The Fait Accompli: How Your Party’s Leadership Manufactured a Scottish Crisis

What to do before Friday

TL;DR: Your Party’s central leadership has not simply failed Scotland. It has systematically dismantled the democratic structures Scottish members built, through procedural maneuver rather than open confrontation, culminating in a ballot so cynically timed it can change nothing. The Grassroots Left minority on the CEC documented everything. The question now is what Scottish members do with that record. A postscript outlines the first step of the Interim Scottish Executive Committee appointed by the Scottish conference: a letter for members in Scotland to send objecting to the ballot. 

On the evening of 24 March, members of Your Party Scotland received an email from Jenn Forbes, the party’s Chair. The subject line read: “VOTE: Scotland Update – Elections, Organisation, and Next Steps.” It invited Scottish members to cast an indicative ballot on whether to stand candidates in the May Holyrood elections, or focus instead on the 2027 local elections. The ballot closes Friday 27 March. The statutory deadline for candidate submission is April 1. The next full CEC meeting, the body that would need to act on any result, is April 10.

Work through the arithmetic. It does not take long. A “yes” vote closes Friday. There is no mechanism to select, vet, or nominate candidates over a weekend. The CEC cannot act for another eleven days after nominations close. This is not a consultation. It is, in the language of bureaucratic maneuver, a fait accompli. The decision has already been made. The ballot is the alibi.

This matters. Not only because it is contemptuous toward the members it purports to consult; but because it is the endpoint of a pattern that has been building since Your Party Scotland’s founding conference in Dundee, and which the 22 March CEC meeting brought into sharp relief.

What actually happened at the CEC

The Grassroots Left minority on Your Party’s Central Executive Committee has published a detailed collaborative report of the 22 March meeting. Read it. It is not a polemic; it is a document of record, specific enough to be checked and precise enough to be damning.

Several things stand out. The Grassroots Left submitted six motions in advance: on anti-racism in action, fair staffing processes, inclusive engagement with underrepresented communities, branch formation, member communications, and finance. Not one made the agenda. The reasons given were “capacity and governance.” Only papers produced by the Officers’ Group were heard. Amendments proposed by Grassroots Left CEC members were described during the meeting as “time wasting.”

Speaking time was rationed in ways that speak for themselves. The Welsh CEC representative was afforded over ten minutes to present her paper. Niall Christie, the Scottish CEC representative, was given less than two minutes. He had asked to lead the discussion on Scotland; the Chair took the floor instead. When Christie outlined the pattern of disrespect toward Scottish structures and the Interim Scottish Executive Committee, the Chair disagreed.

Multiple points of order were raised and dismissed. Members were cut off mid-contribution. Accessibility requests, including the elementary step of displaying amendments on screen, were refused in the interests of time. A vote proceeded on the Code of Conduct while related amendments were outstanding.

None of this is, on its own, extraordinary. Meetings run badly. Chairs make poor procedural decisions. What makes this pattern extraordinary is its consistency and its direction: every deviation from good democratic practice cuts the same way, against the Grassroots Left minority and against the national structures of Scotland and Wales.

The sortition trick

The most consequential procedural maneuver at the 22 March meeting concerned Scotland directly. A paper on Wales came forward, proposed by the Welsh CEC rep and passed by the majority. When Christie attempted to amend it to reflect Scotland’s distinct situation, including the founding conference vote in Dundee toward organisational independence, the amendment was rejected.

Instead, an amendment from the floor was accepted by the Chair. No matter that amendments were formally closed. No matter that this amendment had not been circulated in advance. It passed. Its effect: to establish “Working Parties,” appointed by sortition, to determine the structures of Your Party in Scotland.

Christie raised three points of order against this, each dismissed. The first was procedural: the floor amendment arrived long after the deadline the Chair had otherwise enforced. The second was constitutional: Your Party UK’s constitution contains no provision for working parties of this kind, and the party has no federal structure. The third was democratic: the paper as amended directly contradicts decisions taken at the founding conference of Your Party Scotland.

The Chair dismissed all three. The paper passed 13-7.

Let us be precise about what sortition means in this context. Random selection of party members to determine Scottish structures does not merely disregard the Dundee conference decisions. It actively liquidates them. Democratic bodies, built through member participation, conference mandates, and elected committees, are superseded by randomly selected individuals who have not been party to any of the preceding debate. The organisational gains of the Scottish membership are to be reviewed by people with no connection to the process that produced them.

The proto-branch question

Threading through all of this is the question of proto-branches. The majority position, confirmed explicitly at the CEC: proto-branches are not branches, have no organisational standing, and will not be recognised as such. The founding documents of Your Party Scotland, the structures of the Interim Scottish Executive Committee, the Dundee conference itself: all of these are products of proto-branch organisation.

By refusing to recognise proto-branches, the CEC majority does not merely deny them formal standing. It retroactively delegitimates the organisational work of the past several months. The founding conference was built by people who do not, in the CEC’s current assessment, constitute recognised party structures. The ISEC was constituted from bodies that the CEC does not recognise. The vote to move toward organisational independence was taken by an assembly the CEC regards as essentially informal.

And yet those same members are to be balloted, with 72 hours’ notice and an effectively expired deadline, on the most consequential decision facing the party in Scotland. Their informal gatherings do not count. Their votes do.

The Code of Conduct as instrument

The Code of Conduct passed at the 22 March meeting deserves a moment’s attention. Its key provision, for present purposes: CEC members may not publicly disclose details of meetings until the Chair’s report has been published, within 48 hours. Breaches may result in action “internal or external to its own procedures.” The obligation of confidentiality “continues during and after a member’s term on the CEC.”

The Grassroots Left CEC members ignored this provision and published their collaborative report immediately. They were right to do so. Transparency in a democratic organisation is not a privilege granted by the executive; it is a precondition of accountability. The attempt to establish a 48-hour information embargo, with investigation powers concentrated in the Officers’ Group, is precisely the kind of procedural control that majorities reach for when they cannot win the argument.

Christie’s report on Scotland was distributed to Scottish members through the ISEC. Members across Scotland now know what happened at the CEC. They know the ballot is structurally meaningless. They know their CEC rep was given less time to speak about their nation than the Welsh rep had for Wales. They know the sortition amendment was taken from the floor in defiance of the Chair’s own procedural rules. The Code of Conduct did not prevent any of this becoming public. It was never going to.

What this reveals

The Many won the CEC elections 14-7-3. They have a majority. On most internal questions, they can simply vote the Grassroots Left down. They have done exactly that, on issue after issue, throughout the brief life of the CEC.

The question this raises is not whether the majority is acting in bad faith. Political majorities act in their own interests. The question is what kind of organisation this creates. A CEC that dismisses amendments as time wasting, allocates speaking time by factional alignment, and uses floor amendments to override conference decisions is not building a democratic socialist party. It is replicating, in miniature, every bad habit of the bureaucratic formations it claims to have superseded.

The trajectory is recognisable: a genuinely popular initial mobilisation, a leadership that consolidates control by treating the grassroots as a resource to be managed rather than a constituency to be answered to, procedural devices that formally respect democratic norms while substantively hollowing them out. The rank-and-file saw it coming in Podemos. They saw it in the Scottish Socialist Party. The question is whether Your Party Scotland’s active membership, which has built something real in a short time, recognises the pattern early enough to act on it.

The ISEC meets Sunday

The Interim Scottish Executive Committee meets on 29 March to discuss next steps. Regional meetings are already taking place across Scotland’s eight parliamentary regions. The membership receiving the Forbes ballot email this week is not a passive audience; it is a membership that voted in Dundee, that built proto-branches, that sent delegates to a founding conference. Those structures exist regardless of whether the CEC chooses to recognise them.

What Scottish members do now will define whether the Dundee conference was a beginning or a high-water mark. The ballot can be treated for what it is: a maneuver without organisational teeth. The ISEC’s legitimacy does not derive from CEC recognition; it derives from the members who elected it. The same is true of the conference decisions.

A fait accompli only works if the people it is done to accept the fait.

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Postscript: What to do before Friday

The ISEC has produced a template letter for Scottish members who wish to register their position with the party Chair. It is reproduced below. The address is j.forbes@yourparty.uk, with conference@yourparty.scot on copy.

Dear Jenn,

I am writing in response to your emails dated 23rd and 24th March which discuss a number of matters relating to Your Party Scotland, and which I have serious concerns about.

Firstly, I will not be participating in the vote on “the election focus for Your Party Scotland” as I do not believe this to be a legitimate or good faith consultation of members. Members voted overwhelmingly to stand candidates in select regions of Scotland on the 8th February and since then, the Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC) have made multiple requests to Your Party HQ and the CEC to initiate a process for standing candidates, all of which were ignored until it is now too late to reasonably stand candidates. The vote you launched, which Scotland’s CEC representative Niall Christie has confirmed he was not consulted on, is nonsensical and illegitimate. It is difficult to see this as anything other than a transparent attempt to overturn the vote held at the Dundee conference and I will not participate in it. The options to either stand candidates or focus efforts on building towards the 2027 local elections fail to acknowledge that standing candidates is in and of itself an act of building towards the 2027 elections; and it is clear that should Option A pass, there is no realistic way that a fully democratic and participatory selection process could take place to ensure the result could be carried out before the Electoral Commission’s deadline to submit candidate nominations. As no such process has been set out, it is impossible for any member to make an informed vote.

This being the case, I will not be participating in this vote and I will not consider any outcome of it to be democratic or legitimate.

I wish to raise further concern regarding the establishment of “working parties” to facilitate strategies in Scotland; I believe this directly undermines the ISEC which we voted to ratify as the interim decision-making body in Scotland at our conference in Dundee. Our conference in Dundee also mandated the creation of an election organising group in Scotland which has not taken place due to the intransigence of the UK party. To fail to facilitate democratic elections to these bodies and to then attempt to impose such a body on Scotland without our consent is completely unacceptable and shows a deep disdain for Scotland’s right to democracy.

Finally, I wish to note that I find it entirely unacceptable that the ISEC and other bodies in Scotland are yet to receive access to the member data of myself and fellow members, or their share of my membership contributions.

By overriding democratic decisions made by members in Scotland, undermining the bodies we selected to represent us, and refusing to cooperate with simple requests from these bodies, all creates a clear impression that the CEC, a body of 22 members of whom only one is from Scotland, does not care about, or seek to represent the views of, members such as myself from Scotland. I joined Your Party to build a member-led socialist party that would do politics differently. Your actions towards Scotland directly undermine this principle.

Yours, [NAME]

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