• Why are such arguments taking place? At the root, the rows show the pull of “electoralism”. It’s the idea that the left party should dump or water down principles in a grubby search for votes.

   

  You can, for example, be a landlord and support Palestine. So, the argument goes, perhaps it’s better to tone down rhetoric that rightly calls landlords money-grabbing parasites?

   

  Others say the left should stick to talking about the cost of living crisis. They think saying, “Refugees and migrants are welcome here,” or, “Trans+ rights are human rights,” will cause “divisions” and “put off some voters”.

• If a left wing Labour government was elected, it could manage the state, the economy and society much more fairly.

   

  But if you want to use the state and the system in this way you have to keep it intact. And if you want to manage the economy to redistribute wealth, you have to make sure it stays profitable.

• And before you even get to that point you have to prove to the gatekeepers of the system you can be trusted to do both.

   

  You desperately need big business not to wield their economic power against you by crashing the markets in reaction to measures they don’t like. That creates internal pressures too.

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• As materialists we believe in the reality of biological sex, that women & girls are subject to discrimination and oppression on the basis of their sex, and that women have the right to organise around their material interests. It is inconsistent with a materialist analysis of sex-based oppression to attempt to sideline women’s sex-based protections, or to overwrite sex in law with gender identity. At a time when women’s reproductive rights are coming under pressure across the Western world, it is vital materialists remain focused on the fact that the exploitation of women’s bodies is central to women’s oppression, and understand how this exploitation links to other forms of class-based material extraction.
• Without recognising sex, it is impossible to understand why rape, domestic violence, forced birth, female genital mutilation, honour killing, domestic exploitation, the gender pay gap, sexual harassment etc., are harms particularly aimed at women
• As materialists we also object to the widespread use of the acronym LGBTQ+ which ‘force teams’ lesbians, gay men and bisexuals with trans and queer people. As same-sex attracted people, many in the LGB community understand their political interests to be in conflict with gender identity politics.

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• it is now undeniable that this historic opportunity has been well and truly squandered.
• This week a poll for the next general election showed support for Your Party at 0 percent.
• Once lively proto-branches have by and large disintegrated and descended into factional infighting. They were established through the volunteer efforts of grassroots activists, but starved of funds and resources by the party’s leadership. 
• We encouraged our members to join the new party while maintaining our political and organisational independence as revolutionary socialists. We threw ourselves into building branches a
• But no sooner had Your Party launched than the first public spats between Corbyn and Sultana took place. Members were dismayed as senior figures briefed the right wing press and exchanged legal threats.
• On the eve of the party’s founding conference in Liverpool last November, the Your Party leadership expelled leading members of the SWP. They did so before the conference had debated if “dual membership” with other organisations would be allowed.
• The conference voted to allow dual membership of organisations “approved by the CEC as aligning with the party’s values”.
• As a result of the factional warfare, only around 60,000 people joined Your Party when membership finally opened and many have since drifted.
• The Many slate, boosted by Corbyn’s high profile, secured a majority. The rival Grassroots Left slate, which the SWP supported, didn’t convince enough members that it was the basis for a better leadership. 
• It has hollowed out what was supposed to be a “collective leadership” and left all the key levers in the hands of Corbyn’s supporters. For example, an amendment that called for the identity of paid staff to be disclosed and to make them accountable to and recallable by the CEC was defeated.
• The CEC will act as a rubber-stamping body to approve decisions that have already been taken elsewhere.
• And while claiming to uphold self-determination for Scotland and Wales, the Your Party centre has outrageously obstructed the democratic decision taken by a majority of members at the Scottish founding conference to stand candidates in the May elections. 
• The infighting is rooted in real political divisions. From the beginning, two broad visions have clashed inside of Your Party. The group around Corbyn wanted Labour Party mark 2, knit together through existing networks of “community independents” many of whom did not have socialist politics.

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• Valerie Coultas, a veteran of the International Marxist Group, resigned from her Lambeth Your Party branch after it voted to affirm trans liberation policy — having narrowly declined to remove her
• materialist feminists, campist commentators, anti-woke culture warriors, all using the same arguments. This article argues that gender-critical politics in the UK socialist left is not a separate phenomenon from the conservative left. It is its connective tissue, simultaneously exhibiting class reductionism, social democratic capitulation, campist logic, and identity politics backlash. Counterfire’s record, the YPML’s programme, and the CEC election results are the evidence.
• n the Lambeth branch of Your Party in early March 2026, when Valerie Coultas, a former leading figure in Socialist Action (itself a fragment of the International Marxist Group, affiliated to the Fourth International), found herself at the centre of a controversy over her positions on trans rights.
• Coultas, who had been serving as vice-chair of the Lambeth branch, had expressed public support for the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, which determined that the term “woman” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex.
• On 8 February, a week before CEC voting opened, she appeared at the All-Party London hustings,
• The Grassroots Left was the unnamed target;
• The CEC results were declared in late February. The branch meeting followed in early March. A no-confidence motion was put. It was defeated, narrowly, by 21 votes to 20. The branch then voted overwhelmingly — 35 to 5, with 5 abstentions — to affirm unambiguous support for trans liberation in line with party policy.
• Coultas resigned. Stuart King, the branch chair and a long-term political ally of Coultas with roots in Workers’ Power, resigned alongside her, publishing an account framing the process as a “witch hunt” by sectarian far-left groups.
• She resigned not because she was expelled but because she was unwilling to serve in a branch that had just voted to implement the party’s own policy on trans liberation.
• he response was immediate. The thread in which it unfolded belonged to Tariq Ali — a central leader of the IMG in the 1970s, the organisation that had politically formed Coultas herself. On that thread, Lindsey German, the most prominent public figure in Counterfire, reached for the credentialist defence
• This is so appalling — she has socialist credentials going back more than 50 years. This seems to me a literal witch hunt, ie an unjustified attack on a strong woman. And I don’t know for a fact but I would lay a bet that the majority voting for this were men.” A branch of a socialist party that had voted to enshrine trans liberation in its founding principles, months earlier in Liverpool, had presumably included trans women among those voting. German did not consider this1. The coalition that rallied to Coultas’s defence proved, rather more than the original dispute, what was actually at stake.
• Coultas has been active on the socialist left since at least 1971. She served on the editorial board of the journal International and published work in Feminist Review, including the article “Feminists Must Face the Future.” In the 1980s she wrote for Socialist Action on gay liberation and the politics of the family under Thatcherism
• In February 2026 she stood as a candidate in the Your Party CEC elections, representing the Your Party Materialist Left (YPML). The YPML’s stated objectives include the segregation of trans people from single-sex spaces and the breaking of the political alliance between gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and trans people.
• This is a long way from where she started. The IMG tradition that formed Coultas politically was committed, at its best, to combining revolutionary Marxism with the liberation movements — including, in the 1980s, Coultas’s own writing in defence of gay liberation. The distance from that position to leading a faction whose explicit goal is to dissolve the LGB/T alliance is not merely a failure of personal political consistency. It is the conservative left’s drift made visible in a single biography.
• This article argues that gender-critical feminism within the UK socialist left is not a separate phenomenon from the “conservative left” tendencies analyzed in these pages before. It is their connective tissue. It exhibits, simultaneously, the characteristics of class reductionism, social democratic capitulation, campist logic, and identity politics backlash
• Lindsey German, Counterfire’s most prominent public figure, has argued in multiple pieces that biological sex is not a spectrum and that gender-critical feminists have been subjected to illegitimate suppression. When Professor Kathleen Stock resigned from Sussex University in 2021 following sustained student pressure, German wrote that the campaign against her was “pathetic” and that challenges to gender-critical academics should be “reserved for fascists.”
• Elaine Graham-Leigh, another leading Counterfire figure, has gone further. Writing for Counterfire, she characterized the theoretical framework underlying trans liberation as “wild-eyed idealism,” arguing that placing individual gender identity above biological sex represents a retreat from materialism into subjectivism. The framework is borrowed from serious theoretical traditions. The conclusion — that trans people’s self-understanding of their own gender is a philosophical error — serves a thoroughly reactionary purpose, whatever the intentions of those advancing it.
• The structural logic here is visible in Counterfire’s own writing on “woke” politics. German’s March 2025 piece argues that identity politics have become institutionalised in ways “compatible with corporate capitalism,” that EDI programmes are “almost totally performative,” and that “no-platforming should be reserved for actual fascists” — explicitly including gender-critical feminists among those wrongly no-platformed.
• The class analysis, introduced to explain why “woke” politics fails working people, ends by defending those whose politics make trans workers’ lives materially worse. The critique of liberal identity politics becomes a licence to dismiss trans liberation as one more bourgeois distraction.
• German wrote, in her Counterfire piece on Your Party’s founding period, that a mass party “will have a range of opinions on various matters which are controversial,” listing trans identity alongside Brexit and Scottish nationalism as issues on which the party should not force division.
• Note the framing. Trans liberation is an “opinion.” Whether or not trans women are women is a matter on which reasonable people might differ, like the precise constitutional relationship between Scotland and Westminster. This is not a principled defence of internal party debate. It is a concession to the idea that the oppression of a vulnerable group is a legitimate policy preference rather than a political line that socialist organisations have an obligation to take. It accepts the premise of the right: that trans rights are contested territory on which the left should remain deliberately agnostic so as not to alienate potential supporters who hold “conservative views on issues of oppression.”
• The parallel with social democratic accommodation on immigration is exact.
• The theoretical core of the gender-critical socialist position is the claim to materialism: sex is a biological reality; gender is a social construct imposed upon it; to treat gender identity as primary is to retreat into idealism; only a materialist analysis that recognizes the physical reality of female bodies and the specific forms of oppression to which they are subjected can form the basis of socialist feminism.
• This argument has intellectual ancestry in the materialist feminism of Christine Delphy,
• he argument that “biological sex is the raw material of women’s oppression” is deployed not to develop a more adequate analysis of how capitalism regulates and exploits bodies, but to exclude trans women from the category “women” and, by implication, from the solidarity of socialist organisations
• The Social Reproduction Theory tradition — which builds on Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women and actually does extend Marxist feminist analysis to account for the specific exploitation of trans and gender non-conforming workers — is simply ignored. Vogel, whom gender-critical socialists rarely cite, turns out to be more useful to trans liberation than to those who claim the materialist mantle
• The manoeuvre is the same as that employed by every conservative current that has ever claimed Marxist authority for reactionary conclusions: take a genuine theoretical framework, strip it of its emancipatory content, use its vocabulary to dress up a conservative accommodation to the existing order, and denounce those who object as idealists, liberals, and sectarians
• Trans people are among the most economically exploited workers in the UK. They face discrimination in housing, employment, and healthcare. They are disproportionately represented among the homeless, the precarious, the poorest. A materialism worth its name would begin there. The gender-critical “materialism” that begins instead with “immutable biological sex” is not materialism. It is biological essentialism with a red flag wrapped around it.
• there are formations on the left with quasi-campist analyses of Ukraine that maintain principled support for trans liberation
• Counterfire, which has provided the most sustained intellectual framework for gender-critical politics on the UK socialist left, is the same organisation whose leading figures have consistently framed the Ukraine war as primarily a product of NATO provocation.
• Both campism and gender-critical politics operate through the same structural logic: identify a “primary contradiction” (imperialist aggression / biological sex) and declare all other analysis that complicates it to be a distraction, a liberal imposition, or an idealist deviation. In both cases, the positions of actually oppressed people — Ukrainians, trans workers — are subordinated to a theoretical framework that claims to represent their real interests while systematically ignoring what those people actually say about their own situation.
• his is not mere implication. In February 2023, Counterfire published a piece by Mike Wayne — a Marxist academic, and co-director of the gender-critical documentary Adult Human Female — titled “Liberalism’s hegemony over the left”.
• rans liberation is reframed not as the self-determined interest of an oppressed group but as a symptom of the left’s intellectual subordination to its class enemies.
• he article was published three days after two teenagers were charged with the murder of Brianna Ghey. Counterfire left it up. Both rs21 and Workers’ Liberty condemned it; Counterfire did not respond.
• his is campism transposed into gender politics: identify a “primary contradiction,” declare every analysis that complicates it a liberal deviation, subordinate the expressed interests of actually oppressed people to the theoretical framework. The logic is identical. The targets differ.
• The Your Party founding conference, held in Liverpool in November 2025, voted explicitly to incorporate trans liberation in the party’s principles of anti-oppression — one of three conference votes with the highest participation, engaging over ten thousand members
• The Trans Liberation Group, formed the same year, deserves more than a passing mention here. Its founding statement explicitly grounds trans liberation in class struggle, rejecting what it describes as a purely “rights-based” approach on the grounds that freedom secured through liberal channels alone is inherently precarious. It argues that trans liberation is achievable only through “active and equal participation in class struggle.” This is not the language of identity politics. This is the language of historical materialism
• Counterfire’s own candidate, Michael Lavalette, stood independently of both slates. The decision is telling. The Grassroots Left had explicitly opposed purging far-left organisations including Counterfire, and had endorsed Lavalette’s candidacy: it was, in organisational terms, fighting Counterfire’s corner. Counterfire declined the alliance. The most plausible reading is that Counterfire calculates a closer working relationship with the winning side serves it better than formal alignment with the democratic left that was actually defending its presence in the party
• What produces conservative drift in revolutionary organisations? No single answer covers every case. But a recurring pattern is visible: the substitution of past credentials for present political commitments. The assumption that because one was correct in 1974, one is still correct in 2026. German’s Facebook post crystallises this logic with unusual precision: “socialist credentials going back more than 50 years” is offered not as context but as argument
• Every time a veteran of the British left takes a gender-critical public position, the amplification comes from the same places: materialist feminist networks, Free Speech Union spokespeople, right-wing culture war commentators, campist accounts that have spent years explaining why Ukrainian sovereignty is a secondary concern.
• The function this serves for the right is legible. If the socialist left can be shown to harbour serious figures who share the basic premises of gender-critical politics — that biological sex is the proper basis for organising social life, that trans people’s existence in women’s spaces constitutes a genuine threat, that opposition to this is bourgeois identity politics imposed by liberal elites — then the entire terrain of the culture war is shifted. The right needs no further argument. The left has provided the intellectual cover.
• The YPML’s documented goal of breaking the LGB/T political alliance is worth dwelling on. This demand did not emerge from working-class struggle. No trade union branch, no tenants’ association, no community campaign ever demanded that the left separate gay and trans liberation. It comes from the same political infrastructure that has spent a decade manufacturing the culture war: sympathetic press barons, well-funded think tanks
• Previous analysis in these pages identified four forms of conservative left politics: class reductionism, social democratic capitulation, campism, and identity politics backlash. Gender-critical politics in the UK socialist left is not a fifth, separate tendency. It is the connective bridge between all four, exhibiting the structural logic of each simultaneously.
• A commenter on social media suggested that Counterfire is not the primary driver of gender-critical politics on the left — that the CPB, Stalinist-influenced trade union bureaucracies, and networks of former second-wave feminists in academia and journalism have been more influential. This may well be true in terms of sheer institutional weight. The argument here is more specific: Counterfire’s role is to supply theoretical legitimation
• The evidence is in their own published writing. German’s 2021 piece argues that “sex is an immutable characteristic of human beings,” defends Maya Forstater’s employment tribunal victory, and reserves no-platforming for “fascists only” — explicitly including gender-critical feminists among those wrongly excluded from debate
• John Rees, her co-leader, argued in April 2025 that women’s oppression “shapes the lives of biological females in a way which it does not do to men” and is “not reducible to biology, but neither is it separable from biology.” Both disclaim any hostility to trans people. But a theoretical framework that grounds women’s oppression in biological reproduction and defines its subjects as “biological females” has already done the work of placing trans women outside the political category it is organising around.
• A reader has drawn our attention to a statement by Valerie Coultas herself, published on the Materialist Left Substack on 13 March 2026, giving her account of events in her own words

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• On 12 April 2026, the CEC of Your Party passed a dual membership policy that explicitly targets the organised revolutionary left. SWP members were expelled the same day, just before a national meeting of Your Party Scotland members. An Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC) representative received confirmation of his expulsion just before the meeting he was facilitating had begun. The Scotland representative to the CEC, Niall Christie, whose full report is now public, reported that an amendment which had actually passed was ruled void by the officers group because they disliked the outcome
• When he raised points of order to counter this undemocratic trick, he was told he was harassing the chair and would be disciplined if he continued. This is not a party that made a procedural error. This is a party that overturned its own democratic result and threatened the person who noticed.
• Christie’s report details further. A proposal on Scottish autonomy, submitted in line with standing orders, was rejected by the CEC Operations Team, acting on behalf of the party chair, before the meeting. When Christie asked, multiple times, whether at least the final point on Scottish autonomy could be voted on, no response was received. An entire agenda item on devolved nations was simply skipped. Questions about membership loss in Scotland, submitted ahead of and during the meeting, went unanswered on both occasions. Meanwhile, the CEC majority repeatedly claimed that Your Party Scotland remains in a “developmental stage” and that no votes taken there are therefore binding. This is the constitutional theory that does the real work: not just ignoring Dundee, but retroactively denying that any binding decisions were ever made there at all. To make the power grab concrete, the CEC has announced that a working group on Scottish development will shortly be sortitioned into existence, with no constitutional basis, bypassing both ISEC and the Scotland CEC representative simultaneously.
• The ISEC has a longer and more damning account. From 18 February onwards, every request was stonewalled. Emails ignored. Proposals rejected before meetings. A Holyrood election strategy document was provided late, under instructions not to share it, and then used as cover for the claim that ISEC hadn’t responded in time.
• This is the fundamental breach. It isn’t a series of mistakes. It isn’t bad communication or overstretched staff or the inevitable friction of a new party finding its feet. It is a deliberate, sustained pattern of conduct designed to make Scottish autonomous organisation impossible. The last straw, the dual membership decision, would count as sufficient cause by itself. The eight weeks before it count as evidence of systematic intent.
• he SWP and Counterfire are both arguing, across Britain, that Your Party as a whole is over.
• Withdrawal does the bureaucracy’s work for them

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