Vote Grassroots Left, But Trust the Ground: Bureaucracy, By-Elections & the Polarization Trap in Your Party

Don't Let the Internal War Make You Stupid

On 26 February, voters in Gorton and Denton will face a three-way fight that crystallises everything broken about left politics in Britain today.

Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, a Manchester councillor parachuted in after the NEC blocked Andy Burnham from standing, represents a government haemorrhaging support across Greater Manchester. Burnham himself has admitted Labour “never” supported his mayoral campaigns; Starmer’s apparatus blocked him because his candidacy threatened to become a leadership challenge platform. The party that won this seat with a 13,000 majority in 2024 is now scrambling to hold it with a candidate most voters have never heard of.

Reform’s Matt Goodwin, the GB News presenter and former academic who once wrote a book criticising the English Defence League before pivoting to the radical right, represents something worse: the fascist-adjacent right testing whether it can break through in a constituency where 28% of the population is Muslim. Goodwin has suggested that British-born people from ethnic minorities are not truly British. Hope Not Hate has branded him an “opportunist extremist.” Tommy Robinson endorsed him within days of his selection. Reform’s response? “He isn’t welcome in the party.” Goodwin has not returned the endorsement, but he hasn’t distanced himself from it either.

And Hannah Spencer, a plumber and Trafford councillor standing for the Greens, has promised to be “laser focused” on ending British complicity in Israel’s genocide. The Muslim Vote has endorsed her. Salma Yaqoob, a YP member and former Respect leader, appeared at the Green campaign launch. The constituency’s Muslim communities, facing a candidate who questions their right to call themselves British, know what the stakes are.

This is exactly the kind of contest where the left needs clarity. Instead, Your Party’s internal war has turned a tactical question into a political litmus test.

The party’s first Central Executive Committee election is underway. Two slates dominate: “The Many,” backed by Corbyn and organised by his allies in the party apparatus; and Grassroots Left, a coalition of socialist organisations and rank-and-file activists backed by Zarah Sultana. The outcome will determine whether YP becomes a bureaucratic vehicle for one man’s political network or a genuinely democratic formation capable of challenging both Labour and Reform.

Red Mole’s position is simple. Vote Grassroots Left. But on Gorton and Denton, the GL statement gets it wrong, and the reasons why it gets it wrong illuminate a deeper problem that anyone serious about building a mass workers’ party needs to understand.

The Murphy Method

The case against Corbyn’s “The Many” slate begins with what happened behind closed doors. In January, Karie Murphy convened a Zoom meeting with independent CEC candidates to pressure them into withdrawing in favour of the Corbyn slate. The party staff team, which was supposed to remain “strictly neutral” under the Year One Organisational Strategy, actively tried to clear the field. This was not a persuasion exercise. It was an ultimatum.

Anyone familiar with the Unite scandal will recognise the method. Murphy, the former chief of staff to Corbyn and partner of Len McCluskey, learned her trade in the Unite apparatus: control appointment panels, exclude rivals, use left credentials as a political smokescreen to deflect accountability. Red Mole documented this mechanism in detail in “Breaking the Bureaucratic Chain.” The Unite interim report found that of 42 Executive Council officer appointment panels convened between 2018 and 2020, 37 were dominated by the United Left faction and their allies. The vast majority of successful candidates were members or recognised supporters of the faction. To step outside the faction was a career killer.

The same logic now operates in YP. Branches remain unrecognised months after the founding conference. Membership data is withheld from local organisers, making grassroots activity nearly impossible. Independent CEC candidates like Ian Drummond and Ruth Cashman of the AWL were temporarily suspended from standing before being reinstated; the message was clear enough: challenge the machine, and the machine will find a way to challenge you back. “The Many” slate launched with 1,000 at its online rally while independent voices were squeezed out through back-channel pressure. One activist described the experience of the Zoom call with Murphy succinctly: it was not a consultation, it was a clearance operation.

Tribune published its endorsement of the Corbyn slate with rhetoric about building a “mass party” and avoiding “purity tests,” as if demanding branch recognition and financial transparency constituted sectarian navel-gazing. The irony is exquisite. The very forces warning against “infighting and navel-gazing” are the ones who centralised control before democratic structures could consolidate, provoking the infighting they now deplore.

This is the “effective organisation” trap. We have seen it before. At Vistalegre in 2014, the Podemos leadership deployed identical arguments: the movement needed a “war machine” to challenge the regime; internal democracy was a luxury the left could not afford; pluralism was the enemy of effectiveness. Izquierda Anticapitalista, which had provided the legal registration, the initial infrastructure, and the activist cadre for the Podemos project, was systematically marginalised. The tragedy of Vistalegre was that the leadership used the energy of the Indignados to construct an apparatus designed to exclude the very forces that had generated it.

Murphy’s YP operation is not identical to the Iglesias machine. It lacks the media sophistication. It lacks the mass base. But the structural logic is the same: centralise control before democratic structures can consolidate, use the founder’s political authority to legitimate bureaucratic manoeuvre, and dismiss anyone who objects as a wrecker.

Why Grassroots Left Deserves Your Vote

The GL slate, for all its imperfections, represents the organised alternative. Its platform commits to immediate branch recognition and the handover of local membership data. It includes genuine trade unionists like Mel Mullings of the RMT. The socialist organisations within it, including Anticapitalist Resistance, the SWP, and the Socialist Party, have accepted the discipline of a coalition slate. That is itself a small achievement for the British far left, not exactly renowned for coalition discipline. Anyone who has sat through a nine o’clock meeting watching three different tendencies argue about the wording of a motion will appreciate the significance.

The founding conference victories on collective leadership and dual membership were won partly because GL forces organised to defend them. The conference was far from perfect: delegates selected by sortition, votes conducted online, motions manipulated by the standing orders committee, filibustering speakers eating into debate time. But the democratic principles that survived the founding conference survived because organised forces fought for them. A GL majority on the CEC would not transform YP into a revolutionary party. Nobody serious expects that. But it would crack open the bureaucratic carapace enough for the membership to breathe: branch recognition, data access, financial transparency, and the right of minorities to organise. These are not “purity tests.” They are the minimum conditions for a democratic organisation.

A caveat is necessary, and it applies from outside England. The CEC itself is a structurally inadequate body: 22 seats elected from England, one from Scotland, one from Wales. That is not a sustainable basis for anything other than a de facto English party. At least the Greens are honest enough to organise as a Green Party of England and Wales, with a separate and independent Scottish Green Party. YP’s pretension to be a British party while concentrating nearly all democratic power in English structures is a democratic deficit the GL has not adequately addressed. Scottish and Welsh members watching the Gorton debate from the outside can be forgiven for seeing it as an English factional squabble elevated to the status of party-wide strategy, when their political landscapes: the independence question, the distinct Green parties, the different relationship to Labour, bear almost no resemblance to the terrain being fought over in Manchester.

Vote for the GL slate. But not unconditionally.

But the GL Gets Gorton Wrong

Here is where it gets complicated.

The GL statement on the by-election declares that “Grassroots Left will not lend unconditional support to the Green Party candidate, because the Greens are a pro-capitalist, pro-NATO party and have been enforcing cuts in councils all over the country.” The statement insists that YP should have stood its own candidate.

Then, on 3 February, Sultana herself broke with this position. Her personal statement is worth quoting at length: “The unelected interim leadership of Your Party has still not formalised local branches or ensured members have access to their own data. This should have been resolved months ago, allowing local members to democratically select a Your Party candidate for the upcoming Gorton & Denton by-election.” And then the decisive passage: “The candidate list is now published and it is clear that Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and trade unionist, is the strongest challenger to Labour and Reform. I am, therefore, giving my personal critical support to her and the Green Party in this by-election, and I urge others to do the same.”

Personal critical support. The Marxist formulation. Sultana, the GL’s most prominent backer, has publicly repudiated the GL’s own position on Gorton, correctly identifying that defeating fascism must be the priority: “As a young Muslim woman, I understand viscerally what it would mean for the far-right to gain power in this country.”

This vindicates what Red Mole has been arguing. But the GL statement still stands, and the problems with it still need examining, because they illuminate a pattern that will recur in every tactical question YP faces.

There are three major problems and at least one question mark.

The first is that the GL transforms a tactical question into a political principle. Whether to stand in a by-election is a concrete assessment: do you have the candidate, the organisation, the implantation in the constituency, the resources? YP has none of these in Gorton and Denton. The party has announced it will not field candidates in the 2026 local elections. Branches remain unrecognised. There is no local infrastructure. Standing a candidate in these conditions would produce an embarrassing vote that damages the project more than abstention does. The activists on the ground know this. YP members in Manchester know this. Trust them.

The second problem is that the GL caricatures the Greens. Yes, the Greens implement cuts in councils. Yes, their programme remains within capitalist parameters. No serious revolutionary pretends otherwise. But describing them as simply “pro-capitalist, pro-Nato” flattens a party that currently holds the strongest parliamentary position on Palestine, whose candidate has centred her campaign on ending British complicity in genocide, and which is the only electoral vehicle in this constituency capable of defeating Reform. Salma Yaqoob, a YP member and former leader of Respect, appeared alongside Green leader Zack Polanski at the campaign launch in Gorton. The Muslim Vote has endorsed Spencer. Are Yaqoob and The Muslim Vote being suckered by a “pro-capitalist” formation? Or are they making a concrete tactical assessment about who can defeat Goodwin?

There is also the question of consistency. Many of the same forces now denouncing the Greens as insufficiently socialist enthusiastically built the Corbyn project inside Labour, a party with far deeper complicity in imperialism, austerity, and NATO than the Greens have ever had. Some of Polanski’s positions are now to the left of Corbyn’s were. Nobody demanded that Corbyn resolve every programmatic ambiguity on NATO or council cuts before they would campaign for him. We do not, and should not, vote tactically only or primarily on the basis of programme. We assess the concrete situation, the balance of forces, and the consequences of victory or defeat for the working class. In Gorton and Denton, those consequences are stark.

This is not a call for political support of the Green programme. It is a recognition that in a specific by-election, the concrete choice facing working-class voters, and particularly Muslim working-class voters facing a Robinson-endorsed candidate who has questioned whether British-born people from ethnic minorities are really British, is between Spencer and Goodwin. Revolutionaries should be able to say: vote Green to stop Reform, while maintaining every criticism of the Greens’ programme. The united front is not an endorsement. It is a method. This is not fundamentally different from what socialists have done in France, voting for far worse candidates to keep the far right out.

The third problem is that the GL continues Sultana’s own bad habit of distorting the Greens’ positions to sharpen the case for YP, as if the Greens were the main enemy rather than Labour or Reform. This is strategic bankruptcy. The Green Party is currently polling at 14-17% nationally under Zack Polanski’s “eco-populist” leadership. In Gorton and Denton, they are running a serious campaign with national resources behind it. YP and the Greens will need to negotiate local electoral pacts for the May 2026 council elections, where YP plans to endorse “community independents” and where vote-splitting could hand seats to Reform across Greater Manchester and beyond.

Burning bridges now, over a by-election YP cannot contest, is self-defeating. Worse, it is self-defeating for no strategic purpose whatsoever. Who benefits from a GL statement denouncing the Greens as “pro-capitalist” and “pro-NATO”? Not the workers in Gorton facing a Robinson-endorsed candidate. Not YP members trying to build local branches without data or resources. Not the Palestinian solidarity movement that has found its strongest parliamentary voice through Green MPs like Ellie Chowns. The only beneficiaries are those who mistake sectarian posturing for political principle.

The Polarisation Trap

This is the analytical core, and it matters beyond Gorton.

When a bureaucratic apparatus seizes control of a party, it not only damages internal democracy. It also distorts the opposition. The GL, forced into a permanent war footing against the Murphy machine, begins to define itself by opposition rather than by strategic clarity. Every question becomes a factional test. The leadership says don’t stand in Gorton? Then we must insist on standing. The leadership considers endorsing the Greens? Then we must denounce the Greens as pro-capitalist and pro-NATO. The leadership talks about building a broad coalition? Then we must emphasise programmatic purity.

This is how Vistalegre poisoned Podemos from both sides. The internal war consumed so much political energy that neither the Iglesias faction nor the Anticapitalistas could think clearly about the party’s actual relationship to social movements, municipal power, or the PSOE. The opposition became a mirror-image of the bureaucracy it opposed: reactive, tribal, incapable of independent tactical judgement. By the time the left in Podemos finally left in 2020 to form the Anticapitalistas, years of productive organising had been lost to internal trench warfare. Comrades from Anticapitalistas and Viento Sur have said that this experience haunts them: the knowledge that the bureaucratic fight, necessary as it was, consumed the political oxygen that should have gone to building power in workplaces and neighbourhoods.

The lesson from Spain is not that the opposition was wrong to organise against the Iglesias apparatus. It was right. The GL is right to organise against the Murphy apparatus. The lesson is that opposition must maintain its own strategic independence: its capacity to make tactical judgements on their merits, not simply as mirror-images of whatever the bureaucracy proposes. When the apparatus is wrong, say so. When the apparatus stumbles toward the right position, as it has in reportedly discussing a Green endorsement for Gorton, do not oppose it simply because it comes from the wrong people.

The Democratic Bloc, OFPP, the Platform for a Democratic Party, and Counterfire have all already withdrawn from Grassroots Left, the major YP coalition. Mish Rahman of the Democratic Bloc has joined the Greens outright. The AWL has announced a “reconnaissance” of the Green Party for potential entry work. These departures are symptoms of the same polarisation: activists who cannot tolerate the bureaucracy’s methods but also cannot find strategic space within an opposition defined primarily by that opposition. The GL must learn from this haemorrhage. The way to hold a coalition together is not to raise the factional temperature on every question, but to demonstrate strategic seriousness, the capacity to distinguish between the fights that matter and the fights that don’t.

Gorton and Denton is an election that doesn’t matter for YP internally. It matters enormously for the communities facing a Robinson-endorsed candidate in a constituency with a 28% Muslim population. The GL should have said: we have no candidate, we have no infrastructure, vote Green to stop Reform, and let’s get on with building the party so that next time we do have a candidate. Instead, it produced a statement that reads like a factional position paper dressed up as electoral strategy.

What to Do

Vote Grassroots Left in the CEC election, but do it with your eyes open. If the GL candidate in your region actively defends the Gorton statement, that tells you something about their political judgement. Ask them. Do they agree with Sultana’s call for critical support for Spencer, or do they stand by the characterisation of the Greens as simply “pro-capitalist, pro-Nato”? A candidate who cannot distinguish between programmatic criticism and tactical stupidity may not be the best person to navigate the complex decisions a CEC member will face. Where there are independent candidates with better political judgement than the GL slate nominee, consider them seriously.

The GL remains the organised vehicle for fighting for branch recognition, data access, financial transparency, and the right of minorities to organise. Those demands are non-negotiable. But supporting a slate does not mean switching off your critical faculties about individual candidates within it. That would be precisely the kind of bureaucratic loyalty the GL claims to oppose.

But on Gorton and Denton: follow Sultana’s lead, not the GL statement. Back Hannah Spencer against Matt Goodwin and Labour. Trust the activists on the ground. Trust Salma Yaqoob’s judgement. Trust The Muslim Vote’s assessment of what this constituency needs on 26 February. The Greens are a contradictory formation, as any reformist party operating within capitalist democracy must be. Giving critical support to their candidate in a specific by-election to defeat a Robinson-endorsed racist is not an endorsement of their programme. It is an elementary application of the united front method: march separately, strike together.

Sultana understood this. Her statement cuts through the factional noise with a clarity the GL statement lacks: “Defeating fascism must be our number one priority.” She is right. A victory for Goodwin in Gorton and Denton would embolden Reform across Greater Manchester ahead of the May council elections, the very elections where YP plans to endorse community independents and where it will need local electoral understandings with the Greens to avoid splitting the anti-Tory, anti-Reform vote.

Do not let the internal war make you stupid about the external one

Goodwin is campaigning on the doorsteps of Gorton and Denton, and the only people he’s photographing himself with are white men in a constituency where 44% identify as coming from a minority ethnic background. Spencer is pledging to end British complicity in genocide. This is not a difficult tactical call. It is only difficult if you have allowed the factional logic of an internal party election to colonise every political judgement you make.

The by-election will not determine the future of the British left. The CEC election might. Get the priorities right.