In my last article for Prometheus, I tried to explain the broad details of what has been happening in the secretive national process to create a new party of the left, and to explore some of the underlying dynamics contributing to the apparent dysfunction and delays. In this article, I have tried to expose the full tedious details of exactly what has been going on and of exactly which people within our ultra-secretive cliques of ‘leaders’ have been arguing for what. Some of this has already been reported by the talented Sienna Rodgers, but I intend this to be a more comprehensive account.

Editor’s Note (19/09/25): We have added a list of corrections to this report at the end of this article

These kinds of reports can risk being demoralising and demotivating. I don’t think anyone has felt inspired by the way this process has been conducted or by the glacial pace at which it has been progressing. Understanding in full detail the closed, anti-democratic and secretive processes by which this has been proceeding can make people feel hopeless and powerless – as if we are doomed to be passive bystanders with no way to influence this slowly unfolding car crash.

I am confident that we are not powerless and that we should not feel hopeless. The first step in solving any problem is to investigate it. Without understanding what is going on, what the existing structures are, who has been making decisions, and who wields power over the situation, it is difficult or impossible to usefully intervene or to hold anyone to account.

The bulk of this article is split into five sections. The first section explains the secretive organisations and committees through which decisions have been made so far about the new party and gives a rough history of the negotiations. The second section gives an overview of the individuals who have been key players in these negotiations. The third section attempts to unpack the personal, political and factional divisions that have been so stymying progress. The fourth section gives a quick summary of the legal situation and of who controls the data and the purse strings, and the fifth offers an overview of who has been pushing what in the next steps towards a founding conference. The essay then concludes on a more hopeful note about what the rest of us can do to start fixing this mess.

It may well be that some of my information is inaccurate or imprecise. Given the secrecy of the process so far, this is unfortunately inevitable. I welcome all corrections and clarifications, and I hope that my article can contribute to opening all of this up into a more public debate where our political disagreements can be worked through more openly.

The Committees

There seem to be a few different groups of key decision-makers as these negotiations have proceeded, who have been organised at different times over the past few years through a rather confusing series of different committees. In this section, I will try to give an overview of these different bodies and the way the negotiations have progressed over the past two years.

Collective 

This was originally the broad group containing the entire negotiations, including many of the prominent national figures, as well as representatives from a number of local ‘community independent’ groups and relevant national organisations. It was founded in 2024 by people with close personal links to Corbyn via his Peace and Justice Project and via the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (LOTO) 2016-19, and its current directors, Pamela Fitzpatrick and Karie Murphy, seem to have kept tight control of the group. 

The way it was run seemed to cause considerable discontent with others involved in the process, causing it eventually to be sidelined as the central hub of the new party negotiations. This eventually culminated in a row in July 2025, as detailed by Gabriel Pogrund in The Times, where a number of key figures were purged from Collective’s WhatsApp groups for supporting Zarah Sultana’s announcement that she would co-lead the founding of the new party. Collective now seems to be reduced in status to being a single faction within the wider process, which has since been proceeding through a series of more clandestine committees.

The Memorandum of Understanding group

This seemed to emerge originally from an attempt by some involved in Collective (I believe in particular Andrew Feinstein and Jamie Driscoll) to outmanoeuvre Karie Murphy, and to sidestep her control of Collective. This group was convened, on the basis of agreement with a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) document drafted by Driscoll (the exact contents of which are unknown to me, but I’m told it was basically a broad statement about the need for a new party). 

The Organising Committee

The MOU group seemed to have some initial success in sidestepping Collective’s and Karie Murphy’s domination of the process. However, Jeremy Corbyn, wanting a broad and inclusive process, insisted that Karie Murphy and other key figures from Collective not be excluded completely. In accordance with Corbyn’s wishes, a new ‘Organising Committee’ (OC) was convened, combining the MOU group with Karie Murphy and several other figures from Collective.

Since the end of 2024, this secret group, with no name or public profile, seems to have been the main centre of negotiations for the new party. It is not clear how many people are in this group, exactly who they are, or what its internal processes are supposed to be, but we know from Andrew Murray’s reporting in the Morning Star that there were at least 25 people attending its meetings, and that they have voted in favour of the proposal for Zarah Sultana & Jeremy Corbyn as co-leaders. Throughout the first half of 2025, this committee was the main centre of the negotiations for the new party.

The ‘Ops Team’

There was apparently a group of volunteers, with no voting rights, operating under the auspices of the OC, that is referred to internally as ‘the Ops Team’. This has mainly been younger activists with technical skills or practical organising experience, and they have been tasked with organising the technical and logistical preparations for the foundation of the party, and implementing the decisions of the OC.

The ‘Working Group’

I am told that since the joint announcement that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana would ‘co-lead the founding of a new party’, that the OC broke down completely, with the members from Collective resigning from the committee, and Corbyn himself declaring that he would have nothing more to do with it. 

It has apparently been superseded by a ‘working group’ consisting of Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, the four independent MPs, and their respective staffers, which is intending to take charge of the process. It is unclear how this was agreed or between whom, but I am told that the OC certainly did not vote in favour of this. I have heard some of Sultana’s supporters allege that this is, in effect, an attempt to sideline her, since the other four independent MPs already have a close relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, and tend to take their lead from him politically – almost guaranteeing that she will be stuck in a minority of one on the new committee.

This has apparently left the Ops Team in a strange kind of limbo, where they are still being relied upon for a lot of the critical technical and logistical work for the foundation of the new party, but it is unclear where they are supposed to be taking political direction from.

The Individuals

The Organising Committee

Some of the key individuals who I understand to have been part of the OC include:

• Jeremy Corbyn – Independent MP for Islington North, and former leader of the Labour Party. As discussed in my previous article, Corbyn has been the centre of the entire process, and as such has usually had effective veto power over it. He seems to favour a loose federal structure that is as broad and inclusive as possible.
• Zarah Sultana – Independent MP for Coventry South. She was apparently only brought into the negotiations at a very late stage when the co-leadership proposals were brought in, in the run-up to her resignation from the Labour Party (shortly before she was expected to be expelled) in 2025. She has been publicly clearer and more outspoken than others involved about her vision for the new party. She seems to be in favour of a unitary democratic structure similar to the Democratic Socialists of America, and to favour the new party taking uncompromising stances on issues like trans liberation.
• The other four independent MPs (Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed) – I get the impression that they have had a more limited involvement in the process until recently, and I am told they tend to take their lead from Corbyn rather than acting as an independent bloc. They are mainly just united on the issue of liberation for Palestine, but they seem to reflect an array of divergent and sometimes quite conservative views on other issues.
• Karie Murphy – Director of Collective, former chief of staff of LOTO under Corbyn 2016-19, with a background in the trade union Unite. Karie Murphy is a figure of some considerable controversy within the left, particularly for her role in LOTO, where she was accused by her subordinates of “bullying and intimidation” (including to the point of physical assault), and she has also been named in an interim report by Unite in connection to a possible corruption scandal in Unite, alongside her partner, Len McCluskey (Murphy denies both allegations). She seems to be strongly in favour of a centralised unitary party, with Corbyn as its singular leader, and reportedly is extremely hostile to the involvement of organised Marxist groups in the new party. I understand that she has been acting as a key adviser and representative for Corbyn in many of the negotiations.
• Pamela Fitzpatrick – Director of Collective, director of Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project, longtime member of Unite, and independent parliamentary candidate and former Labour councillor in Harrow West. She has been outspoken about the need for the new party to have a strong class basis, and to argue for nationalising the banks and other key economic sectors, and on the need for the new party to stand in solidarity with migrants and refugees.
• Andrew Feinstein – Investigative journalist, former African National Congress MP in South Africa, independent parliamentary candidate against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras in 2025, and chair of the Camden People’s Alliance. He seems to have been one of the key figures in proposing Zarah Sultana as co-leader. He has made some public comments about his vision for the new party and for the process of its founding, but they have tended to be quite vague.
• Jamie Driscoll – Former mayor of Newcastle, leader and founder of Majority. His background was in an activist group called Talk Socialism, but his more recent interventions have made him sound more like a liberal than a socialist, and he apparently opposes the new party taking a working class orientation.
• James Schneider – Communications Director for Progressive International, former staffer in Momentum, former Director of Strategic Communications in LOTO under Corbyn, author of Our Bloc: How We Win. My understanding is that he was initially on the new party ‘Ops Team’, then stepped back, but was later brought in to help mediate between Corbyn & Sultana after relations broke down. He has done more to communicate publicly his ideas about the new party than most involved.
• Joshua Virasami – Author of A World Without Racism: Building Antiracist Futures, head of organising and training at London Renters Union, and formerly an activist for a number of grassroots groups including London Black Revolutionaries, Black Dissidents and Black Lives Matter UK. Apparently, he was invited onto the committee to represent the tenants’ movement.
• Andrew Murray – Political editor of the Morning Star, former chief of staff in Unite, former Special Political Adviser in LOTO under Corbyn, former member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). He has done more to communicate publicly his ideas about the new party than most involved.
• Andrew Burgin – Founding member of Left Unity and former national secretary of Respect. More recently, he has been involved in building networks of independent councillors.
• Craig Lloyd – Zarah Sultana’s husband, and policy officer for the Fire Brigades Union. Reportedly, he has been acting as an important agent & strategist for Sultana, who does not have much of a team otherwise. Like Sultana, he was only brought into the OC relatively recently.
• Alan Gibbons – Leader of Liverpool Community Independents.
• Sean Halsall – Leader of Southport Community Independents.
• Lutfur Rahman – Mayor of Tower Hamlets and leader of Aspire.
• Amy Jackson – Former Unite political director under McCluskey, former political secretary to Corbyn, now chief of staff for Lutfur Rahman.
• Laura Alvarez – Jeremy Corbyn’s wife. She has apparently been a very strong voice in favour of Corbyn as the singular leader of the new party.
• Salma Yaqoob – Former leader of Respect.
• Beth Winter – Former Labour MP for Cynon Valley.
• Mark Serwotka – Former general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and former president of the Trades Union Congress (TUC)
• Leanne Mohamad – Independent candidate for parliament in Ilford North.
• Clare Farrell – Co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.
• Coll McCail – Staffer for Progressive International
• Marion Roberts – member of Jewish Voice for Labour’s executive committee.
• James Giles – Independent councillor in Kingston, former chief of staff for the Independent Alliance of MPs, former member of the Workers Party of Great Britain and former chief of staff to George Galloway.
• Faiza Shaheen (and her aide Mick Moore) – Independent parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Wood Green. She was apparently briefly part of the OC, before leaving (for reasons that are unknown to me).

The Ops Team

Some of the key individuals who I understand to have been part of the ‘Ops Team’ include:

• Joshua Virasami – As well as being a voting member of the OC (more details above), he has also acted as co-chair of the Ops Team.
• Neel Sengupta – Former staffer for Feinstein’s general election campaign, now a researcher at leftie tech co-op, Jarrow Insights.
• Andrew Dolan – Director of Movement Building for the New Economy Organisers Network, former staffer for Jon Trickett MP, former member of The World Transformed’s Steering Group, former political coordinator of Momentum (hired by the post-Lansman leadership in 2020). He has recently stepped down from the Ops Team.
• Artin Giles – Staffer for Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project, and national organiser for We Demand Change. Former chair of London Young Labour during the Corbyn years, and formerly a volunteer for The World Transformed. Only joined the Ops Team mid-way through 2025.
• James Giles – Also a voting member of the OC (more details above), but part of the Ops Team to advise on electoral law.

The Factions

The political and constitutional basis of the new party remains almost totally unclear. The only official statement so far is from Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s joint announcement, which contained some basic social democratic economic policies, as well as a statement of solidarity with Palestine. The substantive commitments mentioned are:

• A mass redistribution of wealth and power.
• Taxing the very richest in society.
• An NHS free of privatisation.
• Bringing energy, water, rail and mail into public ownership.
• Investing in a massive council-house building programme.
• Standing up to fossil fuel giants.
• Defending the right to protest for Palestine.
• An end to all arms sales to Israel.
• Campaigning for a free and independent Palestine.

Beyond that, everything seems completely up in the air. There is no mention of constitutional or democratic questions, of solidarity with oppressed groups like migrants, LGBT people, or disabled people, and no mention of foreign policy beyond Palestine. Some of the key questions which still seem to be in contention include:

• Whether to limit economic demands to mere social democratic reforms, or to argue for the overthrow of capitalism and the development of a fully socialist economic system.
• Whether to take strong stances in solidarity with migrants, refugees, trans people, and other marginalised groups, or to try to avoid so-called ‘culture war issues’ in an attempt to build a broader coalition.
• Whether to root the party in a Marxist conception of working class struggle, or to take a broader ‘populist’ approach.
• Whether the party should be involved in workplace and community organising, or whether it should be purely focused on electoral work.
• Whether the party should have a federal or a unitary structure, and what the party’s model of internal democracy should be.
• How these questions should be settled and what processes should be used for the party’s founding conference.

Because the negotiations have been so secretive, and because so few of the relevant figures have made detailed public statements about any of this, it is difficult to divine exactly what are the factional lines at play. The negotiations currently seem to have broken down into two hostile and increasingly irreconcilable camps, but it’s not clear that these are on the basis of clear or consistent divisions on any of the above substantive political questions. 

As far as I’ve been able to work out, the division is best understood in terms of personal affiliations and animosity, most particularly over the involvement of Karie Murphy, who has become an enormously controversial and divisive figure. My understanding is that both camps involve figures with quite significantly varying positions on most of the above issues.

To the extent that there is any substantive divide underlying the two camps, it seems to be a strategic one. I’m told that Karie Murphy’s camp is focused on trying to have a party machinery in place ready to contest the May 2026 local elections, and is working backwards from there – and is therefore less concerned about democratic niceties and wider questions about the structure and nature of the party. By contrast, the opposing faction is focused on trying to build a democratic party structure for the long term, even if that means the party’s machinery might not be ready in time for the local elections.

In order to make the substantive political divisions a bit more intelligible, I think the two factions can very loosely be subdivided into four broad groupings. The ‘pro-Murphy’ faction seems to consist of:

• Jeremy Corbyn and the four independent MPs – who want as broad a project as possible, and therefore tend towards arguing for a loose federation of ‘community independent groups’, with minimal structures, and a relatively minimal common platform that avoids potentially controversial issues in the interests of maintaining maximum unity. 
• Karie Murphy & her Collective/ex-LOTO/Unite allies (including, e.g. Pamela Fitzpatrick, Alan Gibbons, Amy Jackson, Sean Halsall) – they’ve not done much to spell out their specific positions and arguments publicly, but they seem to want a unitary national party, rather than a loose federation. Some of them (e.g. Pamela Fitzpatrick) have publicly argued for relatively strong positions on, e.g. class politics and nationalising the banks, but I’m not sure how representative this is. Reportedly, Murphy and Gibbons in particular are extremely hostile to organised Marxist groups having any role in the new party. 

The ‘anti-Murphy’ faction seems to consist of:

• Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll and allies (I think including e.g. Salma Yaqoob, Andrew Murray, Andrew Burgin, Beth Winter, Leanne Mohamad) – They’ve usually been very vague about what they’re arguing for and not particularly consistent. They started off arguing for a localist bottom-up approach, before shifting to the ‘co-leadership’ model, and now seem to be aligning behind Zarah Sultana, who seems to be arguing something quite different from their initial localist approach. I think their main consistent/unifying goal has been to avoid having a party that is controlled top-down by Karie Murphy and her allies. 
• Zarah Sultana – She only joined the negotiations very late (around Spring 2025), and apparently doesn’t have much of a team around her (besides her husband, Craig Lloyd of FBU). Apparently, a precondition of her involvement was that she should be co-leader and that Karie Murphy should be excluded from having a key role in the new party. The Feinstein/Driscoll faction seems to have swung behind her as a way of outmanoeuvring Karie Murphy. Sultana has been much clearer than any of the other groups in laying out her positions publicly, and seems to be in favour of something quite similar to Max Shanly’s arguments for a DSA-type model. She also seems to be taking a much clearer & stronger position than any of the others on the need for the new party to take clear & uncompromising stances on issues like trans liberation.

My understanding is that the relations between these groups have always been tense, but that relations collapsed when Zarah Sultana made her unilateral announcement that she would ‘co-lead the founding of a new party’. They were eventually patched up well enough for Corbyn and Sultana to issue a joint statement about the launch of ‘Your Party’ and the lead-up to a foundational conference, which would decide all the major questions about the party, including its name. I have been told that arguments in recent weeks over the process for planning the new conference have since led to the unified national process breaking down again.

It’s worth noting that, although some of them had some limited input into the national process in the early stages, for the most part, Britain’s organised Marxist groups have been completely excluded from the national process. Of particular note are the four largest groups:

• Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) – Formerly Socialist Appeal (the half of Militant which stayed in the Labour Party until 2024). One of their leading members, Fiona Lali, spoke at some of the early meetings of Collective – apparently having been invited via one of Pamela Fitzpatrick’s children, who is a member of RCP. They haven’t made much comment on how the new party should be structured, but have been arguing strongly for it to adopt an explicitly anti-capitalist revolutionary programme.
• Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) – The half of Militant which left Labour in 1991. Two of their leading members, Dave Nellist & Clive Heemskerk, attended some of the early Collective meetings on behalf of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). They want a federal party, with a structure similar to Labour or to TUSC, where affiliated socialist organisations and trade unions have guaranteed delegate positions in its leading bodies.
• The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) – They have made no formal comment yet, but seem to be cautiously supportive of the new party, while still emphasising the continued importance of the Labour left’s struggles within Labour. I don’t believe they have had any direct involvement in the national negotiations, but it’s likely they may have some indirect engagement via personal connections to figures like Andrew Murray.
• The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – They haven’t been very clear on the details, but have argued for the new party to be some kind of loose ‘umbrella’, united around a short action programme of key campaigning demands, including clear positions on migrants rights, LGBT rights, Palestinian liberation, and climate action, as well as ‘bread-and-butter’ class issues. They seem to have been more completely excluded from the negotiations than the other three groups, but do seem to have been quite purposeful in cultivating relationships with a few key figures like Andrew Feinstein. They have also made a big push for their members to get involved in founding prospective local branches of the new party.

The Legal Entities

When there are no significant existing structures and organisations involved, the only real sources of power, besides access to prominent individuals, are control of mailing lists and funding streams. Fortunately, these are slightly less opaque than the personal networks, because there are some legal regulations that mandate some degree of transparency.

There seem to be two key legal entities at play here: Peace and Justice Project Ltd and MoU Operations Ltd. According to the privacy policy of Your Party, MoU Operations Ltd seems to be responsible for dealing with donations, while Peace and Justice Project Ltd seems to be responsible for the mailing list. The privacy policy also states that once the new party is formally constituted, a new legal entity will take over responsibility for both.

Thanks to the Companies Act 2006, the details of both companies and the key figures with responsibility for them are publicly available on Companies House. The directors of Peace and Justice Project Ltd are Jeremy Corbyn and Pamela Fitzpatrick. The directors of MoU Operations Ltd are Jamie Driscoll, Andrew Feinstein, and Beth Winter. 

As such, it appears as if one faction controls the mailing list, while the opposing faction controls the money.

Less significantly, there is also Zarah Sultana Campaigns Limited, controlled by Zarah Sultana, which controls the smaller ‘Team Zarah’ mailing list, as well as Justice Collective Ltd, controlled by Pamela Fitzpatrick and Karie Murphy, which controls whatever resources Collective has marshalled.

The Conference

The basic format of a political conference is fairly well established. Depending on the size and structure of the organisation, it will either be open to all members, or local branches and other affiliated organisations will be asked to elect delegates to the conference. For a new organisation, this is rather less straightforward. 

The new party has no membership, it has no local branches, and it has no affiliated organisation. Worse, it has no programme or statement of principles as a basis for membership, and has no criteria for what should constitute a local branch, and no basis on which organisations can affiliate – there is not even agreement on whether or not external organisations should be able to affiliate. And there is no existing body or process trusted to plan the conference, determine its agenda, or oversee the event itself. And there is no agreed-upon process for coming up with an answer to any of these questions.

There are an array of local groups across the country styling themselves as prospective branches of the new party, but most of them are nascent and barely developed and none of them have access to the contact data of the thousands of people who will have signed up in their local area, so only a small section of those interested in the new party can be involved at this stage. Further, there’s no guarantee that all of these groups are meaningfully democratic internally (many of them are too new to have even discussed developing democratic structures), and in some areas, there are competing local groups, with no way of determining which is the legitimate one. 

Corbyn, Feinstein, and others have made some vague public comments indicating that they expect the founding conference to be based on delegates from local groups, but it is not easy to see how an effective, democratic, representative, or legitimate process could be run on this basis in their current state – especially given the time constraints and the widespread desire to establish the party as soon as possible. Particularly, it’s difficult to see how this could be done in a representative way before the May 2026 local elections (Corbyn has stated that he thinks the conference should take place in November 2025!).

The Ops Team’s proposal

Working within these rather considerable constraints, the Ops Team tried to put together a proposal. The idea was to maximise democratic participation, while minimising costs and avoiding having to make any potentially contentious political decisions about the process. The model they went with was apparently heavily inspired by how the Green Party of England and Wales’ conference already works, and is basically as follows:

1. A formal system for paid membership would be launched online.
2. There would be an open online process for any members to submit motions and amendments within certain predefined categories (e.g. constitution, programme, etc) and within certain legal requirements (e.g. complying with the regulations from the Electoral Commission, from the Equalities Act, etc), to comment on & debate the motions, and to second them.
3. There would be a shortlisting process, where the most popular (amongst members) motions in each category would go through to a final round.
4. There would be a so-called ‘hybrid-conference’ – in reality, an online voting process simultaneous with a large in-person rally.

I am told that the process has basically been ready to go for some weeks already – that pending approval on some final pieces of copywriting, a staffer from Corbyn’s office could put the membership system online at the touch of a button. The roadblock is that political authorisation for it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming any time soon.

Karie’s conference?

Zarah Sultana seems to be in favour of a process similar to that proposed by the Ops Team, but I’m told that Karie Murphy’s faction is strongly opposed to this online process and has been blocking it. The reasons why, or their preferred alternative, are not completely clear to me. This is obviously to be taken with a pinch of salt, but their opponents tell me that this is because this process puts all the emphasis on detailed written policy proposals, and that this would expose the vacuity of Murphy’s faction and their lack of such detailed proposals. 

What I’ve been told (again, by their opponents, so skepticism is certainly warranted) is that Murphy’s faction argue that since there are no existing party structures, there needs to be an interim transitional leadership going into the May 2026 local elections, and that Corbyn is the only person with the legitimacy to be such a leader, so should be interim leader for two years. Regarding the conference, the argument is that since there are no established party structures, the delegates to any conference would have to be local independent candidates and ‘prominent’ figures from various social movements and trade unions.

A ‘proposal for interim structure’ document has been circulated, apparently authored by Karie Murphy (although I am told Seumas Milne is rumoured to have contributed to it). The proposal would secure Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, and the four independent MPs as an interim political leadership, with Amy Jackson (a key ally of Murphy going back to LOTO and Unite) as the head of the executive team. The bulk of the names suggested are close allies or associates of Murphy, and of the 9 roles listed, four of them would be filled by former staffers from Corbyn’s office. Of the 11 names listed for the executive team, Joshua Virasami is the only one who stands out obviously as not being drawn exclusively from Murphy’s narrow personal and factional networks within the Labour left.

Murphy’s document has one rather conspicuous hole in it: 

“Political Strategy – what does ‘Your Party’ stand for? 
To Be Announced’

Outside alternatives?

There have been a few other proposals made by people outside the national process, but not many. Edmund Griffiths has argued in favour of an in-person conference with delegates chosen randomly via sortition. I have my own reservations about sortition, but Griffiths’ article is well argued. However, it is more of a general argument for the principle of sortition, rather than a specific proposal for exactly how the conference would be run in practice. Max Shanly has built on this to develop a more specific proposal. 

Shanly argues that the existing national leadership would have to appoint a publicly transparent Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC) of up to 15 people, who would be barred from standing for any elected leadership positions at the founding conference, and from placing their name in the sortition hat for the purposes of delegate selection. The CAC would then be responsible for running an online platform where everyone who registered to participate would be able to submit and discuss motions, amendments, and proposals – in an online process for short-listing motions, similar to that proposed by the Ops Team.

The CAC would then have to commission a trusted third-party organisation, such as the Sortition Foundation, to oversee the process of sortition in a transparent way. Once delegates are randomly selected, the conference should take place over a long weekend, starting with a Thursday evening meeting to agree the conference’s agenda, followed by three full days of conference business, deliberating on the party’s name, structure, principles, strategy and electing a leadership. The conference would also be streamed online.

Shanly’s proposal would also enable political campaigning groups built around particular proposals for the new party to be represented at the in-person conference (with speaking rights but not voting rights) to make the case to delegates for their proposals if they secured enough support on the online platform. He also argues for a series of online debates chaired by Corbyn or Sultana in the run-up to the conference.

Personally, I still have some reservations about Shanly’s proposals – there are various points where I fear the devil may be in the details, and I worry it neglects the importance of in-person deliberation across the movement (perhaps it could be supplemented by a series of regional conferences or assemblies similar to those proposed by Hallam and Assemble?). Nevertheless, the hybrid model he proposes seems detailed and serious, and goes some considerable way towards counterbalancing the problems of either a pure sortition or a purely online process.

Assemble’s assemblies?

The network of activists around Roger Hallam and groups like Just Stop Oil/Assemble/Youth Demand/Umbrella/Humanity Project/Extinction Rebellion have been more or less plugged in to the national negotiations for some time, with James Schneider apparently being a key liaison facilitating this relationship. 

From what I understand, they initially were just consulting on ideas around facilitating ‘citizens assembly’ meetings to help with the independent campaigns in the 2024 general election. These ideas are now being explored as something which could contribute to the foundation of the new party. Jan Baykara from Common Knowledge has posted some snippets of information about this on his blog, but apparently, there is a much more detailed plan in Hallam’s new, soon-to-be-published book.

Taking lessons from his experience with Extinction Rebellion and other social movements, Hallam has an ambitious plan for exponentially scaling the left at the local and national levels. Roughly speaking, the idea is to onboard sign-ups through a series of regional Zoom calls, training them in how to participate in and how to organise assemblies, as well as how to do door-knocking and community organising work. Central funds would be used to hire organisers to facilitate participatory in-person assemblies as starting points for local campaigns, as a way of bringing in more and more people and jump-starting local branches. 

These local groups would then host local assemblies to debate national issues, including questions around the structures and policies of the party. These local assemblies would inform larger regional assemblies, sourced by sortition from the national members’ list, eventually culminating in a national conference (again, sourced by sortition) to found the party. There would also be a role for a digital platform to facilitate wider debate and sortition-appointed panels to aggregate proposals from the regional assemblies in order to make the national conference’s agenda manageable. 

Reportedly, Hallam has already been field-testing his methods by knocking-doors in Brixton and in the Wirral, and has calculated that the new party could accrue three million subs-paying members by February if it follows his plan.

Hope Springs Eternal

The national situation may seem like a mess, but, despite this, activity at the grassroots is intensifying. In some parts of the country, prospective local branches of the new party have already been set up and are starting to organise. Elsewhere, more and more local meetings are being called every day – WhatsApp groups and mailing lists are being set up, and people are starting to take action.

At the national level, I’m aware of at least four caucuses of grassroots members organising towards the new party’s founding conference. Three of these are still being planned and are yet to be announced publicly – one focused on ensuring that the party is meaningfully democratic, one focused on transformative community organising, and one focused on solidarity with trans people. I’m sure that there are many more of which I am completely ignorant, and that others still will come together in the coming weeks and months.

Democratic Socialists is the first caucus to have declared itself publicly. The group, which I myself have joined, was initiated by activists from the younger generation of Corbynistas, such as Morgan Paulett and Kieran Glasssmith. They are fighting for the party to be openly anti-capitalist, to stand in solidarity with all oppressed groups, and to be meaningfully democratic – led by its members, rather than by councillors or MPs. Their full statement of principles is available online, and anyone who supports those goals can sign their open letter or register to join and help organise towards those goals.

Writers like Max Shanly and Edmund Griffiths have already had a significant impact on the progress of the national negotiations by being the first people to publicly make detailed proposals about the structure and processes for the new party. If caucuses like Democratic Socialists can successfully connect these kinds of detailed proposals with the activists setting up local groups across the country, there is an opportunity to exert real pressure on our ostensible national ‘leadership’. 

We need more substantive written contributions like these, as well as critiques of the existing processes and proposals. Certainly, Prometheus would be glad to publish these, and there is an array of other left media, such as the new Life of the Party podcast, that can host these debates. New Left Review’s Sidecar blog and Novara FM have done some good work on this, but we need more, and other established left media need to follow suit.

If the national process continues to be mired in delays, these networks formed through left media, national caucuses and local groups will ultimately reach the point where we can sidestep the dysfunctional national negotiations and run our own conference to found a party on a genuinely democratic and socialist basis.

There is a real opportunity ahead of us. Ordinary activists across the country have the chance to play a decisive role in building the democratic party that we so badly need. When we can maintain illusions of some secretive committee room where our rightful leadership will work everything out, it is easy to remain passive. It is only by understanding the limits of our purported saviours that we can understand that we must be the agents of our own salvation, and thus that we can begin to take action.

Corrections (19/09/25)

• I incorrectly asserted that the Working Group consisted of the six MPs and their staffers. The exact nature and composition of the Working Group is quite complicated and contested (as detailed above), but it did not include the MPs’ staffers.
• Although Pamela Fitzpatrick has been an important figure, through her directorships of Collective and of Peace and Justice Project, her involvement in Arise in Harrow, and her public interventions (e.g. in Novara Media), she was never formally a member of the OC. However, she did attend a critical OC meeting in July as a representative on behalf of Karie Murphy.
• Andrew Murray was not a member of the OC. However, it was apparently an open secret that someone within the OC was leaking information to him directly.
• Faiza Shaheen and Mick Moore attended some of the MOU/OC meetings, but they never joined the committee formally.
• Zarah’s husband, Craig Lloyd, was never formally a member of the OC, although he did attend one of their meetings and was afterwards added to their WhatsApp group.
• There was a discussion about the possibility of inviting Coll McCail, of Progressive International, to the Organising Committee, but he did not ultimately join the committee.
• James Giles is the current Chief of Staff to Ayoub Khan MP, and has never been Chief of Staff for the entire Independent Alliance of MPs.
• Some have taken my reference to Sultana’s “unilateral announcement that she would ‘co-lead the founding of a new party’” as meaning that she made the decision unilaterally. Perhaps I could have been clearer. The co-leadership arrangement was agreed upon by a majority vote at an OC meeting. It was only her communications strategy, and her immediate decision to announce that arrangement publicly, which was unilateral – she had not agreed with Corbyn that she would be announcing it the same evening. Her allies would defend this decision on the basis that it was necessary to prevent the decision from being undemocratically reversed, but it was, nevertheless, a unilateral announcement.
• The leadership body of the Communist Party of Britain, on which Andrew Murray used to sit, is called the executive committee, not the central committee (thanks to Edmund Griffiths for this very precise correction!).