Reflections following the Your Party CEC meeting held online on Sunday March 22

This is supplementary to the chair’s brief report emailed to members on Monday March 23 and a much more detailed document posted online by other CEC members the following day. I contributed to the latter.

I have taken some time before deciding to publish these reflections because I realise many people resent the proliferation of different accounts and sincerely want to see the CEC working together in a unified fashion for a party we can all be proud of. This was definitely my hope during the CEC election when I stood on a platform of transparency, accountability and member-led democracy.

As one of the two members’ representatives elected in South East Region, I looked forward to playing an active role, alongside the other 23 CEC members from all over the country, in facilitating the growth of YP as a grassroots-based movement/party.  I eagerly anticipated being given the tools to communicate with the thousands of members and supporters in my region who originally signed up for Your Party in July 2025, in order to help them build active campaigning branches in their communities.

I expected to be invited to one or more in-person meetings where CEC members would get to know one another, brainstorm ideas, set up working groups to engage the range of talent and experience from across the membership in new ways of organisation-building, collective decision making and policy development.

None of this is happening. Since the CEC election results were announced on February 26, there have been three, tightly controlled meetings with a combined duration of less than six hours. Decisions taken have limited the autonomy of CEC members, restricted their ability to communicate with the wider membership and even denied them the ability to talk to each other.  

I wasn’t part of any slate during the election, although I was endorsed by Grassroots Left. I’m finding it an enriching experience working with the seven CEC members elected on that slate, plus Scottish rep Niall Christie, another independent. They have proved to be intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable and laser-focused on representing the interests of grassroots members. This has been the motivation behind the many proposals we have attempted to put to the CEC meetings to date. We have done our best to raise questions and open up discussion about how to maximise the party’s chances of intervening productively in elections in May, and – the big question for most members -  how to activate and empower local branches.

Although members elected us to nine of the 24 seats on the CEC, not one of us has been given any role in the officers’ group. The majority who stood on The Many slate have used their 14 votes as a bloc to dominate all seven officers’ positions, to make Jeremy Parliamentary Leader and to add him ex-officio to the officers’ group which works with staff who have no relationship with other CEC members.  At the March 22 meeting, the bloc voted to exclude any of us from two new roles supporting the membership officer on branch development work and from a three-person panel to hear complaints that might arise from the local election candidate selection process.

This is the background against which I want to highlight a few points from my experience of the March 22 meeting not explained in the chair’s report. Apologies for going into so much detail but I believe members have the right to an accurate record of CEC proceedings.

1.      A Confidential request

During opening remarks by the chair Jenn Forbes, I raised my hand to draw her attention to an email sent on March 18 to everyone on the CEC by a group of YP members requesting an independent investigation into allegations of breaches of party rules. It would not be appropriate for me to mention here the contents of their letter which was correctly flagged CONFIDENTIAL. I had already corresponded with the chair about this so she would have been aware I wanted to raise it. Her response in the meeting, as in her exchange of emails with me, was to denounce the author of the letter for writing to CEC members using their personal email addresses and to say that her priority was to find out how this had been possible. She reprimanded me for failing to raise the matter as a formal point of order and then said that it could not be entertained in any case because the confidential letter contained “hearsay” and “unsubstantiated allegations”. I attempted to ask how members were supposed to raise serious concerns which only the CEC could address if they were not permitted to contact CEC members. The chair said she was “not going to entertain that subject any further in this forum.” She said there were complaints procedures and everything would be dealt with properly.  However, her own report emailed to members on Monday March 23 said a “detailed complaints and disciplinary process” would be brought back to a future meeting for approval. There is currently no complaints process in place.

2.      Correcting the minutes

Draft minutes for the previous CEC meeting on March 8 were circulated to members at 9.12 pm on March 21, to be approved at the meeting starting at 15.00 the following day. As with other amendments or options, we were given until 13.00 to submit amendments. None of them were  circulated to CEC members ahead of the meeting. I submitted two corrections concerning matters I had raised at the March 8 meeting.

Finance

I had asked a question about £500,000+ held by MOU Ltd not being accepted by YP despite the dire need for funds to help build branches. Vice-chair Laura Smith had raised a point of order, saying there was a conflict of interest because Zarah Sultana (director of MOU limited) was in the room and the discussion should not take place.

This was incorrectly minuted:

           Some members were concerned about a potential conflict of interest regarding money held by MOU Ltd, Laura Smith raised a point of order that financial matters should go to the Officers’ Group and the meeting should move to the next item.

I proposed correcting the minute to say:

           During a discussion about financial matters, questions were raised about money held by MOU which were available for transfer to YP. Laura Smith raised a point of order about a potential conflict of interest and moved that the matter should go to the Officers’ Group.

Laura Smith raised the same point of order about conflict of interest again, even though at that point in the March 22 meeting Zarah was not present. The chair ignored CEC members pointing this out, citing unspecified “other issues” as a reason for again preventing discussion in the full CEC.

Officers’ roles and responsibilities

In the interests of trying to build a collaborative, collective leadership, I had proposed at the March 8 meeting that, instead of electing one Parliamentary leader, YP MPs should work together collectively.  This was misrepresented in the minutes as “No Parliamentary Leader.” My proposal for putting the record straight was rejected.

3.      No room for questions from members

On Thursday March 19, soon after learning that there was to be a CEC meeting on Sunday March 22, I wrote to the chair and secretary saying members in South East region had asked me to ensure that a number of questions they regarded as urgent would appear on the agenda. I got an email response signed “Your Party” saying that I could submit a motion or proposal, with a seconder, and the chair and secretary would decide whether it would appear or not. Why, I asked in reply, could concerns from members not be included as agenda items for open discussion? Why did they have to presented in a form which required voting for or against? Nonetheless I re-wrote my members’ questions and submitted them as formal motions. Neither of them appeared on the agenda. Here they are for the record.

Providing communication between members (and CEC members)

Rationale: 

Members are hampered in their efforts to build local branches by their inability to contact others in their area - both paid up members and many others who expressed interest in the party in the past.

The party holds email addresses or other contact details which could be used to inform the greatest possible number of people about meetings, events, campaigns and activities organised by YP members in their area.

Failure to do this is causing frustration at the grassroots, contributing to the loss of members and potential members, in many cases to the Greens.

CEC members are also hampered in their role of contributing to the construction of a collaborative, collective leadership by the absence of a means of communication between themselves.

The CEC therefore resolves

a) to provide YP members with a central point to send information about local initiatives for prompt circulation to all members and supporters in the relevant area.

b) to provide a functioning portal on the national website where members can post information for it to be accessible to others in their area.

c) to provide groups of active YP members with access to contact details of fellow members in their area who are willing to be contacted.

d) to provide a channel for CEC members to talk to one another via Whatsapp or similar.

Moved: Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

Seconded: Solma Ahmed

2. Finance and staffing

Rationale:

Members are very concerned about the lack of transparency regarding the party's financial position and its staffing arrangements. An effective secretariat which has the confidence and trust of the members is vital to the healthy functioning of the party. It is the obligation of any organisation, in particular a democratic socialist party, to provide clear accounts of its income and expenditure, of which staffing costs form an important part.

The CEC therefore resolves:

a) to provide a financial audit of the party's position to date and a business plan for the coming yea.r

b) to provide information about how money allocated to staffing costs has been apportioned to date - What payments have been made, to whom and for what roles.

c) to explain how new staff are to be recruited and their roles assigned in the financial year starting April 2026.

Moved: Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

Seconded: Megan Clarke

Although the motions were not explicitly discussed, some of the points raised did crop up at various points during the meeting. As I understand it:

- There is no capacity for YP HQ to circulate information about local initiatives;

- Work is in progress on a portal on the national website for uploading local information

- Members are not going to get access to contact information for others in their area any time soon

- CEC members will not be given a channel for contacting one other.

- no detailed finance audit is forthcoming, nor information about money allocated to staffing costs

- no explanation is available about staff recruitment and roles.

Conclusions

It is deeply frustrating to have been elected to a body which denies me the opportunity to work as part of a collective leadership doing what thousands of members voted for – building YP as a grassroots-based movement/party.

Instead of openness and accountability, we have the same anonymous secretariat as before the elections, now working with a closed bloc of officers exploiting their hold on 60 percent of CEC seats to exclude the other 40 percent from any meaningful role.

I’ve heard this justified on the grounds that if I’d been on the “winning side”, I would have behaved in the same way. This is simply not true. If Grassroots Left had won a majority and advocated excluding any non-GL comrades from significant roles, I would have argued strongly against it, and from what I now know of the elected GL CEC members, I believe they would have concurred.

Things could have been done very differently.

We could have a Code of Conduct designed to open the operations of the CEC to party members’ scrutiny, instead of one which focuses on punitive measures to rein in the independence of elected CEC members.

We could have a central leadership structure which embraces a diversity of views and perspectives, seeking out ways of drawing on the creativity and energy of the wider membership, instead of the tightly knit, impenetrable group currently in charge.  

Nationwide, we could embrace existing structures that dedicated activists have built for themselves, or are trying to build. We could be working together to overcome practical obstacles in order to give local branches the resources to operate effectively in their communities, in social movements and in election campaigns. Instead we have top-down processes requiring members to fulfil criteria decided at the centre, favouring groups and individuals approved by the group currently in control.  

This unhealthy situation is stifling the growth of grassroots democracy. It is driving members away just at a time when global crises are crying out for socialist solutions.

It is not too late to put it right. The leadership could still demonstrate the will and ability to turn the party into one that can unite around fundamental principles and build genuinely democratic structures. Only then will we be in position to restore trust by putting authority where it belongs in a mass party of the working class  – at the grassroots.