The Machine Is the Finding: What a year on Your Party’s executive actually looked like

....from two of the people who were on it

Sep 07, 2026

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TL;DR: Your Party gathered 800,000 signups in the summer of 2025, reported 55,000 members in December, and had its holding company struck off on 21 April 2026. It has never published a set of minutes. On 3 July three members of its executive were sent letters barring them from a meeting due two days later. On 6 July the committee learned it had been kept in the dark about personal liability. On 12 July fourteen of twenty-four members carried votes of no confidence in the chair, the secretary and the membership officer, and the three stayed in post. On 20 July the official meeting collapsed inquorate. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi resigned on 14 August, disclosing that party email addresses were by then being offered on condition of signing non-disclosure agreements and that an autumn conference was being planned at which they expected collective leadership to be abolished. Thirteen days later two of them described the year in public. Nothing in their account is a story about 800,000 people failing to become a party. All of it is a story about a leadership preventing them.

Eight hundred thousand people gave Your Party an email address in the summer of 2025. By December the party reported 55,000 members. On 6 June 2026, roughly 150 people travelled to Sheffield for the Connections convention, and eighty of them were still in the room for the final vote. Your Party UK Ltd, company number 16619803, was dissolved on 21 April 2026 having filed neither accounts nor a confirmation statement in the nine months of its existence.

Those four figures are the balance sheet. The argument about what they mean is the subject of Part Seven. This part is about the record, because the record has never been set out in one place, and because two of the three people who resigned from the executive in August have now described it themselves.

A year without minutes

Your Party refused to establish branches for a year. It restricted access to members’ contact information. Its founding conference voted 69 per cent for dual membership, and the Central Executive Committee buried that vote through administrative stalling, drafting election rules that barred dual membership until the CEC approved a list of acceptable organisations. No list was ever published. Candidates were disqualified. Proto-branches went unrecognised. In February 2026 The Many took fourteen of twenty-four CEC seats against the Grassroots Left’s seven, swept all eight officer positions on 8 March, and appointed Jeremy Corbyn parliamentary leader at the first meeting. No official minutes have been published since that day.

What members got instead were the chair’s own summaries. Votes went unrecorded despite repeated requests that they be recorded, and when the minority members began sending their regions their own accounts of what had happened in meetings, they were threatened with disciplinary action for breaching confidentiality. CEC members had no means of communicating with one another, or with the members of the regions they had been elected to represent.

The month the machine ran into the law

Then the machine ran into the law. On 3 July, three CEC members were sent letters suspending them from a meeting due on 5 July. On 6 July the committee learned it had been kept in the dark about a serious risk that its members, and possibly ordinary members, might carry personal liability for an organisation whose legal vehicle had been struck off in April. Seven CEC members who had voted with the majority all year, three of them officers, joined seven others at a special meeting on 12 July and carried votes of no confidence in the chair, the secretary and the membership officer. Three officers and one other member resigned during July. The three who had lost the confidence vote stayed, issuing statements denying that the meeting had been legitimate. The official meeting of 20 July collapsed inquorate. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi resigned on 14 August, disclosing on the way out that CEC members had by then been offered party email addresses on condition of signing non-negotiable non-disclosure agreements, and that the agendas of the postponed and inquorate meetings carried plans for a second national conference in the autumn at which they expected collective leadership to be abolished. Within seconds of the resignation email being sent, Wimborne-Idrissi was removed from the WhatsApp groups of the region she had represented an hour earlier. The person who removed her was the membership officer, Cassi Bellingham, in whom the CEC had passed a vote of no confidence on 12 July.

The people who had been told they were building a members’ party found they had been underwriting somebody else’s risk.

None of that is a failure of breadth. Every item on the list is a decision by a leadership to prevent the membership becoming an organisation. The 800,000 were not a mood that evaporated. They were a layer that was deliberately not given branches, not given a members’ list, not given the right to belong to anything else, and then blamed for dispersing.

The three put it in their own words on the way out. This is not a superficial tit-for-tat battle between factions or clashing personalities, they wrote, but a rift between bureaucrats whose priority is running a parliamentary party with loyal, unquestioning foot-soldiers at local level, and class-conscious activists striving to build a movement which empowers the grassroots through democratic, transparent, accountable campaigning institutions.

What it looked like from inside the CEC

Thirteen days later, on the evening of Thursday 27 August 2026, Wilson and Wimborne-Idrissi described that year to a public online meeting hosted by Republic Your Party (RYP), a grouping inside the party that came out of the Republican Labour Education Forum. Thanks go to it for allowing Red Mole to share the recording and cite from it. Ahmed was billed and did not appear. Both speakers are still YP members, both were on the losing side, and the meeting was called by a faction. All of that should be said before anything else. What is striking is that neither of them gave a procedural account of what had happened to them.

Wilson served four or five months. She listed the sequence as she experienced it: standing orders first, then extra-constitutional business including the parliamentary leader, then the code of conduct, and then what she called the real issue, the creation of the officers group. She thought a parliamentary leader was probably sensible and said so at the time. She also thought it was unconstitutional. In the first meeting each agenda item was allotted ten or fifteen minutes and each speaker a minute, there was no structure of for and against, and votes were not recorded. She and others kept asking members of the majority to say why they were voting as they were, and could not get an answer. She proposed that the committee meet more often and for longer, on the grounds that this was serious work. The pushback was that long meetings are not inclusive, because members have childcare. She has childcare.

She was clear that this was not a matter of bureaucratic style. The party had been thrown into questions it never debated, sortition among them, and the differences underneath them were political: what democracy means inside a party and outside it, how multi-tendency the party should be, what relationship it should have with community independents and councillors. Organisational urgency was the standing reason not to have those arguments. Underneath the urgency, she said, was fear of a mass membership organisation that would debate these questions and might reach different conclusions from the people currently running the party.

Wimborne-Idrissi described the same machine from another seat. All eight officers were elected by the controlling slate at the second meeting with no input from anybody else. She proposed that each officer share the role with one or two other CEC members, to spread the load and force the reasoning into the open. It was rejected outright. Policies arrived fully drafted. The decision that there would be no dual membership, and the decision about which left groups were too toxic to be given any role, were taken with no discussion at all.

Then she stated the difference, reading it off her own notes because she wanted it exact. Were they building a party based on a grassroots movement engaged in struggle on all fronts to resist the effects of capitalist decline, or a party whose main task is to secure the election of members to local councils and parliament, with branches as foot soldiers to get the vote out. The second conception won. Its holders deny holding it. It explains everything else.

Two speakers at the Anticapitalistas summer university had drawn that distinction in the Spanish state a year earlier, and Part Seven of this series takes up what they said. It matters that it was reached here independently, from inside, by somebody with no interest in the vocabulary.

The numbers deserve their own paragraph, because they change what the balance sheet at the top of this article can be claimed to show. CEC members had no access to membership data. A figure of seventy thousand had been publicly used by the membership officer shortly before the meeting, and Wimborne-Idrissi’s position was that the committee had no way of knowing whether it was true, because no report detailing the source of the data was ever put to it. A member from a branch spanning eleven constituencies said that at his inaugural meeting, he was told the branch had more than 860 members, and that the ballot that followed listed about 300 eligible voters. Branch launches carry a twenty per cent quorum and votes have been extended because the quorum was not reached. Wimborne-Idrissi chaired a launch that drew twenty-five or thirty people in an area that had been turning out fifty, sixty and seventy a few months earlier. So there is a fifth figure in the balance sheet, and it is that none of the first four is auditable by anyone who might be held liable for them. That includes the 55,000.

The branch rollout is the clearest single instance of what this article is about. Launches were announced haphazardly, and in Wimborne-Idrissi’s nearest branch the most active people in the area did not know that a launch meeting had been called for them. She learned of it because a list appeared and she was asked whether she was free to chair one. More than one CEC member had told members that the delay in branches was the fault of the membership, for having voted at the founding conference for collective leadership. The branches that do arrive have no bank account and no control over their own membership lists. Wilson has not been invited to one. Sheffield was not on the list.

The relation between the membership and the leader came up at that meeting in a form nobody had to theorise. Wimborne-Idrissi said that thousands of members are content with top-down control, and that the leader’s iconic status makes many of them reluctant to take any critical stance at all. A member then asked from the floor whether somebody who knows Jeremy Corbyn could go and knock on his door and tell him this was not good enough, because he is the only person everybody respects. Two speakers answered her, one that Corbyn is the last person to appeal to, the other that putting your hope in a single leader is what the Labour Party had just done again. Much of the response beneath the resignation statement itself ran the same way in reverse: the three were saboteurs and wreckers, and should leave quietly so that the rest could get on with electing MPs. A plebiscitary relation to a leader is not a theoretical category. It is a thing people say in comment threads.

Part Six takes the same year from the outside: what the party did with its name in the places where it used one, and what the public registers show about who was carrying the risk.

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