Your Party's resignations: The liability question nobody will answer
Appendix: Who is liable for Your Party? A briefing from the public registers
The statement surfaced this morning and it took a moment to register what was actually in it. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi resigning from Your Party’s Central Executive Committee: that much anyone who watched July could have predicted. Buried on the second page, written in the flat register of a governance memo, was something else entirely. On 6 July, they write, they learned that CEC members ‘and possibly grassroots members, might face onerous personal liabilities as a result of unresolved governance issues’. Chair Jenn Forbes had referred to this in her July report to members as ‘serious items around liability, insurance, indemnity and data protection’.
By mid-afternoon a socialist who had stood for the CEC in January had been removed from Your Party’s South East regional WhatsApp group. His offence was suggesting that members read the resignation letter and judge for themselves whether it described the party accurately. Wimborne-Idrissi was cut from the official groups the same day. A document alleging bureaucratic closure was answered by bureaucratic closure, in public, within hours of publication.
Set the sequence out and the trajectory is not in dispute. The Many slate took fourteen of twenty-four seats in the February elections. The officers’ group was settled on 8 March. No official minutes have been published since. On 3 July three CEC members were suspended from a meeting due two days later, for attending a Socialist Federation event. On 12 July a quorate special meeting, convened after the chair and secretary declined to call one, voted no confidence in Forbes, in secretary Dawn Aspinall and in membership officer Cassi Bellingham. Corbyn refused to recognise it, on the grounds that he had not been present. Councillor Sam Gorst went on the nineteenth. Three more have gone today.
No minutes. No recorded votes. No answer on liability.
That last one is not a procedural complaint, and the left should stop treating it as one. Your Party registered with the Electoral Commission on 30 September 2025 with Marion Roberts as treasurer. A registered party’s treasurer carries statutory duties under PPERA, and a party that is an unincorporated association has no separate legal personality at all, which means its contracts, its employment obligations, its data-protection exposure and its debts rest on identifiable human beings. Which human beings, exactly, is precisely what the CEC says it was not permitted to find out. In the Spotlight Socialist Network chat on the day the letter landed, one member asked whether they should be worried and another answered that they should be worried ten thousand per cent; a third said he had thought the same thing on reading it but had no idea how to establish the facts. Fifty-five thousand people joined this party. Not one of them can currently discover whether they are personally on the hook for anything, and the body elected to represent them was threatened with discipline for asking.
The obvious reading is that this is a Corbyn problem: the leader who could not let go, surrounded by people protecting him from his own membership. But that is not quite right either. Corbyn’s personal conduct explains the tone of the thing, not its architecture. What the resigners describe is a party built as an apparatus for parliamentary representation, onto which a membership was bolted afterwards as a source of subscriptions and canvassers. Their own formulation is sharper than anything the Trotskyist left has managed this year: the rift, they write, is ‘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’. Three CEC representatives with no prior relationship to our tradition arrived at the Fourth International’s argument about broad parties by walking into it.
Chris Saltmarsh’s autopsy in Prometheus, published the day before the resignations, conveniently divides the British socialist left into a bureaucratic wing rooted in Labour and the unions, a doctrinal wing of the Marxist organisations, and a movementist wing of issue-based activism, and concludes that each must put its own house in order before unity is attempted again. There is real analytical work in the piece and it deserves engagement rather than dismissal. The categories will not hold, though. The doctrinal bucket collapses the SWP, whose method has been control and recruitment for four decades and which nobody in the movement now trusts on either count, together with organisations that formed specifically to escape that method. ACR exists because Socialist Resistance concluded that ‘orthodox democratic centralism’, the unhappy practice far removed from Marx’s dream for comunist organisation, produced bureacratic practice, wasted cadre and a poor record of supporting women and Black and disabled comrades. Filing it alongside the SWP tells you something about the filing system, not about ACR.
A Scottish comrade ran a control-F over the article looking for Scotland, for Scottish, for Dundee, for ISEC, for the name of the party’s most conspicuous Scottish casualty. Nothing. Not one instance. Your Party’s treatment of its Scottish membership was among the clearest demonstrations of the bureaucratic method available anywhere in its short life, and an autopsy of the British left that cannot see north of Carlisle is an autopsy of the English left with the label changed. As per, as per.
There is a further difficulty with holding up any current formation as the model of democratic culture. Comrades who tried to join Ecosocialist Horizon report a two-stage interview process, a period of silence during which the leadership was assembled and the priorities decided, and a self-description as small by design. One of them joked that it was harder to get into than the Illuminati. That may be a perfectly defensible way to build a cadre nucleus. It is not a platform from which to instruct the rest of the left about openness.
What the schema misses altogether is the mass movement. Two years of Palestine mobilisations on a scale Britain has not seen since 2003, and the schema has no term for the hundreds of thousands who marched. Class struggle appears nowhere as a category of analysis. Sort the three lefts into whatever boxes you like: the question of which of them can relate to that layer, and on what terms, is the only question that decides anything, and it is not a question about organisational culture at all.
So what should the left be doing in the next six weeks, before Your Party’s autumn conference does or does not scrap collective leadership? The answer is not another statement of principle. It is finding out who is liable, publishing the answer, and putting it in front of fifty-five thousand people who are entitled to know. The Electoral Commission register, Companies House and the ICO register are all public. Any organisation with a competent researcher and a fortnight could establish Your Party’s actual legal form, who the responsible officers are and what exposure attaches to whom, and doing so would be worth more to the membership than every think-piece written about the crisis combined. Alongside that: publication of all minutes and recorded votes since 8 March, an elected conference arrangements committee with a delegate basis and proper notice, external handling of the misconduct complaints, and no non-disclosure agreements attached to a party email address. Demands that ordinary members can move at branch level, in rooms where the argument is still live.
Whether the Socialist Federation’s September conference amounts to anything is a separate question and an honestly open one. ACR’s July conference declined to settle affiliation before seeing who turns up and what the balance of forces is, which was the right call and remains the right call, though the longer it holds the more it starts to look like waiting rather than judgement. The Greens under Polanski will be administering cuts in Lambeth and Manchester within the year. Neither is the vehicle. Neither is close to being the vehicle, and pretending otherwise now would repeat the error we have spent the summer diagnosing in other people. Or something close to that error, anyway. The analogy does not quite hold and this paragraph should probably not end here.
The resigners write that they will hold the strands of the movement together ‘until new opportunities arise’. Opportunities do not arise. Left Unity did not arise, Respect did not arise, the Socialist Alliance did not arise, and none of them survived contact with the question of who controls the money, the staff and the disciplinary machinery. Your Party did not fail because the wrong people won an election in February. It failed because nobody insisted, in the summer of 2025, that those questions be settled in front of the membership before a single MP put their name to anything. That argument was available. Some of us made it. It was not made loudly enough, and the honest thing to say today is that we do not yet know where it gets made next.
Appendix: Who is liable for Your Party? A briefing from the public registers
Prepared 14 August 2026. Sources are public records. This is not legal advice.
Why this matters
The resignation statement issued on 14 August 2026 by Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi records that on 6 July they learned CEC members, ‘and possibly grassroots members, might face onerous personal liabilities as a result of unresolved governance issues’, referred to in Jenn Forbes’s July report as ‘serious items around liability, insurance, indemnity and data protection’.
Members have no way of finding out what this means from inside the party. Most of it can be established from Companies House, the Electoral Commission register and the ICO register, all of which are public. What follows is what those registers actually show.
Established from the public record
Your Party UK Ltd, company number 16619803, no longer exists.
It was incorporated on 31 July 2025 as a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, SIC code 94920, activities of political organisations, registered at The Atrium, 89-93 Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, London N4 3JH.
Its directors on incorporation were Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Ayoub Khan, Shockat Adam Patel and Iqbal Mohamed, with Adnan Hussain as company secretary. Mohamed resigned with effect from 20 November 2025.
An application to strike the company off the register, form DS01, was filed on 27 January 2026. The first Gazette notice followed on 3 February 2026 and the company was dissolved on 21 April 2026.
It never filed accounts and never filed a confirmation statement. There is therefore no public record of what assets, income or liabilities the company held during the nine months it existed.
The party confirmed the change on the record. On 27 January 2026 a Your Party spokesperson told City AM that the strike-off was ‘a planned step in our democratic founding process’ and that the party would become ‘an unincorporated association governed in line with our democratic, member-approved constitution, regulated by the Electoral Commission’.
A second company remains active. MoU Operations Ltd, company number 16359847, is a private company limited by guarantee, SIC code 94920, incorporated on 2 April 2025 and registered at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. Its original directors were Jamie Driscoll, Andrew Feinstein and Dr Bethan Winter, appointed 2 April 2025. Feinstein and Winter resigned on 25 October 2025 and Driscoll on 28 October 2025. Zarah Sultana was appointed on 28 October 2025 and is now its sole director. Its accounting period ends 30 April 2026 and its first accounts are due on 2 January 2027.
Electoral Commission registration. Your Party was registered as a political party on 30 September 2025. Secondary sources give the registered treasurer as Marion Roberts, the registered leader as Jeremy Corbyn and the nominating officer as Adnan Hussain, later Andrew Jordan. These names must be checked against the register itself before publication; see the verification list below.
What the unincorporated form means in law
The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are also unincorporated associations, so the form itself is unremarkable. The exposure comes from what surrounds it.
An unincorporated association has no separate legal personality. It cannot own property, enter a contract, employ anyone or be sued in its own name. Everything it appears to do is in law done by identifiable individuals, normally the members of its management committee. In Your Party’s case that committee is the CEC.
The practical consequences follow from that single fact.
Contracts and debts. Office leases, supplier agreements, venue bookings and any borrowing are entered into by individuals. Those individuals, and often those who authorised them, are personally liable, potentially jointly and severally, and the liability is not capped by the association’s funds.
Employment. Staff are employed by individuals, not by the association. Claims for unfair dismissal, discrimination, unpaid wages or constructive dismissal are brought against those individuals. The resignation statement refers to complaints of serious misconduct including by senior party staff. Where employment claims arise in an unincorporated association, committee members can find themselves respondents in their own names.
Employers’ liability insurance is compulsory under the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 for any organisation employing staff. Members are entitled to know that a policy is in force and who is named on it.
Assets. An unincorporated association’s property must be held on trust by named trustees or a custodian body. Without a trust deed, the ownership of subscriptions, donations and equipment is legally unclear, and the individuals in whose names accounts are held may be treated as holding them personally.
Data protection. The controller of personal data cannot be the association, because the association is not a legal person. The controller will be an individual or a set of joint controllers. Your Party holds the personal data of a membership reported at 55,000 in December 2025. Joint controllers can be individually liable for enforcement action and for compensation claims by data subjects. The ICO’s register of fee payers should show who has registered and paid the data protection fee.
Bona vacantia. This is the sharpest unanswered question. When a company is dissolved, any property it still holds passes to the Crown as bona vacantia under section 1012 of the Companies Act 2006. Your Party UK Ltd was dissolved on 21 April 2026 having filed no accounts. Members who paid subscriptions or made donations between 31 July 2025 and that date are entitled to know which entity received their money, whether any of it was still held by the company at dissolution, and if so what has been done to recover it.
Statutory exposure under PPERA
The registered treasurer of a registered party carries personal statutory duties under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.
Section 47 of PPERA provides that where a statement of accounts, notification or auditor’s report is not delivered to the Commission before the end of the relevant period, the person who was treasurer of the party immediately before the end of that period is guilty of an offence, subject to a defence of reasonable excuse. The liability is the treasurer’s personally, not the party’s.
Electoral Commission guidance sets the filing deadlines. A party with gross income or total expenditure of £250,000 or less files within four months of the end of its financial year. A party above that threshold must file audited accounts within six months and seven days. Accounting units with income or expenditure above £25,000 have their own reporting obligations. Changes to registered officers must be notified within fourteen days.
A party reporting 55,000 members in December 2025 is very likely to have crossed the £250,000 threshold, which would put it in the audited category. Its financial year end is not something I have been able to establish; if it is 31 December, audited accounts would have fallen due in the first week of July 2026. The liability question surfacing on the CEC on 6 July is consistent with an accounts deadline, but that is a hypothesis and should be presented as one, not as a finding.
The chronology worth putting in front of members
The strike-off application was filed on 27 January 2026. CEC nominations and elections ran from 5 to 23 February 2026. The officers’ group was formed on 8 March. The company was dissolved on 21 April. The CEC learned of the personal liability exposure on 6 July, and by 14 August seven of its members had resigned or been forced out.
The CEC elected in February inherited a party whose limited liability vehicle was already in the process of being dissolved. Whether the candidates knew that when they stood is a question the party should answer.
Questions the party should be asked
Does the constitution contain an indemnity for CEC members and for ordinary members, and if so what does it cover and what funds stand behind it?
Who are the trustees or custodians holding the party’s assets, and into which entity’s bank account are membership subscriptions paid?
Which entity received members’ money between 31 July 2025 and 21 April 2026, did any assets remain in Your Party UK Ltd at dissolution, and if so has a bona vacantia recovery been made?
Are officers’ liability insurance and employers’ liability insurance in force, who is the named insured, and what are the limits?
Who is the registered data controller for the membership database, and is the party or an individual on the ICO register of fee payers?
What is the party’s financial year end, when are its audited accounts due to the Electoral Commission, and have they been filed?
What is MoU Operations Ltd’s present relationship to the party, given that a sitting MP is its sole director and its first accounts are not due until January 2027?
Sources
Companies House, YOUR PARTY UK LTD, company 16619803: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16619803
Companies House, MOU OPERATIONS LTD, company 16359847: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16359847
City AM, ‘Exclusive: Corbyn and Sultana’s Your Party UK Ltd to be deleted’, 27 January 2026: https://www.cityam.com/exclusive-corbyn-and-sultanas-your-party-uk-ltd-to-be-deleted/
Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, section 47: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/41/section/47
Electoral Commission, ‘Introduction to being a party treasurer’: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdf_file/intro-party-treasurer-rp.pdf
Electoral Commission, ‘How to maintain your registered political party’: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/full-guidance/how-maintain-your-registered-political-party
ICO, register of fee payers: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/what-we-do/register-of-fee-payers/