Activists blast the “the anti-democratic ‘sortition’ method”

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The “World Socialist Web Site” has a report about a recent rally in which Zarah Sultana, a co-founder of YourParty, spoke. The piece goes into some detail about the infighting in YourParty and mentions the sortition issue.

Tina Becker, from the “Why Marx?” group and a member of the Your Party “proto-branch” in Sheffield, asked Sultana about the anti-democratic “sortition” method being imposed by Corbyn’s “Organising Committee” to select delegates to the founding conference. Becker explained it meant “We can’t put forward motions, we can’t put forward amendments. There will be a lottery system to choose delegates.” She asked Sultana, “Should the regional meetings be able to vote and have amendments? Should we not be the ones who decide how Your Party should be run and not the six MPs, and what are you trying to do to change that?”

Sultana replied, “I too am quite critical of sortition, but that is what has been announced for the conference, and so we need to make sure it’s democratic. And I think there’s a way to still do that.”

Her remarks made clear there would be no organised challenge to Corbyn’s anti-democratic stitch-up. She did not and could not explain how delegates randomly selected based on “gender, region and background” could be “made democratic”. Sortition is being employed to block members from exercising democratic control, preventing them from nominating delegates who are accountable and who best reflect their views, suppressing any political challenge to Corbyn’s (and Sultana’s) unelected cliques.

Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition |

5 Responses

Anonymous, on September 27, 2025 at 9:02 pm said:

🤦🏻‍♂️

“The soothsayers came, but none of them all

Could interpret the writing of fire on the wall.”

View at Medium.com

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keithsutherland, on September 28, 2025 at 9:01 am said:

>“We can’t put forward motions, we can’t put forward amendments. There will be a lottery system to choose delegates.” She asked Sultana, “Should the regional meetings be able to vote and have amendments? Should we not be the ones who decide how Your Party should be run?

I think that is a good critique of the anti-democratic nature of putting policy motions/amendments in the hands of randomly-selected persons, selected on the basis of purely demographic criteria.

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Anonymous, on September 28, 2025 at 9:32 am said:

Given the farcical power struggle we have seen from ‘Your Party’ so far, I would not be surprised at all if these criticisms of their sortitional system were accurate; but I would also not be surprised if the attempt at manipulation blew up in the attempted manipulators’ faces. Either way, it will be an interesting case study, if nothing else.

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Yoram Gat, on September 28, 2025 at 12:48 pm said:

> I would not be surprised at all if these criticisms of their sortitional system were accurate

What are those criticisms that you think may be accurate? The activists are clearly unhappy that delegates would be allotted from the entire membership rather than elected because they believe this would dilute their own power. They provide no backing to their claims that sortition empowers the MPs. It is a thin facade over their rather blatant anti-democratic mindset.

(Of course, sortition by itself is no guarantee for democracy. Things could easily be arranged so that the MPs are empowered and the allotted is disempowered and thus the membership is disempowered. But elections in fact guarantee this disempowerment.)

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keithsutherland, on September 28, 2025 at 4:40 pm said:

It’s interesting that “the elected” and “the allotted” are portrayed in these comments as distinct groups, whereas the reference is just to two balloting mechanisms. What matters is that the considered preferences of the membership are represented, and it’s not clear how “allotment” as such can achieve this better than a judicious combination of allotment and election.

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