Original Post >> Red Mole

The lift was broken. At the Dundee venue hosting Your Party Scotland’s founding conference on 7–8 February, anyone needing step-free access had to be directed around the back of the building to an external ramp. The Wi-Fi kept dropping. The voting platform ran ten to fifteen minutes behind. Members stared at phones, refreshing, waiting for votes that appeared out of sequence or not at all. The chair extended deadlines, apologised, extended them again.

And yet: this conference worked. It worked better than anyone who survived Liverpool had a right to expect. Over two days, around three hundred members attended in person with others joining via a hybrid platform, out of roughly six hundred registered. Bob Goupillot, a veteran of the Scottish Socialist Party who attended both days as an observer, described the conference in a report for The Left Lane as “very well organised, open and democratic with a diversity of views being heard and no voices suppressed. Debates were conducted largely in a comradely and democratic manner with robust chairing facilitating this. This contrasts with my view of the Liverpool conference.” That judgement is right. Scottish Socialist Youth made what Goupillot rightly calls “a full contribution to both the organisation of the conference and to the quality of the debates.” The Conference Organising Group, drawn from what he describes as “a wide political and geographical diversity,” proved that the Scottish left can work together when freed from London’s interference. Day 1 finished ahead of schedule. In the history of left conferences, this may be a first.

On the conference WhatsApp group, the mood was telling. “Definitely been better than Liverpool, less dramatic too,” one member wrote. Another replied: “That’s a pretty low bar, but it’s gone well over it.” A third was more direct: “I think it’s been an excellent conference.” While the platform voted on constitutional amendments, the chat was alive with a substantive, detailed debate about local government finance; council tax, borrowing powers, delegated authority, the mechanics of no-cuts budgets. Members with experience as councillors and council officers were educating each other in real time, unprompted. This is what a democratic culture looks like when it’s functioning: people engaging with policy because they believe the organisation might actually do something with it.

The conference took a string of significant decisions. Every one of them went against the Corbyn inner circle’s preferences. And together, they represent the most democratic founding of a left party in Scotland since the SSP.

The Five Votes That Matter

Goupillot identifies five crucial votes that he argues “will have significant ramifications for the future of YP Scotland and YP rUK.” He is right about the number, and right about the ramifications, though this article departs from his assessment on some of the strategic conclusions. The numbers tell a story.

Your Party Scotland voted for a collective leadership model (61.47%), for organisational independence as a sister party (59.16%), for dual membership on a blacklist basis (82.11%), for trade union affiliation (81.48%), and for standing in the May 2026 Holyrood elections (69.8%). It also declared itself a pro-independence party (63.23%), voted for STV in internal elections (78.42%), for term limits on office holders (76.34%), and for national officers to be elected directly by the membership rather than the SEC (79.87%). The only significant defeat was an amendment to make conferences delegate-based rather than open to all members, which was rejected by 65.22%.

The margins are revealing. The most contested decisions were the ones that touched the relationship with UK Your Party: the sister party vote (59.16%) and the pro-independence declaration (63.23%). These split the conference roughly 60/40. The decisions that addressed the party’s internal character; dual membership, trade union affiliation, STV, term limits, direct election of officers; passed with majorities between 76% and 82%. The rank and file know what kind of party they want. The fight is over what kind of country they’re building it in.

The Gender Catastrophe the Conference Named

Start with the CEC hustings, because this is where the honest energy of the conference collided with a structural problem nobody could solve on the day. Three candidates took the stage to contest Scotland’s single seat on Your Party’s Central Executive Council. Three white men: Niall Christie from Glasgow, Ian Drummond from Edinburgh, Jim Monaghan from Glasgow; Monaghan running as the Corbyn slate’s candidate for Scotland. Not one woman had cleared the endorsement threshold of 75 nominations.

This was not an accident. Over Christmas, the UK leadership doubled England’s CEC seats to achieve gender parity; a mechanism that itself raises questions, since “at least one woman per region” structurally excludes non-binary candidates. Scotland and Wales, meanwhile, saw their proportional representation slashed from roughly 8% to 4%. The endorsement threshold was 75 everywhere. But English regions each elect two members, triggering the gender requirement. Scotland elects one. One seat means no gender mechanism at all. Sheila Sen collected 58 endorsements. Even had she cleared 75, Scotland’s single seat makes gender parity mathematically impossible. England got gender balance by doubling its seats. Scotland got half the representation and silence.

To its credit, the conference refused to be silent. Ian Drummond named the problem “bizarre” and called for an additional Scottish seat on an all-women shortlist. Niall Christie told the hall he had urged people not to endorse him and to back Sheila instead. Malena Rosh explained why the gender catastrophe had changed her vote on autonomy: “As a woman, I just can’t support that.” On the WhatsApp group, one participant put it simply: “it would be great to hear more women, non-binary or gender marginalised folk speak and to give people a chance to build confidence contributing.” Goupillot noted “a preponderance of white male voices” which “will need to be addressed.” Several women named the “shouty men” problem. One speaker, Mick Rice, apologised with a disarming honesty that captured the conference’s better instincts: “I think I am the shouty man. Sorry, I am an old man and used to rallies, not indoor chats.”

They were diagnosing the right problem. But diagnosis without structural remedy is just another contribution from the floor. The SEC must legislate for an additional Scottish CEC seat on an all-women shortlist, and it must do so before the current election concludes on 26 February.

Branch Office or Sister Party

The conference voted 59.16% to negotiate with UK Your Party to become an organisationally independent sister party. It was the tightest of the major votes, and the one that will provoke the sharpest reaction.

Philip Stott of Socialist Party Scotland laid out the charge: “bureaucratic and top-down methods” from the UK party, bans on dual membership, the exclusion of Dave Nellist and April Ashley from CEC elections. Ben Alker from Forth Valley put it simply: “Scotland is its own country. We cannot keep ourselves chained to the infighting of the wider British body.” The infighting he meant was the factional war between the Corbyn inner circle and the Sultana wing; a war fought over money, membership data, and control of the party apparatus, with Scotland reduced to collateral damage.

Jim Monaghan warned that Option B would mean losing access to the 60,000 Scottish email signups held on UK servers. The room heard this for what it was: not a warning but a threat. Vote for independence and the Corbyn machine cuts you off from your own membership data. Goupillot, who has more reason than most to be wary of factional manoeuvring within left parties, predicts that “YP rUK will resist this” and notes that one representative “made threatening noises about this from the platform.” He further predicts, and this article shares the prediction, that the vote “will encourage Welsh comrades to create YP Cymru” and that “these developments will in turn provoke identity crises for comrades in England alongside a feeling of losing control amongst some of the bureaucrats.”

The COG-to-SEC transition is the conference’s institutional safeguard. Goupillot describes it as a potential “shield against some of the centralising control emanating from those around Corbyn,” while doubting “it will be able to get the membership contact list or finances held by central; a frequent demand from the conference floor.” Both the hope and the doubt are well-founded.

In a separate vote, the conference declared Your Party Scotland a pro-independence party (63.23%). This is welcome, but the framing matters. Goupillot makes a point that deserves wider circulation: he argues the independence debate “needs to be framed within a material analysis of the rise and decline of the UK monarchical state and empire” and that “from this republican socialist perspective Scottish independence can be seen as part of the democratic dissolution of the UK state. This in turn points to the need for allies in England, Cymru/Wales and Ireland.” Exactly right. The petty-bourgeois nationalists are in the SNP. We know the difference. Always have.

Dual Membership and Trade Unions: The Conference’s Strongest Mandates

The dual membership vote (82.11%) was the conference’s clearest rebuke to the Corbyn apparatus. Amendment C7 established a blacklist system: dual membership is the default, with the SEC only prohibiting specific organisations deemed incompatible. Under the alternative whitelist model, every revolutionary organisation starts excluded and must petition for admission. Under the blacklist, everyone starts included and only fascists and wreckers get removed.

Sinead Daly of the Socialist Party made the case with precision: the European left has been built on alliances between socialist organisations and individuals. “I don’t understand why we would start by excluding organisations who share the necessity to build a working-class socialist party.” Linda McHugh was blunter: “Don’t follow the undemocratic route of Kinnock and New Labour who led a witch hunt.” Rebecca Long from Dundee, an SWP member, reminded the conference that SWP members including National Secretary Lewis Nielsen had been expelled by email on the eve of the Liverpool conference; Nielsen received his expulsion notice on the train to Liverpool, sitting in the same carriage as Corbyn himself.

The sole speaker against was Steven Alcroft, who argued that aligning with parties “who wish to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat” was “not particularly good electorally.” Not wrong on principle, not practically unworkable, but bad for the brand. The Corbyn inner circle’s logic, reduced to its essence.

Goupillot, who notes that he “had his political fingers badly burned by some of these groups” during his time in the SSP, nevertheless supports dual membership over “bans and proscriptions.” His hope is that the SWP and Socialist Party Scotland “can rise to this challenge, form open platforms within the party and use their considerable energy, organisational ability and talents to make Your Party a success in Scotland.” He calls this “perhaps a triumph of hope over experience.” It may be. But the alternative; a party that starts by excluding its most committed activists; is worse.

Trade union affiliation passed with 81.48%. Wayne Scott, a PCS rep and Socialist Party member, put it sharply: “If you’re trying to build a mass socialist party and from the outset saying you want to exclude mass organisations of the working class, you’re condemned to be a sect on the fringes.” The figure he cited: 600,000 trade union members in Scotland. The danger, raised by several speakers, is that affiliation becomes bureaucratic capture. The Labour Party’s century-long relationship with the trade union machinery is the standing warning. Democratic affiliation structures that connect to rank-and-file workers, not general secretaries, are the only answer.

The Holyrood Gamble

The decision to stand in the May 2026 Holyrood elections (69.8%) is the conference’s most significant strategic error. No, worse than an error: it is a gamble taken without the cards to play it. Goupillot, who voted against, puts it with characteristic directness: the party has “no programme, candidates or more than shallow roots in many of the communities that some members wish to stand.”

The SSP took years to build the activist base that won Tommy Sheridan his Glasgow seat in 2003, and they had trade union networks, community campaigns, and the poll tax movement behind them. Your Party Scotland has an email list it doesn’t control.

Scotland uses the Additional Member System. Standing on the regional list, where small parties typically compete, risks splitting the left vote and handing seats to Reform UK. Goupillot frames the danger precisely: “Our standing in the lists may take votes from parties such as the Greens and allow Reform to take seats more easily.” In the very communities where Reform is advancing; the northeast, former mining areas of Ayrshire, communities abandoned by both Labour and the SNP; a Your Party list candidacy that takes 2% from the Greens while Reform takes 8% is worse than not standing at all. RISE in 2016 is the cautionary tale: the Scottish left’s electoral alliance won a derisory vote share and set back regroupment by a decade.

His alternative strategy is the correct one: “Standing in working class communities long abandoned by Labour or SNP and largely impervious to the Greens but perhaps fertile ground for Reform would be a much more fruitful strategy.” Targeted intervention in two or three constituencies, run explicitly as campaign-building exercises with honest expectations about the result. Elections can be organising tools. But only if the party is honest with itself about what it’s doing. Standing to build, not standing to win.

Corbyn’s Strategic Silence

Jeremy Corbyn’s Day 2 keynote was vintage Corbyn: historically literate, emotionally compelling on Palestine, warm about Dundee’s labour movement traditions, and politically vague on every question that had actually divided the conference. He endorsed Scotland’s right to decide its own future, which is correct but cost him nothing. He proposed a disability commission and monthly open public meetings, both good ideas. He spoke about George Galloway with affection. He spoke about the genocide in Gaza with genuine moral force, reading aloud testimony from a doctor at Al-Shifa describing mutilated bodies, severed hands, and credible evidence of organ theft. Nobody in the hall doubted his sincerity on Palestine.

But notice what was absent. Not a word about dual membership. Not a word about the Liverpool expulsions that his apparatus orchestrated. Not a word about the gender catastrophe on the CEC. Not a word about the 60,000 Scottish email signups sitting on a server his machine controls. He told the conference “disunited we can achieve nothing” while his own slate was running a factional campaign and his allies had blocked Socialist Party candidates from standing. On the WhatsApp, one member captured the democratic culture: “I love how folks just get up, take a verbal punch at Zarah and Jeremy (who are both there?) Love Scottish Democracy at work.” Corbyn left before lunch. Sultana stayed for photos and conversations. Draw your own conclusions.

Corbyn’s political authority is real and earned. His organisational apparatus is the single biggest obstacle to the party he claims to be building.

What Dundee Tells Us

Your Party Scotland’s founding conference was better than anyone had a right to expect, and the energy in the room was genuine. People cared. They argued about things that mattered. They voted, overwhelmingly, for inclusion over exclusion, for democracy over bureaucracy, for Scotland’s right to determine its own future. The Conference Organising Group proved that a diverse committee can run a serious political event without London pulling the strings. Scottish Socialist Youth earned their place. The democratic culture was real.

But five correct votes do not make a party. The conference must now negotiate independence with a UK leadership that will resist. It must prove that dual membership works in practice, not just in principle. It must build the democratic trade union structures that prevent affiliation from becoming bureaucratic capture. It must confront a gender catastrophe that it named honestly but did nothing structural to fix. And it has committed itself to a Holyrood election in three months’ time without the infrastructure, candidates, or programme to fight it responsibly.

Dan Hutchison’s opening speech named the £1 billion funding gap and the crisis in communities across Scotland. But there was a telling volta: the interests of the working class, Hutchison argued, lie in peace, and we should make solidarity with all those to whom the West has brought war. It is a notable and disappointing framing, after twelve years of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The interests of the working class lie in peace and in justice; and the United States and Russia are currently in Abu Dhabi, jointly pushing Ukraine into an unjust settlement. On that question, much of the British left aligns with the Kremlin and the White House simultaneously. The conference organisers had placed the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland stall next to that of the CPB and Morning Star. The debate continues.

Jim Monaghan said the thing everyone was thinking: the room was “almost entirely white people” while thousands of young Asian Glaswegians march for Palestine every week. Building a bridge to the actually radicalising layers of the Scottish working class requires campaigns, not constitutions. It requires the kind of integration of electoral work and mass struggle that Paul Murphy described from Ireland on the conference’s international panel, not the parliamentary-first model that the Corbyn wing instinctively defaults to.

It is worth pausing on Monaghan himself, because his role tells you something about the political culture of the Corbyn wing. During the hustings, he boasted that he had lied to the police and in court “and would do it again.” The applause was warm. People assumed he meant some righteous cause. He did not clarify. What I assumed Monaghan was actually referring to was his role in supporting Tommy Sheridan’s perjury defence; a case in which Sheridan used the courts to attack and humiliate his former sexual partners. That he can still trade on this as a credential, in a conference where not one woman cleared the CEC endorsement threshold, tells you everything about the gap between the left’s rhetoric on gender and its practice.

Your Party Scotland is not yet a party. It is a possibility; argued over by people who care deeply about getting it right, in a conference that was genuinely democratic in ways that much of the British left has forgotten how to be. The lift was broken, but people found another way in. As Goupillot puts it: “All shoulders to the wheel, comrades.”

This article draws substantially on the conference assessment by Bob Goupillot, a veteran of the Scottish Socialist Party who attended both days as an observer. His framework for understanding the conference’s five crucial votes, and his strategic analysis of the Holyrood decision and the sister party vote, inform much of the analysis presented here, though not all the conclusions. Red Mole Substack is grateful for his contribution.

The author attended both days of the Your Party Scotland founding conference in Dundee on 7–8 February 2026. The CEC election runs from 9–23 February, with results announced on 26 February.

Friday: “Elections as Organising Tools: What the International Left Told Your Party Scotland”

A Name Removed, A Point That Stands

Postscript, 10 February: This article originally named a conference participant who had commented in the Your Party Scotland WhatsApp group. She has asked for her name to be removed and it has been. Red Mole regrets the original inclusion.

Jim Monaghan has responded to the article’s characterisation of his remarks about lying to the police and in court. He states that his reference was to the Sheku Bayoh case, not the Sheridan perjury trial: “About 10 minutes after the debate someone informed me that the question about lying was probably a planted question about the Sheridan perjury trial. It hadn’t entered my mind. As someone who is working class I took the question at face value. The police, courts, judiciary and authorities are not your friend. Throughout my life I have seen all of them lie to convict friends and comrades and family members. I answered that question on that basis. What was in my mind at the time was Sheku Bayoh not Tommy Sheridan. Sheku had been raised by Phil Taylor and I had sat with him alongside Sheku’s mother and family while the police lied on a daily basis.”

The original article stated as fact what was in Monaghan’s mind when he answered. That was an assertion about inner motivation, not a verifiable claim, and the article should have flagged it as interpretation rather than presenting it as established. Monaghan’s account of his own motivation is now on the record and readers can assess both readings. On the database question, he clarifies that his concern arose from a conversation with a family member after the vote, not from any discussion with HQ, and that his fear is that a separate Scottish party could lead YP UK to assert a duty to members who did not transfer: a framing that confirms the substance of the concern while contesting whether it constituted a threat or a warning.

The broader political observation stands: a man who was centrally involved in the Sheridan perjury trial made a public statement about lying in court, in a hustings for a party leadership election, in a conference where not one woman cleared the CEC endorsement threshold. The gap between the left’s rhetoric on gender and its practice does not depend on what was in any individual’s mind at any given moment. It is structural.

The author attended both days of the Your Party Scotland founding conference in Dundee on 7–8 February 2026. The CEC election runs from 9–23 February, with results announced on 26 February.

Friday: “Elections as Organising Tools: What the International Left Told Your Party Scotland”

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