Corbyn denies endorsing ex-Tories – but it’s still an almighty mess

On Thursday 2 April, a leaflet emerged featuring three ex-Tory councillors who claimed to be “endorsed” by Jeremy Corbyn. Since then, Your Party and Corbyn have denied endorsing these men. Instead, the situation seems to be that they recently joined the Walsall Community Independents group which Corbyn has voiced support for.

Corbyn’s supporters are furious that anyone believed the endorsement in the first place. Others are saying the situation exposes the broader problem with supporting independent groups who aren’t beholden to Your Party (YP) values.

“Endorsed” by Corbyn?

As we reported on 2 April, the ‘endorsement’ was first reported by the Green Party’s Mish Rahman:

The Stats for Lefties account also highlighted the leaflet. They noted in a subsequent discussion that if the endorsement wasn’t real, the councillors were violating electoral law:

Later that same day, New Statesman’s Ava-Santina reported that Your Party would indeed be supporting independent candidates in Walsall:

As we reported:

This could be ex-Tories highlighted above, or it could be the ex-Labour independents who joined Your Party last year.

We did ask Your Party to confirm if the endorsement was real, but hadn’t heard back at the point of publication, and we noted this in the piece. Your Party would later tell us:

Neither Jeremy nor Your Party has endorsed these candidates in Walsall. Any suggestion otherwise should be immediately corrected.

No permission has been given for Jeremy’s name to be used on any individual candidate’s leaflet.

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And Rahman has now said:

As Rahman highlights, it is indeed wrong to print misleading information on an election leaflet (albeit par for the course with Tories / ex-Tories).

The discussion hasn’t ended there, though.

Walsall Community Independents

On 14 February, Corbyn spent his Valentines Day with the Walsall Community Independents:

The above tweet also said (emphasis added):

Jeremy Corbyn MP endorsed Walsall Community Independents and asked everyone to support Walsall Community Independents in the May 2026 Local Council Elections.

This was posted nearly two months ago and remains up. Presumably, this means no one in Your Party took issue with it. Presumably that means Corbyn did voice his support for the group in the upcoming local elections.

The argument coming from Your Party now is that Corbyn did not give blanket support to individuals within the group, as Nicola James said:

Appearing on a stage with a community group is not a personal endorsement of every candidate in that group. Support for the creation of an independent community group does not equal blanket endorsement. Jeremy has made it clear that he does not endorse those candidates.

The Walsall Community Independents group have said that Corbyn supports them in the local election; Your Party are saying his support does not represent endorsement of individuals within the group.

Okay, so what does his support constitute?

Hang on, Corbyn

James would later claim that the three ex-Tories only joined the Walsall Community Independents after Corbyn gave his support:

Those candidates weren’t even in the group when Jeremy was there. Your Party has been crystal clear that neither Jeremy nor the party has endorsed those specific candidates.

However, the three ex-Tories were in the front row of the event that Corbyn spoke at:

The photo these candidates used on the controversial flyer was clearly taken on the same night – as they are all wearing the same clothes. Plus, on 8 February – six days before the event Corbyn spoke at – the three ex-Tories had a meeting with Your Party MP Ayoub Khan:

Independent alliances are free to work with whoever they like. Once Your Party has thrown its support behind them, though, Your Party is no longer free to say it has nothing to do with them. If YP objects to the group containing ex-Tories, then it should publicly withdraw the support for the group in the local elections – support which the group is publicly claiming they have received.

As several people highlighted, the situation has exposed the issue with Your Party’s support for independents:

Interjecting my own opinion here (this is an Opinion piece, so I’m allowed), I don’t believe Corbyn knowingly endorsed three ex-Tories. At the same time, I do think the cadre of Chuckle Brothers surrounding him have created a situation which plausibly allowed them to claim they have his backing.

I’d be interested to see how all this holds up in court, anyway, should the trio face criminal consequences. This won’t happen, obviously, because UK ‘electoral law’ is a joke.

The independent push

On the topic of Your Party supporting / endorsing independent groups, we published the following on 2 April based on a YP press release:

Jeremy Corbyn has unveiled Your Party plans to target Labour’s heartlands in the upcoming English local elections in May. The start-up party is supporting allied community independent groups at the local elections.

Additionally:

At Your Party’s founding conference in November 2025, members voted to adopt a targeted strategy. This aims to maximise the party’s seats, rather than standing everywhere. As party structures continue to develop, Your Party will support around 250 candidates across England. The vast majority of these will be standing as Independents or for allied local community parties.

Also:

Corbyn was elected as Your Party parliamentary leader earlier this month after his allies were victorious in the party’s leadership elections. He is expected to tour the country in support of the Your Party-backed independents and groups in the coming weeks, following a first event in Redbridge.

Your Party is saying it will support “250 candidates” and also that Corbyn will “tour the country in support of the Your Party-backed independents and groups”. Again, this is going to create a high degree of ambiguity – especially if these groups contain members who are at odds with the broader YP movement.

Corbyn himself said:

These elections are the beginning of the fightback against austerity, privatisation and fear.

All across the country, there will be community independent groups offering an alternative to the despair of Labour and the division of Reform. We are proud to support those candidates and groups standing up for redistribution, inclusion and peace.

People in power underestimate the power of people at their peril – and arrogance in office always comes back to bite you in the end.

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Presumably, YP will now have to rethink if it ‘supports’ entire groups, or whether it only supports individuals that closely align with YP values. It should also make clear what sort of vetting is conducted before a group or individual receives the party’s support. The very fact that three ex-Tories were already in talks with a Your Party MP, and the attended an event Corbyn endorse the group at, shows a clear lack of any kind of due diligence around this.

The independent drive isn’t happening because there were no YP members willing to stand, by the way, as we reported. Supporting independent groups has certainly saved YP the effort of vetting, fielding, and supporting its own candidates, but it’s unarguably created issues of its own.

And this isn’t the first time that working with independents has created a problem for Your Party.

The trouble with independents and Corbyn

When Your Party got going, it included Jeremy Corbyn and his Independent Alliance. Corbyn and the other independent MPs did good work opposing the government’s support of Israel’s genocide. At the same time, there were some pretty big gaps between the politics of some of these men and the YP membership.

The two big issues that came up were:

Transphobia and landlordism were big reasons why left-leaning voters abandoned Labour. As such, the presence of these issues in Your Party served to turn away potential members.

Following the backlash, people who criticised the independent MPs were accused of being intolerant or racist. This was because the independent MPs were Muslims, and some argued that we needed to respect their “socially conservative” values. As Maryam Jameela wrote for the Canary, independent MP Adnan Hussain:

is wrong that Muslims tend to be socially conservative. Perhaps because he has chosen to be a landlord and real estate mogul, his circle of Muslims is correspondingly socially conservative. The notion that Muslims tend to be socially conservative is a lie that is hauntingly in-step with Western stereotypes of Muslims as regressive and backwards.

Whilst certain schools of thought within Islam are of course socially conservative, it’s a joke to think of the majority of two billion Muslims worldwide as such. Muslims come with all manner of political positions – socialist, liberal, conservative, and so on. And, perhaps to Adnan’s surprise – some of us are even trans!

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The months of fighting around this issue should have clarified something; namely that supporting independent MPs who aren’t beholden to the party’s broader project is a massive hurdle to having a broader project in the first place.

Clearly, however, the people at the top of YP have learned nothing.

FAQs

I wrote the original Canary article on Corbyn ‘endorsing’ the ex-Tories, so I’m well placed to answer some of the criticisms. The first is this:

I wrote “Leaflet suggests” to be clear there was a degree of doubt around whether Corbyn had endorsed the men. I highlighted this doubt in the piece, and also noted that we’d approached Your Party for comment.

In terms of ‘finding our way back’, many of us have been at the Canary for years; some since 2015.

The following is another critique we received:

As noted, it was made clear in the piece that we approached Your Party. They got back to us 23 hours later for what should have been a yes / no question.

To be completely fair, it was late in the day when we approached them, but we did say we were publishing that day and gave them four hours to respond. That is standard when dealing with political parties. They should be ready to deal with media at any time of the day.

No skin in the game

Clarifying my stance on all this, I’m not unhappy with Your Party because I’m a member of the socialist faction which lost out to Corbyn’s group in the recent elections. It’s also not the case that I have no skin in the game. I returned to full time reporting because I was enthused by the announcement that Your Party was happening, and I’ve taken no joy in watching what happened next.

Personally, I think Corbyn should have established a party from the top down which was in line with his own politics – i.e. progressive Labour-style social democracy. After getting the ball rolling, Corbyn should have stepped down as leader, and opened the position up to elections. I don’t think Corbyn himself should have run, because he will be 80 in 2029, and come on – that’s clearly too old – what are we doing here?

For clarity’s sake, I don’t think Corbyn should have done the above because I share his politics; I think he should have done it because that was where the energy was, and that’s where his instincts are. Instead, he oversaw a half-arsed project of endless meetings which gave the impression that people could collectively shape the party. When that shape took on a form that Corbyn’s allies didn’t like, though, they freaked out, and months of confusion and infighting ensued.

I have the upmost respect for the YP members who tried to make the party fully socialist, by the way; I just think their project was hamstrung by Corbyn’s involvement. Corbyn has never been a full socialist, and most of the 800,000 people who showed that initial interest clearly did so because they wanted more Corbyn-style politics.

With hindsight, then, it would have been better for the socialists to start from scratch and build their own thing. That or run as independents, anyway. If they’d done that, presumably they would have received unconditional support from Corbyn and his team – the sort of support they never enjoyed as paying members.

The state of things

The benefit of being an independent politician is that you’re free to pursue your politics as freely as you like; the downside is that you lack the support of a wider party.

The benefit of being a political party is that you have strength in numbers; the downside is that individuals may have to forgo individual beliefs for the benefit of the movement.

Your Party keep experimenting with a system in which they’re a mass-movement party with a special class of non-movement politicians – specifically the independents who regular members are encouraged not to criticise even when said independents stray from the party’s politics.

In 2025, this meant asking members to hold their tongues on ‘social conservatism’ ; in 2026 it means asking members to support independents who are comfortable standing shoulder-to-shoulder with ex-Tories.

This is the tagline that Your Party have in their bio, by the way:

We’re building a new kind of political party. One that belongs to you – join us!

Your Party is telling members that the party ‘belongs to them’ but it’s backing politicians who don’t even belong to the party.

Adding to the weirdness, Jeremy Corbyn himself remains an independent MP despite being the YP parliamentary leader. This isn’t out of necessity, because YP is a registered party, and Zarah Sultana is a YP MP.

If the party wasn’t ready to field its own candidates, that’s a shame, but it is what it is. At the same time, that unreadiness should have demonstrated that YP needed to spend more time building up its own people. And clearly, launching a national pro-independents campaign has only added to the confusion about what Your Party is and what it aims to become.

In summary

So all in all, it’s a mess whichever way you look at it. It may not be the dumpster fire that people initially suspected, but it’s still a flaming skip of disappointment.

On the plus side, Corbyn isn’t endorsing ex-Tories on purpose; he’s simply doing so by accident, as a result of a Thick of It-style comical mishap by the people around him.

If Your Party want their own Malcolm Tucker, by the way, I’d be happy to swear at Corbyn’s underlings.

Featured image via Sophie Brown (Wikimedia)