‘Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic’ and chants proclaiming ‘Ruhollah [Khomeini], you are our leader’. Revolutionary memory was rewritten in real time.

Today, some media outlets, like Iran International, have gone so far as to rename the Jina uprising ‘the Iranian National Revolution’, a strategic act of depoliticisation that erases its feminist, class, and revolutionary content. Thus the heir to the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Pahlavi—a man backed by fascist thugs who attack opponents at protests abroad and defend the Pahlavi regime’s old secret police force—is amplified by the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and presented as the alternative.

The move is clear: to shift a revolutionary process rooted in mass struggle toward leader fetishism and the consolidation of power from above. A revolution born of courage and sacrifice is redirected toward a single, pliable figure acceptable to global power blocs and capital.

It feels like 1979 all over again.

At the Guadeloupe Conference that year, leaders of the US, UK, France, and West Germany concluded that the Shah could not be saved. They feared state collapse, leftist influence, and workers’ control of oil and industry and sought an outcome consistent with Cold War strategies that viewed Islamism as a barrier against communism. In that context, Khomeini’s relocation to France and his extensive access to international media helped frame the revolution as a binary choice: Shah or Khomeini.

In 2026, the message is eerily similar: Khamenei or Shah. The aim is to shift legitimacy upward, push aside ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, and prevent a revolutionary reorganisation of society from below, one that threatens not only clerical rule but repressive social relations and patriarchal authority.

Pahlavi now appears on every major satellite channel and chants of ‘Long Live the Shah’ dominate the protests we are shown. There is mounting evidence that some footage circulating online has been manipulated to amplify this narrative, an illustration of how the manufacturing of consent works to defeat political imagination and possibility. Pahlavi is presented as a saviour to narrow the imaginable future, a future that is firmly female.

In every revolutionary situation, the ruling class attempts to pre-shape outcomes in order to restore ideological control and neutralise the emergence of autonomous and radical organisations and leadership. The women’s ward of Evin Prison is full of such leadership.

Support for Pahlavi as the ‘leader’ serves a precise purpose. It signals inevitability to the women and people of Iran who dared to demand ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’: You wanted liberation, instead you get a dictator’s son. The outcome is already decided. Adjust your expectations.

The speed with which image-making is replacing political struggle with spectacle is astonishing, erasing collective agency and infantilising people as being in need of guidance from a paternal figure imposed from above.

The false binary of Khamenei versus Shah is designed to suffocate revolutionary imagination. This is how revolutions are emptied to make sure that business continues as usual. The revolution opens space through mass courage and struggle; media and elites narrow the options; leadership is imposed; popular forces are co-opted and demobilised.

Reza Pahlavi, son of the former hated dictator, the Shah of Irah who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is backed by fascist thugs … and authoritarians such as Trump and Netanyahu.

Reza Pahlavi is not preparation for Iran’s liberation; he is preparation for the revolution’s containment. Revolutions are not defeated solely by bullets and batons; they are also defeated by false narratives and pre-selected futures. The Islamic regime has not even been overthrown, yet the revolution’s core demands are already being postponed.

For those in power, a king whose legitimacy rests on his bloodline and foreign recognition is far safer than ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’, a slogan that originated in the Kurdish feminist struggle and has become a mass rallying cry across Iran to reorganise society around women’s freedom, material improvement, and collective power. Sex apartheid in Iran, including the compulsory hijab, is also an economic policy. It disciplines labour, devalues women’s work, and secures unpaid care and social reproduction under crisis. The call for women’s freedom is, therefore, a call for the liberation of all.

The ‘Khamenei or Pahlavi’ binary does not reflect this reality; it is imposed to prevent revolutionary alternatives from consolidating. Once people accept that there can be only one alternative, the revolution has already been contained. Once leadership is imposed, the repression of women, LGBT people, freethinkers, leftists, and workers can be justified as necessary to ‘protect the transition’. A revolution that hands power to figures engineered from above surrenders its hopes, demands, and future. This is how revolutions are defeated.

What can we do to defend our Woman, Life, Freedom revolution when those in power claim to have already decided its outcome?

One proven defence is to insist on non-negotiable minimum demands: freedom of organisation and the right to strike; release of political prisoners; an immediate abolition of executions and torture; women’s and LGBT rights and equality; laïcité; the abolition of patriarchal and religious laws and institutions; the dismantlement of coercive organs under popular oversight; free expression and conscience; protection of strategic sectors from privatisation; price and rent controls on essentials; wage guarantees; healthcare and social protections. (See, for example, the Woman, Life, Freedom Charter.) These demands require organisation through neighbourhood assemblies, workplace committees, strike coordination, and recallable representatives rooted in struggle.

The classic trap is elections first, women’s rights and social justice later. Without binding guarantees, elections become a means of closing revolutionary openings, not expressing popular will.

The revolution in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan, offers vital lessons in resisting this trap. Its revolution has been deemed dangerous precisely because it has materially reorganised power around women through autonomous women’s structures, co-leadership, and embedded systems of defence and self-organisation.

In revolutionary moments, women are celebrated as brave bodies in the street; their repression becomes moral fuel. But when it comes to power, authority is always masculinised. The elevation of Reza Pahlavi is not solely due to delusional nostalgia for the monarchy. It is about restoring male authority, neutralising class politics, and suppressing women’s revolutionary autonomy.

History does not repeat itself by accident. It repeats through intervention, the renaming of struggles, the postponement of demands for liberation, and regime changes imposed from above.

Photos from the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement begun in September 2022. (See HERE and HERE)

‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ is a material challenge to how power is organised in Iran, how labour is disciplined, how social reproduction is enforced, how obedience is secured through patriarchal law and violence. That is precisely why it is being displaced by ‘Man, Nation, Prosperity’ nationalism, by the Shah, by the fantasy of a saviour. The move from programme to personality, from demands to brands, is not neutral. It is a mechanism designed to stop a woman-led revolution.

The historical task before us is not to choose between turban and crown, but to prevent the Jina revolution from being buried under false inevitabilities. This revolution will survive only if its meaning is defended: against kings, against clerics, against sects like the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, against media-manufactured futures, and against every demand that women and people wait their turn. There is no liberation that comes later. There is no freedom that arrives from above.

Neither turban nor crown!

Neither cleric nor king!

Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!

The article was first published in The Freethinker on 12 January 2026.

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Want some more background on the fast-moving Iranian crisis? Watch this videoed interview filmed late on 14 January by the ZETEO publication. View it HERE or look at this brief clip on what Trump may be up to with his latest stunts.

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Above is a photo of Maryam Namazie and THIS is her website. She is a multi-award winning Iranian-born campaigner and writer living in the UK. (She is also currently the Spokesperson of One Law for All and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.)

Her website contains links to other articles she’s written and her contact details. When we chatted this morning, Maryam said she would be happy to speak to groups in the UK. I would contact her promptly; she is a terrific speaker on a leading international subject.

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All hail the brave hunger strikers after winning an important victory in support of Palestine Action/ Elbit Systems on “stolen time.”

Hunger strikers Lewie Chiaramello, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed

Just as we were in the final editing stage of today’s THE LEFT LANE, this good news came in. Briefly:

+ The longstanding hunger strike in support of Palestine Action has all but ended after seven of the strikers said they are ceasing it with a victory. It is well earned. Some were facing imminent death. One man, 22, is reportedly still refusing food.

+ The win followed a decision by the Starmer government not to award a £2bn contract to the Israeli arms company subsidiary Elbit Systems UK.

+ This possible contract (and related matters) led to widespread protests and a government decision to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. That shameful decision is now being appealed in court.

+ In a statement, Prisoners for Palestine said there had been a number of victories: “In the past few weeks alone, 500 people have signed up to take direct action against the genocidal military-industrial complex, more than the amount of people who took action with Palestine Action over its five-year campaign. During that five-year campaign, four Israeli weapons factories were shut down. Elbit Systems is living on stolen time – we will see it shut down for good, not because of the government, but because of the people.”

+ “Our prisoners’ hunger strike will be remembered as a landmark moment of pure defiance, an embarrassment for the British state. It exposed to the world Britain has political prisoners in service of a foreign genocidal regime, and has seen hundreds of people commit to take direct action in the prisoners’ footsteps”, the statemen continued.

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Join “THE REPORTER”

On Wednesday, 21 January at 19:00, a group of us (now approaching 20 peeps) will hold our first online planning meeting for THE REPORTER.

THE REPORTER (TR) is a proposed new online (only) socialist newspaper that would come out every two weeks later in the spring of 2026. TR will be billing itself as a “critical friend” of Your Party and aimed at an audience of YP supporters and working-class readers.

Interested in perhaps joining the TR team, attending our 21 January meet and giving your views? We will be all ears.

1) Write ASAP to: theleftpolitics@gmail.com Put “THE REPORTER” in the subject line.

2) Please include all of your contact details and a little bit of your political history.

3) Also include a few details on what skills and experience you could bring to the publication. A wide variety are needed.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 108 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover art: El Machete Illustrated

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In the first issue of THE LEFT LANE of 2026:

1. The US military assault on Venezuela

2. “The criminality of this act is beyond dispute”

3. An open letter to MP Zarah Sultana

4. Cartoon of the week: Class politics, not identity politics.

5. Interested in helping out on THE REPORTER?

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The US military assault on Venezuela

by Alan Story

In one sense, the US military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his partner early on Saturday morning (3 Jan.) is not news at all. As one academic commentator put it, “Uncle Sam has returned to its historic norm of exercising dominance over the hemisphere.”

Indeed, as a 14-page Wikipedia entry titled “United States involvement in regime change in Latin America” that was helpfully updated over the weekend reveals, US military might – direct and/or from the shadows – has attempted “regime change” in almost 15 countries on that continent since 1898. ( The Wiki list does overlook some government overthrows, such as the resulting from the 1983 US invasion of Grenada under Reagan.)

Usually over the past 125 years, Uncle Sam has succeeded. Cuba 1898, Haiti 1915, Chile 1973, Panama 1989, and so on; check out the Wikipedia entry if South American history and politics is not your strong point.

The cover art from the most recent previous issue of THE LEFT LANE on 14 December 2025.

With a new year having just begun, Venezuela has been added to the list by Trump. Yet as another article explains, “the attack on 3 January is not the first against Venezuela. In fact, the pressure campaign began in 2001 when the government of Hugo Chávez enacted a Hydrocarbons Law in accordance with the sovereignty provisions in the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999.”

The article then proceeds to list numerous and often illegal US interventions over the past 25 years, noting also the role of the Bank of England in seizing Venezuelan Central Bank gold reserves in 2018.

Saturday’s extensive military attacks were an attempt to turn back the clocks in Venezuela to the pre-Chávez era when US fossil fuel conglomerates were king. This was an era when, as I remember learning in 2007 during an invigorating visit to Caracas to give some academic talks, Miami was considered by some wealthy Venezuelans to be capital of South America.

In the old days, countries like Venezuela and Guatemala were dismissed as mere US outposts. “Banana Republics” was the term used. US Secretary of State Mario Rubio, a Cuban American, yearns for a return to the 1950s when the Batista dictatorship ruled Cuba, when Havana was ruled by Miami-based gangsters and when the majority of Cubans were illiterate and lived in dire poverty.

So consider Cuba to be next on Trump’s and Rubio’s hit list as they seeks to make America great again.

YET IT IS ALSO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

But in another sense, Saturday’s assault is something different, something new. The violent invasion of Venezuela by a foreign power and its 150 war planes really is a bit of a one off… and clearly illegal as Mat Callahan writes below and as 90% of experts in international law will surely conclude in coming days.

Typically, PM Starmer implicitly supports action man Trump. In a statement on 3 January, he said, “The UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela. We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime. I reiterated my support for international law this morning.”

Mind you, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza has revealed, the whole concept of international law is melting away like an ice lolly on a hot July afternoon. Again, our PM is falling into line as he did with Trump and Netanyahu about who was responsible for the killing fields of Palestine and how it definitely was NOT a genocide. (As for the hunger strikers for Palestine Action held in prison and near death, what hunger strikers? says our pathetic “Labour” government.)

Other weekend developments are both repeats and new news. The kidnapping of a president (in this case Maduro) by a foreign power (in this case the US) is a unusual one off. So too is Country A saying it will take over and “run” Country B. Typically, Starmer refuses to condemn that idea too.

As for scooping up a foreign leader such as Maduro from his own house in Caracas at 2:00 in the morning, putting him on a plane, and having him face charges as an alleged narco-terrorist in your courts, well, that is another unusual one. Perhaps Starmer can tell us what human rights law permits such an outrage. As Mat Callahan asks below, what will Starmer and others say “when the US invades Greenland”?

With the number of global “hot spots” and war zones expanding on almost a weekly basis – Venezuela, Taiwan, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and who knows where next? -, with the US being a declining economic force and with ever more deadly global weaponry being ramped almost everywhere, the threat of global war breaking out is similarly being ramped up.

On Saturday afternoon, Mat and I had an hour-long Zoom call trying to assess what may come next in Venezuela, in the region, in the US and in the world. We agreed too much was still up the air.

We also agreed the current situation is spelled: “U-N-P-R-E-D-I-C-T-A-B-L-E P-O-W-D-E-R-K-E-G”.

Get tickets (can be free) and register for this online event HERE.

And find out about rallies being organised in various parts of the UK.

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“The criminality of this act is beyond dispute”

By Mat Callahan

It was with distress and outrage that I heard of the US attack on Venezuela. The criminality of this act is beyond dispute, its repudiation by the people of the world a certainty. It is incumbent upon all of us to stand and deliver that repudiation from every rooftop, every street corner, every workplace and school, until earth and heaven ring with the sound of our voices. There can be no more illusions about the nature of US Imperialism, no more wishful thinking that a system so corrupt can “self-correct” or reform itself. Furthermore, let us not be deluded that the grotesque psychopath presently residing in the White House is the cause of this aggression.

Since the Mexican-American war in 1846, the US has been invading country after country south of its border. From the Dominican Republic to Cuba to Nicaragua to Guatamala. From Honduras, Grenada and Panama, the US has “intervened” in almost every country in the hemisphere. If that were somehow “history”, not to be repeated, then what the hell is Guantanamo? What was the removal of Mossadegh in Iran? What were the two invasions of Iraq? What was the destruction of Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and the bombing of Iran? What, moreover, is the genocide of Palestinians if not US policy? Of course, it’s aided and abetted by European powers. Of course, it’s Israel that is doing the dirty work. But all of this carnage is the handiwork of the Master: US Imperialism.

If there is anything useful or positive to be found in this heinous crime it is that of exposing not only the true, and truly hideous, nature of the US government and the ruling class it serves, but its accomplices as well. First among them are the governments of the “collective West”. All are lackeys, complicit in every crime committed by the US. Listen to Ursula van der Leyen praise Trump. Listen as Kaja Kallas does the same. Listen as each and every government lines up to grovel at the feet of their boss. Lawyer Starmer is mute about this military assault. Will they do the same when the US invades Greenland? What then will these morally bankrupt mediocrities say?

Second, all media outlets, but especially the liberal ones, such as the New York Times and the Guardian will be held to account. These are the propagandists spewing the bile that has hitherto covered up the crimes of their owners. Now, they stand exposed. They are the Joseph Goebbels of our time. Simplify and repeat. The bigger the lie the louder it’s told. All their pontificating about democratic values, all their lecturing and scolding about dictators and authoritarians, totalitarianism and despotism, all this hangs upon them like tattered rags. No doubt they will go on publishing, they have no other way of being. But they will no longer be able to hide the fact that they are pathological liars and génocidaires. Ultimately, however, the decisive force in all this will, as it always has been, the people of the world.

We must rally to the defence of Venezuela, join its struggle with the struggle of the Palestinian people, and these two with the struggles of the peoples of Burkina Faso and the countries of the Sahel. Indeed, we must unite all our struggles and focus them all the more intently on the main enemy of humanity: US Imperialism. Down with US Imperialism! Peace and Justice for the people of the world.

In happier times, this is Mat playing the guitar (on the right)

Born in the USA and now living in Switzerland, Mat Callahan is a writer, editor and musician. You can listen HERE to his music and that of his partner Yvonne Moore. THE LEFT LANE interviewed Mat in a two-part interview titled “The power of sharing: music as a common good” in February 2024; read it HERE.

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An open letter to MP Zarah Sultana

Dear Zarah:

On Friday, 2 January, I read this social media message you posted in response to a post from former London mayoralty candidate Susan Hall.

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Yes, Hall is a reactionary arse and her views are repulsive. But attacking her because of her age is downright ageist and, as we used to say back in the 1960’s, definitely NOT right on.

I won’t catalogue here similar offensive tweets you ( or your representative) has posted in recent weeks; the one about London Mayor Sadiq Khan was also petty and surplus to requiremements. Such tweets are doing Your Party (YP) no good. And as a “boomer” myself, as a socialist in the trenches since 1965 and as a member of Your Party since August, can I say just one thing:

Such messages do nothing to boost socialism or the cause of the working class.

Alan Story

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Cartoon of the week:

On why we need class politics, not identity politics.

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Interested in helping out on THE REPORTER?

Image by Angus McNoonan of Glasgow

Of course it is NOT the most important consequence, but an international crisis such as the US invasion of Venezuela points out again the need for a socialist newspaper in the UK.

This is one more reason that a group us will soon be meeting to try our very best to establish an online bi-monthly (to start) socialist newspaper. The working title is “THE REPORTER”. We will be having our first online planning soon.(For more details, see article #3 HERE.)

Interested in perhaps joining the team, sticking your toe in the water, attending our first brain-storming Zoom session in later January, and giving your views? Then:

1) Write ASAP to: theleftpolitics@gmail.com Put “THE REPORTER” in the subject line.

2) Please include all of your contact details and a little bit of your political history.

3) Also include a few details on what skills and experience you could bring to the publication.

+++++++

Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 107 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social

Cover art: On the left is US President Trump. On the right is an undated political cartoon by Louis Dalrymple headed: “EXPANSION!” It is from the Wikipedia entry on the Monroe Doctrine.

NOTE to those reading via email: This article may exceed the length that can be sent by Substack to an email account. Solution? Please click on the headline (“Monroe Doctrine….” ) and it will take you directly to the Substack article in your browser. Or click on “View Entire Message” down the page.

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In today’s issue of THE LEFT LANE ( the last one of 2025) , three pieces:

1. The USA, the Monroe Doctrine & Latin America - a historical view of Trump’s attacks on Venezuela

2. Is anybody listening at Your Party HQ?

3. Let’s end on some good news

The 8 January 2025 front page of the right-wing NEW YORK POST

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Back at the start of 2025, a New York City tabloid featured this map (above) of North and Central America. The word “Donroe” was a take-off on the phrase, the “Monroe Doctrine”, which has, on and off, directed US foreign policy in Latin American since the early 1800s.

A few days ago on Wednesday (10 December), we saw “Donroe” in action when US military forces illegally boarded a oil tanker in what has been called a “spectacular-high seas seizure” in the Caribbean Sea off Venezuela. Acting on orders from Commander-in-Chief Trump, the US forces impounded both the ship, named Skipper, and its cargo, the latter worth $50-$100 million.

International reaction has been mostly mute, even though war and/or an attempted regime change in Venezuela may lie ahead. Its government calls what occured “international piracy.” That’s about right. Meanwhile, the Starmer government has been silent. After all, the logic goes, the Western Hemisphere is America’s “patch.” Moreover, this is just Trump being Trump, they claim; after all, the clown man thinks the Gulf of Mexico is really the Gulf of America.

That’s the wrong way to look at what’s happening … and could happen, argues John Tummon here. This seizure was NOT some 2025 blip. Instead, there are long historical roots to Yankee imperialism in Latin America.

The USA, the Monroe Doctrine & Latin America - a historical view of Trump’s attacks on Venezuela

by John Tummon

The United States claimed to have exclusive imperialist rights to Latin America as soon as the Spanish Empire was overthrown by Simon Bolivar’s forces in 1822. Just months later, President James Monroe , a US founding father, warned European nations that the United States would not tolerate further colonisation or puppet monarchs. The Monroe Doctrine soon became a watchword of U.S. policy in the Americas. The European powers, according to Monroe, had to respect the Western Hemisphere as being the United States’ “sphere of interest”, 19th century code for ‘we are the imperialists here - keep out!’.

The Monroe Doctrine was invoked in 1865 when the U.S. government exerted pressure in support of the Mexican Benito Juárez. That move enabled Juárez to lead a successful revolt against the Emperor Maximilian, who had been placed on the throne by the French government.

Almost 40 years later in 1904, European creditors of a number of Latin American countries threatened armed intervention to collect debts. US President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt promptly proclaimed the right of the United States to exercise an “international police power” to curb such “chronic wrongdoing,” in his so-called Roosevelt Corollary (or extension) to the Monroe Doctrine.

By then, the US had already defeated Spain in a war of 1898 and taken over the former Spanish possessions of the Philippines and Cuba. U.S. Marines were sent into Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 1904, Nicaragua in 1911, and Haiti in 1915, ostensibly to keep the Europeans out. Other Latin American nations viewed these interventions with misgivings. The CIA was instrumental in overthrowing the left-wing government of Guatemala in 1954. (There is an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the subject: “United States involvement in regime change in Latin America”; it is HERE)

US Marines and sailors from the U.S.S. Washington coming ashore for the capture of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1915 ( Credit: Wiki Commons) Will we see this again in Venezuela in 2026?

In 1959, Fidel Castro and the 26 July Movement overthrew the U.S - backed Batista regime; in 1961, the CIA sent a detachment of Cuban emigres it had trained to invade Cuba and to attempt to overthrow Castro. But they were wiped out in the infamous Bay of Pigs debacle.

Then in 1962, the Monroe Doctrine was invoked when the USSR began to build missile-launching sites in Cuba at Castro’s invitation. President John F. Kennedy threw a naval and air quarantine around the island. After several tense days, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw the missiles and dismantle the sites. Subsequently, the United States dismantled several of its obsolete air and missile bases in Turkey.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the CIA trained Latin American ‘Death Squads’ out of right-wing forces, to attack leftist groups, to intimidate rebellious peasants, and to support the right-wing dictators that the CIA brought to power in country after country. This brought death and destruction on a horrendous scale and ensured that most regimes were dictatorships funded and backed by the USA.

Venezuela becomes a leading world oil exporter

After winning independence from Spain, Venezuela was dominated for over a century by Caudillo rule (a Spanish word for a political boss or overlord, dictator or chief). From 1908 to 1935, under continuing dictatorship, it became one of the world’s largest oil exporters. The first elections were held in 1958 and Venezuela profited from a spike in world oil prices following the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

But by 1983, it was subjected to the first wave of neoliberalism, with a new currency exchange policy and the liberalising of prices imposed by the IMF. Later in 1989, a full-blown structural adjustment plan was put in place by the IMF and World Bank, followed by political ‘reforms’ to complete the destruction of the people’ rights and chances of any economic security. The proceeds of oil flowed into US banks. It is not for nothing that Miami Florida is called the capital of South America by some people.

Neoliberalism led to social breakdown in Venezuela, including in its capital city of Caracas. As in many of the other megacities of Latin America, law and order became virtually absent from Caracas, with each shopping centre barricaded by steel fences, each residential street marked off with a guardhouse and a lifting road barrier, and each block of flats protected by armed wardens. The rich lived behind high walls with their own private security guards. The youthful poor survived by organising their own armed gangs. The middle class, sandwiched miserably in between, lived in constant fear for their property and their lives.

In February 1989, the poor from the surrounding hills descended for a week of indiscriminate looting throughout the city. Hundreds of people were killed during the subsequent repression, a reminder of how thin the veneer of class tolerance had become. The event, soon called the Caracazo, was triggered by a rise in the price of petrol; bus fares went up and simmering anger turned to active rebellion.

Hugo Chavez elected president in 1999

Hugo Chavez, the popular president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013.

These developments were challenged in the 1990s by Hugo Chavez, an avowedly radical army officer, who became President in 1999. He won a handsome majority and was supported by the vestiges of the Communist Party and half a dozen larger leftist groups. His government concentrated on undoing neoliberalism by focusing on agro-industrial projects and food production, and the Constitution was entirely rewritten for the first time since 1961. Chavez gave new rights to the indigenous population, rebuilt the judicial system and established a new, single-chamber National Assembly.

He also worked within OPEC to secure a big rise in oil prices, which benefited Venezuela. Chavez, crucially, also worked with other Latin Americans who shared his vision of re-igniting the independent spirit of Simon Bolivar to end the USA’s domination of the continent and its peoples. His government kicked off what was called the socialist “pink tide” across Latin America.

In these ways, Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution was a direct challenge to the USA. Predictably, the CIA tried to assassinate him, tried to organise coups against him, which both failed, and funded anti-Chavez propaganda and his Venezuelan political opponents. The latest is Maria Corina Machado, a loyal Trumpist who recently received the Nobel Peace Prize for her opposition to the Venezuelan government. Machado has called for a US military invasion of her country. Such is the perverse logic of awards for peace, as FIFA went on to prove when it recently awarded Trump its own so-called “peace prize.”

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Trump says a US military ground operation in Venezuela could begin “very soon.”

Get tickets for this online rally HERE.

Sign the Emergency Statement: “No to Trump’s War on Venezuela” HERE.

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But there were also weaknesses during the Chavez era

Despite the nationalisation of the Bank of Venezuela, state-supported cooperatives, which have created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and the 2012 reform of labour law, which allows workers to directly manage a company that is fraudulently liquidated by the bosses, worker management was never given sufficient encouragement or incentives by Chavez. In line with Che Guevara’s own practice in charge of the Cuban Ministry of Employment, Chavez did not allow autonomous trade unions to exist.

Along with a Constitution that is based on huge discretion for the President, who is allowed to stand for a second term, top-down economic management means that Bolivarianism aped the former USSR’s version of socialism, right down to not seeing beyond fossil fuels. So Venezuela under Chavez was never socialist in any important sense. Populist state capitalism would be more accurate.

Even so, this top-down society sat uneasily alongside mass mobilisations of the poor and the growth of working class and peasant activism, which pushed the boundaries of control and power. It amounted to a monumental lifting of millions of people out of the poverty, misery and oppression of dictatorial rule and their partial empowerment. It also represented an important pole of ‘anti-Yanqui’ resistance for Latin Americans throughout the continent, as well as those being attacked by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the USA.

Current President Nicolás Maduro is no Chavez

Maduro is no Chavez; he lacks the popular touch. He has paid insufficient attention to keeping the mass of people onside, has shown scant regard for legitimising electoral practice, and has had the misfortune, alongside Cuba’s post-Castro leadership, of having to cope with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio is a zealot from a reactionary Miami Cuban background who is determined to use all the power of the Trumpist state to deal with the two most consistently anti-US Latin American regimes, Cuba and Venezuela.

This mission to robustly reassert the Monroe Doctrine just last week received the fullest possible backing with the publication of Trump’s National Security Strategy. HERE is one take on that document. Among other things, this document fundamentally shifts the United States focus from NATO and Europe to areas such as Latin America; the latter is once again to come under the thumb of its powerful northern neighbour.

Some predict this will be a violent, long and bloody conflict with Los Americanos. It could easily destabilise the USA itself internally, given the millions of Latin Americans already in conflict with ICE in a number of US cities.

John Tummon is a long-time socialist from the Stockport area and recently returned from a vacation in Cuba.

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Is anybody listening at Your Party HQ?

MP Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a rally in warmer weather. (Your Party photo)

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By Alan Story

After the almost non-stop series of YOUR PARTY (YP) organisational screw-ups, political rifts, faction fights, and anonymous media briefings against party opponents – talk about a no! no! for an aspiring socialist party! – you might think the YP tops would have cleaned up their act since the early days … and started listening to YP members after its recent founding conference two weeks ago.

Sadly you’d be wrong.

Check out this anonymised (and edited) Facebook thread among eight YP members on 11 December … and part of a wider discussion of more than 75 supporters. It reveals the centralised mind-set of those running YP (whomever they are!!!) and their continued hoarding on a London-based spreadsheet of local membership info, their refusal to advertise local YP branch meetings, and even to reply to emails from members. After writing six or seven messages myself without reply, I have given up on this waste of time.

The current situation reveals control freakery in overdrive. And this at a time when many YP members and branches urgently want to GET CAMPAIGNING and RE-RECRUIT the 700,000 potential YP members lost primarily between mid-September and late November due to screw-ups and faction fights among you know who.

As the lead-off Facebook poster below writes: “It does seem that the unelected people currently at the centre of the project do not trust the membership and would like to select another one.”

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YP member #1 (“G” from Brent in London)

We held our first interim Your Party Brent borough branch last night. A good attendance of 20 plus and a determination to work together to build the party. Already members are supporting local striking school staff and are involved in several local campaigns…What was frustrating for all was that we had no means of contacting the two hundred people recorded as having joined the party in our area nor could we know who they are. Requests to those running national Your Party to tell local members of our meeting were ignored.

It does seem that the unelected people currently at the centre of the project do not trust the membership and would like to select another one. This cannot go on; we have so many people relying on us in Your Party to fight back against racism and cuts and many new Your Party members wanting to help.

YP member #2 (from Birmingham)

In Birmingham, these obstructions have led to a lot of fractures in having unity… Without being a party branch, many seem to be willing to have slanging matches over WhatsApp. For a Birmingham branch to be formed with the 20% quota would take around 200 to attend. There are no constituency groups formed yet, but already we would need 25 in attendance.

The logical process of changing FROM an unofficial supporters’ group TO a Birmingham-wide district branch then TO Constituency party groups seems riven with problems. If there are further delays, I’m not sure the supporters group can survive and will be prey to a bureaucratic take over… Is it allowed to establish a district branch? Birmingham Council covers 10 constituencies. Largest in Europe. To try and set up 10 branches simultaneously could lead to failures (spreading too thin). Historically Birmingham Wide groups are formed first and then move to local groups. The 20% quota is daunting at this stage.”

YP member #3 (from Doncaster)

We have the same issue in Doncaster, “G”. Had a guy contact us this morning. He had no knowledge of last night’s meeting, until this morning. There could be so many more people able/wanting to attend.

YP member #4 ( from Wigan)

Stalls are needed in towns to find people or surgeries in community centers. And urgently.

YP member #5 (from Bristol)

I was informed that National will publicise local meetings by sending emails to local members on your behalf. Not sure who to contact,but worth approaching National to ask.

YP member #1 ( replying to member #5)

“National” will do no such thing and hence my post! We have tried everything to alert local people, but of course these miss so many.

YP member #6( from Ealing in London)

In Ealing too we’re desperate to contact the some 450 residents who’ve joined YP. We caught sight of just the names and so many are unknown to us (former/ expelled Labour members). Yay!! New people.!!!!

YP member #7 ( in Wales)

We have the same issue in Wales. It is wholly unacceptable and we have elections next May.

YP member # 8 (unknown location)

What reason have you been given for not getting the membership list?

YP member #1 ( replying to member #8)

No reason given as no reply received at all.

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On and on it goes. And this is only one thread on one YP member’s Facebook. So while a good percentage of the +60,000 YP members are keen to rock n’roll and recover from the recent setbacks to YP, the YP tops have again put their collective feet on the brake pedal.

SOME SOLUTIONS …to resume forward momentum:

1) The four MPs still “stewarding” YP should resume their work and start listening to what members are saying. Pronto.

2) YP needs an immediate audit of its finances. Members need to be told the whole picture of what has happened between 3 July and the present. For example, what money is available for YP rehab work?

3) YP volunteers need to be drafted in to sort out the branches issue (and the questions raised above by YP member #2) and ramp up internal communications. YP has +8,000 members in London alone; finding and organising 40-50 volunteers to assist should not be too taxing a task. And then TRUST THEM.

4) If needed, hire some part-time temporary employees to assist as well. By a rough estimate, YP is now generating revenues of £250,000 a month. Yet, the Monster Raving Loony Party is more professionally organised than YP.

5) Add a “Contact tab” to the YP website HERE, include a few mail addresses for different issues… and answer the emails received PROMPTLY.

6) Sack Karie Murphy. All reports that TLL has read and all the people we’ve talked to suggest she is running the YP show. She needs to go if YOUR PARTY is to become OUR PARTY.

The overall aim: to get hundreds of so-called YP “proto-branches” across the UK transformed into REAL branches by the end of January 2026.

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Let’s end on some good news…

Members of YOUR PARTY in Birmingham are showing what campaigning means on the bin workers’ picket lines in that city.

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By Alan Story

In the most recent THE LEFT LANE, I wrote about the importance of YOUR PARTY members stepping up and taking personal initiative:

“A personal plan for THE LEFT LANE: I’ve been a professional journalist in three countries, on and off, since 1967. Early in the new year, I plan to call an online Zoom session about how we could set up a lively and regular YP online publication in 2026 that would reach out to tens of thousands of readers. Eat your heart out SOCIALIST WORKER! (LOL!)”

Now here is the good news:

In the past six days, I have had personal conversations with twelve people who I thought might be interested in joining the team to put out such a publication/ newspaper (or who had contacted me.) All twelve said it was a good idea; two are too busy on other projects to assist us. Lots of good ideas flowed. A leading left-wing blogger and I chatted for almost an hour and he said he would attend our January Zoom call and give his input.

And so the idea has been further refined:

1) With a team of about 20 people, we would aim to launch in an online format only in the spring of 2026. At first, we would plan to come out bi-monthly… and then more frequently once we got up to speed;

2) We would establish a non-profit, workers-controlled co-op to own and operate the publication;

3) This new publication would not be a typical party organ such as Socialist Worker or The Weekly Worker. In other words, we would not always follow the party line. Instead, we would be critical friends of YP and spread its message and announcements. At the same time, we would host debates on a range of domestic and international subjects and attempt to operate as BOTH a campaigning agitator and a reflective “think tank” … for want of a better phrase.

4) A top priority would be making sure that “member-led” and “collaboration” are not simply PR-speak. It will be a tough act to pull this off well and we will need to build trust.

5)We would be in the struggle for the proverbial long-term … and ensure we had joy, did some serious learning, and had fun in the process.

6) We would strive to be a lively and accessible – and NOT dull nor turgid! – socialist/ anti-capitalist newspaper of high quality and with the working class and its allies at its heart. And consider also producing some videos.

7)We need a newspaper that features the opinions and activities of “average” YP members and their branches … and not just YP MPs.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Of course such a newspaper will need a stable of good writers. But it will also need people with lots of other talents and skills including: editing, photography, illustrating, fund raising, design and production, administration, distribution and so on.

INTERESTED?

Interested in perhaps joining the team, sticking your toe in the water, attending our first brain-storming Zoom session in later January, and giving your views? Then:

1) Write by 31 December to: theleftpolitics@gmail.com Put “YOUR PAPER” in the subject line (though that is NOT the intended name of the publication.)

2) Please include all of your contact details and a little bit of your political history.

3) Also include a few details on what skills and experience you could bring to the publication.

NOTE: we will reply to all emails received. But it might take a little while as I am taking a longer than usual holiday break.

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So Seasons’ Greetings from THE LEFT LANE.

We’ll return in the first week of 2026.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 106 in total) here

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Your Party supporters meeting 29-30 November in Liverpool ( Photo: Dav Jones of YP Wales)

By Alan Story

Six days on from the founding conference of Your Party (YP) – it is keeping the name - I’m sure I am not the only socialist who is having a “head versus heart” moment with her or himself … or with mates or partners.

“Is it worth committing to this cause … or is YP just the latest ghost train of many?” some are surely asking as I am.

In short, is there a “What’s Next?” for YP after its first conference in Liverpool attended by an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 supporters. (See initial THE LEFT LANE (TLL) piece of 2 December HERE).

On the one hand - and looking first at the “head side” - there are lots of reasons to think YP is already on the rocks … or soon will be.

Of course, the plummeting numbers of supporters don’t tell the whole story. But they certainly tell SOME of the story. From a reported +800,000 YP supporters in July --- in other words, being like the Arsenal or Man City of UK politics --- to 55,000-60,000 supporters now in December definitely puts YP in the relegation zone from the topflight of politics … or sort of like Great Yarmouth Town FC [Best FA cup performance ever? The second round in 1953-54]

YP “road map” led us into a swamp

Veterans of left-wing conferences are still mystified. When time was so precious, why did we have such long debates on some of the so-called “road map” amendments about relatively trivial matters in the draft constitution? And then ignore biggies, such as no mention whatsoever of a party disciplinary process or of the critical democratic issues of how money from subs will be allocated between YP branches and the YP centre? Or have a serious discussion/ debate about party strategy for the 12 months ahead? Or how branches should operate?

The YP’s much-touted “road map” led us into a swamp. Once you learn the background of who YP HQ had appointed as head of the all-powerful conference Standing Orders Committee, the mystery of why this happened starts to disappear. See more on this in section 4 below, and also there about Karie Murphy’s future.

YP has been created without any theoretical insights into party building, here or elsewhere. Nor has YP engaged in any detailed critique of Labourism or of past failures to build a left-of-Labour alternative party. Given the political background of so many members in YP, one very much gets the feeling that, yes, they’ve left Labour, but Labour hasn’t left some of them.

Pamela Fitzpatrick is a good example. A long time LP member, co-chair of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project and one of YP’s leading back roomers for more than a year ( see HERE), she was asked a few months ago in a Zoom session what YP could learn from these left organisational failures of the past two decades. Fitzpatrick’s five-word reply: “Things are very different today.”

Not that different Pamela! As former trade union general secretary Mark Serwotka underlined in this insightful MORNING STAR piece, “… if Your Party is to reach out to millions of working-class people it must not repeat the mistakes the left has made in previous attempts at launching a left-wing alternative to Labour such as the Socialist Alliance, Respect and TUSC.” Some left groups might have a mea culpa moment as well.

A divisive “culture war” erupting

Those who believe in class politics, not identity politics ( see the most well-read TLL piece ever) need to consider what a socialist feminist wrote in a Facebook post on 3 December: “From a materialist Marxist perspective I would say Your Party is fucked. I would have expected the majority of people in a socialist party to prioritise struggles rooted directly in the relations of production. That’s why I find it so difficult to understand why the question of trans liberation is framed as oppression and is being pushed as such by people who I thought knew better.”

She continued: “It’s the working class who are oppressed and that oppression is not primarily cultural or representational; it is rooted in the way in which capitalist society is organised, in the ownership of the means of production, and in the exploitation of labour. Workers have no choice but to sell their labour power to survive, and it’s this structural compulsion that defines capitalism itself. Its Marxism 101…”

[As an aside: trans liberation is now emerging as a leading “culture war” issue inside YP and could lead, in time, lead to a significant number of expulsions of those who don’t buy into its divisive ideology. It has in the Greens as TLL reported in 2024. A YP amendment was passed last weekend which, by some manipulative drafting, equated what has happened to the Palestinian people to what happens to trans people. The Starmer government pulled the same drafting stunt when it banned Palestine Action (PA) in July 2025. PA was linked it with the names of actual terrorist groups in the same legislation. On the past weekend in Liverpool, those speaking against this divisive YP motion, including one MP, were greeted by nasty chants of “transphobe.”]

So, yes, many valid critiques. “The YP project is finished,” a long-time socialist mate from Sheffield wrote on my Facebook page yesterday. Later he added: “Who wants to join a sinking ship with a toxic culture? Inevitably a big chunk of potential members have jumped and gone into the Greens claiming that they are going to turn it into a Socialist Party. Ho. Ho. Ho!”

On and on it goes. Some independent lefties I know and respect are saying, with great regret, “I am going to give YP a pass.”

But we must press on and decide “What’s next?”

Yet, at same time, the “hearts” of some of us are saying:

+ Millions of people BADLY need an end to capitalist oppression.

+ Building working class socialist party is all about building working class power. What can you do alone or in groups of 5 or 10?

+ The Starmer/Farage double act urgently needs socialist opposition… and a working-class organisational alternative. Citing what Farage said as schoolboy in Dulwich 50 years ago isn’t the main way to do it. (See the anti-far march advertised below).

+ If Your Party flops, creating another one will be even harder.

+ What’s Plan B? Join a sect? No thanks. Some of them are as small and ineffective as they were two decades ago.

+ Speaking of sects: Pulling out of YP now will make it even easier for groups like the SWP or SP to use YP as a recruitment opportunity.

Let’s leave it to an overall conclusion of John Tummon, a socialist colleague of mine: “… Repelled by the in-fighting of the controlling cliques up to Conference, the majority want a democratic and Socialist Party focused on the working class and have decided on a collective leadership via the CEC rather than the single or co-leader model the cliques wanted.”

MPs Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn will remain leading figures in Your Party … but will NOT be the leaders. The mainstream media can’t get their head around that one.

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Not “start to finish” reportage

So today’s TLL focuses on WHAT COULD LIE AHEAD for YP rather than complex “start to finish” reportage of all that occurred at the two-day session. To at least partially reconstruct what motions were passed, you can:

a) Look at the second draft of the four founding convention documents (“the evolved documents”) that were voted on. See HERE;

b) Examine the results of the online votes by YP members on these documents, as well as amendments. See HERE

As for several of the better journalistic/ analytical takes on what occurred, you could check out Mark Serwotka’s piece already cited, ( headed “A new left party is born — but can it break with old habits?”), “ Messy, combative and intoxicatingly fierce – don’t write off Your Party just yet” by Andy Beckett in THE GUARDIAN and “A triumph for citizen Sultana” by Jack Conrad in WEEKLY WORKER. And here is a piece by Ed Sykes in THE CANARY on a meeting held by YP’s Muslim Network; it was a really interesting session; TLL attended.

Now on to “What Could be Done”.

1.Get your local branch functioning ASAP

Nothing could be more important in a member-led party, as YP aspires to be, than getting hundreds of YP branches operating (and campaigning +see #2) all across the UK.

As a member of the YOUR PARTY- LIVERPOOL Facebook group put it less than 48 hours after the YP conference ended in his city:

“We must now act quickly to establish member-led branches to promote and support electoral and activist organisation, rooted in local communities and fighting for the pro-working class, anti-oppression and anti-austerity principles adopted by an overwhelming majority of the membership.

I’m calling on the various groupings within Your Party - Liverpool, Your Party - Merseyside, and Liverpool Community Independents (all on Facebook) and groups that have sprung up organically amongst individual Your Party members in the Merseyside Open Forum and Merseyside Pensioners, to come together urgently to discuss Your Party branch structures in Liverpool and Merseyside areas and to develop meaningful unified local organisations to lead Your Party’s interventions in industrial and community campaigns and to select candidates and prepare for forthcoming elections (including nominations to the new member-led Central Executive Committee).

Hear! Hear! That’s the spirit!

Just to add a few points: 1) We must demand --- indeed make a hell of a fuss! – that YP HQ send to the branches local YP contact names and contact details. Operating a branch without contact names is like trying to operate a bus without fuel. With names, we could then try to win back the +700,000 people who have bolted from YP’s ranks since September. 2) Branches should put an emphasis on operating on a clear open and transparent basis; do not reproduce/ mimic at the local level the cliques and in-fighting that has plagued the YP top brass since early July; 3) Make sure your local branch is controlled by its members. How can a serious party allow what has happened this autumn in YP Norfolk? Another party is in control of its WhatsApp groups, its website, and all the contact details of its members. Total madness.

And finally: 4) YP needs to be both a vertical and horizontal organisation; for an excellent book on the subject, check out HERE. We need far more branch-to-branch cooperation. Perhaps, for example, YP Liverpool has written up a good constitution or rule book. Our branch in Norfolk needs to know about it and perhaps copy it. We all need to never walk alone.

2. Campaign, campaign, campaign.

YP is still predominantly a party of activists. And it is very far from being a mass working class party.

One thing above all else will change this: campaigning! As yet, YP does not have a full programme; that will come in time. But it does have a brief political statement; HERE is a copy of the second draft. At least for a little while, this political statement will provide branches with sufficient orientation to get started on campaigning. There will be lots of local issues as well to work on. And do share the lessons, positive and negative, that your branch learns from campaigning.

To be clear about one other thing: campaigning for a socialist party means far more than just campaigning for elections. Again, to win back the 700,000 people who have “gone missing”, we need to prove to them that we are true pro-socialist warriors in these turbulent times.

3. Choosing the best people to lead us.

Central Executive Committee elections will occur, on a regional basis, in early 2026. No ballot boxes; all by online voting.

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At its founding conference, YP members chose – by a narrow margin – to be lead and directed by an elected collective leadership and NOT by a single leader. It was a bold decision. Nominations for the sixteen elected posts on the central executive committee (CEC) open on 15 December and close on 2 January.

More about the CEC, which will have about 25 members in total, can be found HERE in the YP draft constitution as amended. (Memo to YP HQ: can you please post the final approved versions of ALL of the founding conference documents on the website? It will take someone less than an hour to do this simple editing task.)

Let’s go back again to another recent post I read, again in the Your Party Liverpool Facebook group, the other day. “The exec of 20 or whatever people will BE the Collective Leadership…they will be elected in February - which means we all have to find the very best people we can find to run a 55,000 strong organisation.” Exactly.

But who are very best people? What kinds of qualities should they have? Answering that question could be the subject of a 1500-word article and TLL will come back to it again in 2026.

Two qualities are paramount:

a) Good political judgement (and that is something which has too often been in short supply in the run up to the initial announcement about YP - from September 2024 to late July 2025- and over the past few months;

b) Unfettered loyalty to the cause of socialism and to Your Party. Some of us who have studied or participated in the various fail efforts over the past 20 years to build an alternative to the Labour Party think it would be a disaster if, say, ten or more of the sixteen elected positions on the CEC were taken by members of the sects. Slates from such groups are already prepared.

The rules of the CEC election contest have not yet been announced. The candidates will be selected on a regional, not England-wide, basis. (The leaders of YP Wales and YP Scotland parties, which have yet to have their own founding conferences, will also sit on the YP CEC. (Again, check the constitution for the full make-up.)

One issue of possible controversy lies ahead. Much against the wishes of MP Jeremy Corbyn and those who wrote the draft constitution, the YP conference voted in favour of dual membership. The relevant clause of the constitution states: “Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the Party’s values, to include those with whom the Party cooperates electorally. The approved list shall be subject to ongoing CEC review and annual ratification by National Conference.”

As the CEC has yet to be elected or to meet – and won’t get together until about 1 March – there is as yet no “approved list” of other national parties. This list might (or might not) include the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Socialist Party, TUSC, or Counterfire. The question will be: can members of other parties run as candidates in the first YP CEC elections? John Rees, a leading member of Counterfire, told TLL in an interview that his group was planning to field at least one candidate for the CEC. Watch this space.

4. And watch – like a hawk - what happens at YP HQ in coming weeks.

Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s top aide, is reported to be leaving Your Party in early 2026.

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In its first piece five days ago on the YP conference, TLL suggested that “the period before the YP CEC is elected at the end of February could be a particularly treacherous time.” This could be understating the matter.

There have been several developments of note in the past few days.

A) Karie Murphy, who ran Jeremy Corbyn’s office for several years while he was Leader of the Opposition, also has been the main controller in the background of this new party effort since at least Sept. 2024. But, “according to sources, Murphy plans to leave the project in the new year, once the party’s central executive committee is in place,” THE NEW STATESMAN reported a few days ago.

Murphy, the partner of ex-Unite chief Len McCluskey, was obviously aiming to become the first general secretary of Your Party. With Corbyn’s faction of YP receiving a serious setback at the recent conference – for example, he will not be the first leader of YP - her chances of being appointed to that post have been seriously diminished. Nor is it at all certain how the Corbyn faction – which includes Murphy, McClusky, Fitzpatrick and others – will respond to being kicked out of the YP driving seat.

B) TLL has learned this weekend that Murphy wants another former Corbyn aide to become YP’s first general secretary as she is now likely out of the running. That person is Amy Jackson. She is head of the Mayor’s Office for Mayor Lutfur Rahman of Tower Hamlets Council.

As it is the weekend, Jackson was not contactable to enquire if she is interested in applying for the YP post.

Some will wonder if being Rahman’s top political aide and administrator provides the best CV to take up the powerful YP post of general secretary. A January 2025 newspaper report says: “Toxic” was the standout word from a recent damning report into Tower Hamlets council and how it is run under independent mayor Lutfur Rahman. A secretive culture permeates a town hall where “many good managers” have quit as a result of “speaking truth to power”, was the thrust of a government ordered investigation. One councillor told the Standard that the atmosphere inside the local authority was “often dysfunctional and, at best, childish”. We are going to need convincing that Jackson (or someone with a similar profile) fits the bill.

C) Murphy has a history of appointing people to YP positions who are used to working for notably controlling political figures. Take Andrew Jordan. He headed up the Standing Orders Committee (SOC) at the YP Conference. SOC’s are supposed to “manage conferences” of behalf of attendees, not act as unchallengeable pawns of the secretive clique that has been running YP for some months.

Socialists who attended a lot more political conferences than I have told me they had never witnessed a more top-down and undemocratically operated conference than the YPs sessions in Liverpool. The conference was not sovereign, as the constitution required. Rather, the SOC was sovereign, they said.

For example, amendments that were voted on were not ranked according to their actual support among members. The Palestine/ trans one is an example. As points of order were banned, there was no opportunity to challenge the shocking expulsion of some YP members on the eve of the sessions and with zero democratic authority. (That move was an extraordinary own goal by the Corbyn faction.)

No surprise then that Andrew Jordan was picked to run the SOC. As this article notes, Jordan was president of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party for four years until 2015. (Jordan had joined at the age of 16.) The SLP is well known on the left as one of the most undemocratic sects around. Scargill headed the party for 28 years, that is, from 1996 when he founded it, until 2024 … and so Jordan served under him as president. The SLP now has 325 members.

D) The point of all this? Your Party needs a virtual cultural revolution in how it is operated at the top. New officials must be found. “Who you know-ism” must cease. The destructive political culture of secrecy, entitlement andd patronage must also end pronto. We also need an immediate accounting of ALL YP (and related) accounts.

And the YP biggies must cease briefing against each other. A week after the conference, I could hardly believe it when I read the consumer column in THE GUARDIAN yesterday ( 6 December) and the two sides were still slagging each other off over the question of membership portals and giving refunds. (The story is bannered across the top of page 46 in the print edition under the headline: “Your Party let me down with membership chaos.”)

5) Who can stop more of this chaos erupting among the YP tops before the CEC takes over in two and a half months? ONLY well-organised branches. See Point 1 above.

5. Rely on ourselves and get creative.

YP calls itself “a member-led party.” Over the next few months, all members must put their money where their mouth is and step up and take action and make this slogan mean something.

One of the huge weaknesses of what is popularly known as “Corbynism” was its over-veneration of Corbyn himself and great weaknesses in the grassroots movement behind his name.

This must change in the next few months. Chat with your mates. Talk to your neighbours. Read how socialists in other countries are getting organised. Try experiments, take risks and get creative.

A personal plan for THE LEFT LANE: I’ve been a professional journalist in three countries, on and off, since 1967. Early in the new year, I plan to call an online Zoom session about how we could set up a lively and regular YP online publication in 2026 that would reach to tens of thousands of readers. Eat your heart out SOCIALIST WORKER! (LOL!)

So what’s your own plan for 2026?

A final word: The future of Your Party is far from clear. In six months or twelve months, we will have to decide its future, individually and collectively, with BOTH our heads and our hearts.

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CHECK THIS OUT

A date for your diary: Can we top Robinson’s 150,000 marchers of a few months back?

Become a co-signatory of the “ TOGETHER ALLIANCE” statement HERE

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Speaking of the far right:

“A Campaign of Cruelty: Farage’s Attack on Glasgow’s Children”

Here is the link to a piece in LEFT UNGAGGED, a publication from Scotland that is new to TLL. (See HERE)

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A Zoom session to check out on 8 December

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Neither Corbyn Nor Sultana: It’s Their Party

A Byline Times article and podcast ( HERE) with Jed Thomas and Alan Story

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 105 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social