Transparency and Accountability: A Response to Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a candidate on Zarah Sultana’s slate (for Collective Leadership) in Your Party’s upcoming CEC election, recently posted on Twitter claiming there’s been a “deplorable lack of transparency and accountability” that “bedevilled this party-building project since long before Zarah was involved.”

Given that she’s asking members to elect her to a governance role while refusing to acknowledge documented evidence of serious accountability failures by the person leading her slate, it’s important to set the record straight. If Naomi won’t hold those around her to the standards of transparency and accountability she claims to value, she’s not demonstrating the Nolan principles that should be foundational to anyone seeking governance responsibilities.

Here’s my response:

Naomi, you claim there’s been a “deplorable lack of transparency and accountability” that “bedevilled this project long before Zarah was involved”.

Your claims don’t withstand scrutiny, and your refusal to hold Zarah to account for her own record discredit you.

Here are the verifiable facts.

Weeks before Zarah’s unilateral announcement on 3 July, Collective had already agreed a public launch statement, approved by representatives from dozens of organisations and networks. It was ready to go. There are irrefutable records of this. The direction was clear, open and collectively owned.

Then Andrew Feinstein and others intervened, demanding Zarah be installed as deputy then co-leader as an apparent condition of her leaving Labour and joining the new party, despite Zarah not having done the 18 months of collective work that built the project.

This was the opposite of grassroots democracy. Installing a leader before members exist, before rules exist, before elections exist giving a person an elevated platform and unfair advantage in any future contest. It runs directly against Jeremy’s instincts: fairness, transparency, letting members decide.

The whole timeline is documented, including Jeremy publicly signalling on Robert Peston on 2 July that a new party launch was imminent. So this wasn’t “Jeremy dragging his feet until Zarah forced it”. The delay was due to last-minute manoeuvring to accommodate an undemocratic leadership carve-up.

It definitely wasn’t transparency. It was an attempt to pre-empt member democracy.

On transparency more broadly, it’s extraordinary to hear lectures from someone associated with For the Many Network, a self-appointed, top-down initiative (you, Andrew Feinstein, Ken Loach, Audrey White, Ian Hodson) with opaque decision-making and no accountability to any membership. Collective, by contrast, was broader, more plural and more transparent than anything before it. The real tension wasn’t “a lack of democracy”. It was that true democracy didn’t guarantee any faction permanent prominence.

Now let’s talk about accountability.

Since July, Zarah’s record involves repeated unilateral actions affecting infrastructure, money, data and public representation, carried out without mandate and outside agreed governance processes. These aren’t “internal disagreements”. They go to the basics of fiduciary responsibility and lawful data handling, the absolute minimum standards for anyone standing for governance roles on Your Party’s CEC.

Governance: acting unilaterally when directors have collective duties. Decisions must be taken properly, not by personal declaration.

Data: use and processing of circa 800,000 supporter records outside agreed DPO oversight and lawful basis. The ICO has stated this may be a criminal matter and recommended referral to the appropriate police regulatory authorities.

Money: once Your Party’s official bank account and infrastructure were in place, Zarah had a fiduciary duty to direct all payments through official channels, not continue routing them through alternative structures outside the party’s financial controls.

Public legitimacy: misrepresenting parallel structures as “the party”, creating confusion that still costs us. You yourself drove traffic on Twitter to that cloned, unauthorised membership portal, stating it was “not a scam!”

If you want to cite “transparency and accountability”, start here. If you want to support Jeremy, apply the same standards to those trying to neutralise him by proxy while claiming virtue.

You can’t credibly invoke transparency while omitting this context. You can’t demand accountability while endorsing a slate led by someone whose recent conduct demonstrates the opposite.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi driving traffic to the cloned membership portal