How Team Corybn Forced Out Your Party Scotland

Postscript: It’s only an “Missed Opportunity” if you surrender

The CEC’s treatment of Your Party Scotland meets every test for constructive dismissal. The question now is whether the Scottish left acts on its verdict before the momentum dissipates. A postscript discusses the mistaken choice of SWP members to voluntarily resign from YP, rather than take the opportunity to refound an democratic socialist party.

Employment lawyers have a concept for what happens when a boss doesn’t sack you but makes your working life so intolerable that leaving becomes the only rational option. They call it constructive dismissal. The employer commits a fundamental breach of the relationship: slashing pay without consent, permitting harassment to flourish unchecked, changing the terms of the job unilaterally and then daring you to object. The employee resigns. In law, the employer fired them. The fig leaf of the resignation changes nothing.

Three conditions determine whether a constructive dismissal claim succeeds. There must be a fundamental breach: not mere unpleasantness, but a violation serious enough to destroy the basis of the relationship. There must be a resignation in direct response to that breach, not months later for unrelated reasons. And crucially, the employee must not affirm the breach by staying silent so long that the courts conclude they accepted the new situation. The legal term for that last trap is the doctrine of affirmation. Wait too long after the breach, and your claim expires.

On 12 April 2026, the CEC of Your Party passed a dual membership policy that explicitly targets the organised revolutionary left. SWP members were expelled the same day, just before a national meeting of Your Party Scotland members. An Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC) representative received confirmation of his expulsion just before the meeting he was facilitating had begun. The Scotland representative to the CEC, Niall Christie, whose full report is now public, reported that an amendment which had actually passed was ruled void by the officers group because they disliked the outcome. When he raised points of order to counter this undemocratic trick, he was told he was harassing the chair and would be disciplined if he continued. This is not a party that made a procedural error. This is a party that overturned its own democratic result and threatened the person who noticed.

Christie’s report details further. A proposal on Scottish autonomy, submitted in line with standing orders, was rejected by the CEC Operations Team, acting on behalf of the party chair, before the meeting. When Christie asked, multiple times, whether at least the final point on Scottish autonomy could be voted on, no response was received. An entire agenda item on devolved nations was simply skipped. Questions about membership loss in Scotland, submitted ahead of and during the meeting, went unanswered on both occasions. Meanwhile, the CEC majority repeatedly claimed that Your Party Scotland remains in a “developmental stage” and that no votes taken there are therefore binding. This is the constitutional theory that does the real work: not just ignoring Dundee, but retroactively denying that any binding decisions were ever made there at all. To make the power grab concrete, the CEC has announced that a working group on Scottish development will shortly be sortitioned into existence, with no constitutional basis, bypassing both ISEC and the Scotland CEC representative simultaneously.

Red Mole has been tracking this pattern since the Liverpool conference. The emergency ballot sent to Scottish members with days’ notice to override the Holyrood candidacy decision. The stonewalling of ISEC’s requests from 18 February onwards. The pattern is not one of mistakes accumulating. It is a strategy.

The ISEC has a longer and more damning account. From 18 February onwards, every request was stonewalled. Emails ignored. Proposals rejected before meetings. A Holyrood election strategy document was provided late, under instructions not to share it, and then used as cover for the claim that ISEC hadn’t responded in time. A rerun vote was sent to Scottish members, without ISEC’s knowledge, to override a decision taken at the Dundee founding conference. The Electoral Commission deadline was missed. Every single mandate from Dundee: blocked. ISEC has announced it will resign collectively next week, not in defeat, but because the conditions for doing the job no longer exist.

This is the fundamental breach. It isn’t a series of mistakes. It isn’t bad communication or overstretched staff or the inevitable friction of a new party finding its feet. It is a deliberate, sustained pattern of conduct designed to make Scottish autonomous organisation impossible. The last straw, the dual membership decision, would count as sufficient cause by itself. The eight weeks before it count as evidence of systematic intent.

Here is what that record actually shows. The last year of Your Party Scotland’s existence has been consumed almost entirely by two tasks: maintaining organisational coherence under conditions of deliberate deprivation, and attempting to recover the basic infrastructure, the membership data and financial access, that any functioning party requires. Both tasks were imposed by the centre’s bad faith. Neither was chosen. The membership never got to discover what a properly resourced YP Scotland could do, because the resources were always withheld. The real work, elaborating a programme for Scotland, building Scotland-wide political campaigns around that programme, developing the electoral presence the Dundee conference voted to pursue, is still almost entirely ahead. That is the argument for urgency, not the argument for despair.

The parallels with employment law are instructive not because political parties have HR departments but because the logic is identical. The CEC is hoping that the Scottish membership will accept the new situation through inertia: stay in the proto-branches, continue paying their dues as Your Party members, allow the Holyrood moment to pass without a formal break, and eventually find themselves in a position where the breach has been so long affirmed that no clean exit is possible. The affirmation trap works for the bureaucrats in two ways. First, the proto-branches have attracted free-thinking activists: exactly the people the leadership doesn’t want. Second, if Scotland isn’t proactive, people will stop joining branches to replace the majority who have already stepped back. The entropy becomes unstoppable.

Which is why the argument being made in the Scottish meeting’s breakout rooms, for example by some SWP and SPS members, that the Scottish left should focus the next month on the Holyrood elections and only then reconstitute, needs to be heard carefully rather than accepted. There is merit in the idea that a founding conference should follow a period of demonstrated independent organising rather than precede it. However: we will lose members, momentum and clarity every day that we do not announce that conference. An organisation that has not formally confirmed its destination cannot recruit to its purpose. Who will join a proto-branch of Your Party Scotland knowing that the London party expelled members this week for belonging to the SWP, the Socialist Party, or the SSP? Who will put energy into a structure whose continued attachment to a hostile central apparatus is described as a temporary tactical position rather than a situation in the process of being resolved?

The affirmation trap is real. The longer Your Party Scotland proto-branches operate under the London banner without formally confirming the goal of independence, the more the CEC’s account of the situation, that the Scottish structures are simply unofficial troublemakers in a state of disobedience, will be the one that sticks publicly. The window for claiming that the management terminated the relationship is not infinite.

There is something else to say. The 178 people who showed up to tonight’s meeting represent an extraordinary political fact. At the moment of maximum pressure, when a central apparatus was expelling members and overturning votes in real time, the Scottish membership mobilised in larger numbers than at any previous online gathering. That is not the behaviour of a demoralised membership. No, actually, it is. It is the behaviour of a concerned membership, furious about bureaucratic obstruction. The distinction matters. The energy in that meeting was not the residual warmth of a dying project. It was the activation energy of something trying to become itself.

The founding conference should be announced as soon as possible by the proto-branches, with a date, an agenda, and an explicit invitation to every socialist organisation and individual currently excluded by the dual membership decision. The Holyrood period is the organising period: TUSC candidates supported, anti-Reform work continued, and the new formation built through practice rather than documents. But the goal must be stated. The resignation must be tendered. The management’s breach must be publicly named as such before the affirmation clock runs out.

It is worth noting, finally, that Christie’s report names the CEC members who voted consistently for Scotland: Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Zarah Sultana, Grace Lewis, Mel Mullings, Solma Ahmed, and Sophie Wilson. They lost. But that minority exists, and the political project Scotland is about to constitute will need working relationships with socialist currents across Britain. The work is not only here.

The material conditions that brought 178 people to a Zoom meeting on a Sunday evening in April are not going away. Reform is still coming. The cuts are still coming. The war is still going. The far right is still on the streets. The CEC did not create those conditions and cannot abolish them by expelling the people who want to organise against them. It simply handed Scottish socialists the clarity they needed about where the project could not be built, and inadvertently confirmed where it must be built instead.

The constructive dismissal claim is strong morally. Legally, of course, no one is suggesting that the Scottish organisation should sue for the 60,000 membership records and finances it deserves. But the working-class movement should know how badly the Scottish comrades have been treated: they should be given every aid possible in building something new and better.

Postscript: It’s only an “Missed Opportunity” if you surrender

A word needs to be said about a tendency visible in tonight’s breakout rooms, and likely to intensify in the days ahead. The SWP and Counterfire are both arguing, across Britain, that Your Party as a whole is over. This is not a Scotland-specific assessment. It is a strategic line being applied UK-wide: resign from Your Party, redirect energy toward the formations these organisations already control, principally SUTR and TUSC, and treat the entire YP project as a cautionary tale rather than an unfinished one.

In Scotland, some comrades are drawing the practical conclusion from this line: not only resigning YP membership but withdrawing from proto-branches entirely. The first response, in the specific case of members who have been expelled by the CEC, is understandable. If the organisation has thrown you out, the formal membership card means little. But withdrawal from the proto-branches is a separate decision, and it is a mistake.

Withdrawal does the bureaucracy’s work for them. The CEC does not need to organise Scotland’s dissolution; it only needs Scotland to organise it on the CEC’s behalf. Every experienced activist who walks out of a proto-branch citing “missed opportunity” leaves behind a room of newer members without the political confidence to constitute something themselves. The branch attrition figures from tonight’s meeting, Aberdeen down from fifty to twenty, Forth Valley from twenty to seven, are not primarily the result of expulsions. They are the result of demoralisation, and demoralisation is contagious.

The political argument underlying the SWP and Counterfire position deserves a direct answer rather than a polite sidestep. The claim is that YP is over, and that the only viable socialist projects are those in which these organisations already have an institutional stake. SUTR and TUSC are the obvious examples. Both are important united front formations and deserve support on their own terms. Neither is a substitute for what Your Party Scotland was attempting to build: a broad, democratic, electorally serious socialist party rooted in Scottish conditions. TUSC is not standing in Holyrood. SUTR is not a party. The vacancy that the Dundee founding conference was trying to fill is not filled by pointing to structures that existed before YP did. And in England, the same logic applies: the 60,000 people who signed up to Your Party did not do so because they wanted another TUSC campaign or another SUTR mobilisation. They wanted something different. Telling them it was always a mirage is not analysis. It is recruitment.

The opportunity is not missed. It is present, tonight, in the 178 people on that Scottish call alone, the overwhelming majority of whom are not SWP or Counterfire members and not attached to any existing socialist organisation. They joined Your Party because they wanted something that none of the existing structures provided. The SWP and Counterfire comrades who helped build proto-branches have earned real political credit with those members, and have real influence over what happens next. The question is whether that influence is used to say “it’s over, come to our paper sale” or whether it is used to stay in the room and help constitute something that can actually hold the people who are there.

The constructive dismissal framing applies here too. You don’t prove wrongful termination by resigning before the verdict is delivered.

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