The Inquisition Comes to Lambeth: When Your Party’s Heresy-Hunters Turned on Their Own

When the left trades free speech for heresy-hunting, it has already lost…

“Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?”

Michael Foot wrote those words in Tribune in 1954. He was not predicting the future. He was issuing a warning. Seventy years later, the warning has been ignored, and not only by Labour. It has been ignored by the very people who would claim Foot as their own.

What happened in Lambeth on the 2nd of March was not a political disagreement. It was a trial. The accused was Valerie Coultas, a socialist feminist with more than forty years of activism behind her. The charge was heresy. The inquisitors were the assembled representatives of the SWP, AWL, SP, ACR, and WP, clustered in the proto-branch of Your Party like sediment at the bottom of a glass, controlling between twelve and fourteen voting delegates and deploying them, with the practised efficiency of people who have done this sort of thing many times before, to bring down a woman whose only crime was to think carefully.

What had Coultas said, exactly? She had said that socialists must challenge far-right divisions and unite all oppressed groups. She had said that women, as a class subject to male violence, have a legitimate interest in feeling safe. She had said that trans people also need to feel safe, and that the task of serious socialists is to reconcile those rights.

This is not bigotry. It is not even controversial. It is the kind of patient, materialist thinking that the British left once regarded as its most essential characteristic.

For this, she was publicly denounced as a transphobe on the branch WhatsApp group. For this, she faced a motion of no confidence. For this, she very nearly lost her position as Vice-Chair by a margin of one vote, 21 to 20, after a process that Stuart King, the now-resigned branch Chair, has described without exaggeration as heresy-hunting. He resigned. Coultas, having seen the vote and read its meaning clearly, resigned too. That two of the branch’s most experienced and committed organisers felt they had no choice but to walk tells you everything about what that meeting had become.

Stuart King is right to use the term “heresy-hunting.” It is the correct one…

What strikes anyone who reads King’s resignation statement is its measured grief. This is not the language of a man who stormed out in a tantrum. It is the language of someone who watched something he cared about being smashed, tried to defend it, lost narrowly, and then drew the only conclusion that decency permitted. He notes, with the precision of someone who counted the hands, that virtually all those who voted against freedom of expression were affiliated with the organised far-left groups. Virtually all those who defended it were ordinary, unaffiliated members. The arithmetic of that observation should stop every serious person on the left in their tracks.

Because this is not a one-off. We reported this week on the Green Party, which is currently facing legal action from its own female members after years of expulsions, suspensions, and disciplinary proceedings against women who hold what the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed, in April 2025, are legally protected beliefs. The Green Party has committed £540,000 across three years to fight the legal consequences of its own unlawfulness. It has chosen to spend its members’ money fighting its members. The pattern is identical: an organised ideological faction, operating through procedural mechanisms, driving out the people who built the movement in the first place.

There is a name for this. The old left, the left of Hardie and Bevan and Foot, had a name for it. They called it sectarianism, and they regarded it with the contempt it deserved, because they understood what it did. It did not strengthen parties. It hollowed them out. It replaced the broad coalition of working people, with all their awkward plurality of views, with a narrow circle of the ideologically certified. It substituted the comfort of purity for the difficulty of power. And it handed every future argument to the right, which could point at the wreckage and say: look what happens when you let them run things.

From Lambeth With Malice: How Entryist Factions Are Turning Your Party Into a Sect

The far-left groups now operating inside Your Party know this history better than most. Some of their leading figures have written learnedly about it. That makes what they are doing in Lambeth not merely destructive but inexcusable. They are not ignorant of the consequences. They simply do not care, because the sect has always mattered more to them than the movement.

Coultas has forty years of socialist activity behind her. She spent six months building Your Party in Lambeth from nothing, sitting on the Organising Committee, doing the unglamorous work of political construction that most people who attend proto-branch meetings have never attempted. She is not a transphobe. She is a materialist feminist who has spent her adult life fighting for exactly the people Your Party claims to represent. The branch’s willingness to nearly vote her out of office, on the basis of anonymous complaints and the block votes of entryist factions, tells you everything about what that branch has become.

Free speech is not a liberal luxury. Orwell understood this. Bevan understood this. Foot understood this. The working class, which has no newspapers, no television channels, no billboards, no lobbyists, and no access to the machinery of the state, has only one weapon in its confrontation with concentrated power: the right to speak, to organise, to dissent, and to demand that its representatives be accountable to it. The moment a political party teaches itself to treat dissent as a disciplinary matter, it has sided with the powerful against the powerless, whatever it calls itself.

Your Party is very young. It does not have the accumulated institutional resilience to survive the sectarian games it is being taught to play. If it proceeds down the path that Lambeth’s proto-branch has marked out, it will end where all such parties have ended: with a dwindling membership, an ever-narrowing definition of acceptable thought, and a leadership whose authority rests on the suppression of the people it claims to lead.

Stuart King and Valerie Coultas have not given up on Your Party. That speaks well of them, and it speaks to something important. Coultas, for her part, has made clear that she is not retreating. She has said that the support she has received from ordinary branch members and from other socialists across Your Party gives her grounds for optimism, and that the fight is worth having. Her words deserve to be quoted directly, because they say something that no editorial comment can improve upon:

“I have been given a lot of support from both members of the branch and from other socialists in YP in battling against sectarian and dogmatic ideas here, so together members can challenge this narrow agenda… freedom of expression and the right for women to express their own views in our branches must be made an absolute principle. Those in other parties need to prove that they are willing to respect a wide range of views.”

That is not a demand from an outsider. It is a demand from a woman who built the branch that tried to silence her. The least the party can do is listen.

Again, Michael Foot’s question deserves repeating, because it has not aged a day.

Is Your Party to remain a democratic body where free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are its members to be bludgeoned into silence, one WhatsApp denunciation at a time, by people whose primary commitment is not to the working class but to the maintenance of their own ideological franchise?

That question is not rhetorical. It requires an answer. And the branch members of Lambeth, the ones who voted down freedom of expression and very nearly removed a forty-year socialist for the crime of nuanced thinking, have already given theirs.

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A party that cannot tolerate Valerie Coultas does not deserve to lead anything worth leading.

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