Iqbal Mohamed becomes second MP to leave Your Party

It hasn't even officially been founded yet but Your Party (itself a temporary name) has suffered weekly controversies and scandals.

Last Friday, Adnan Hussain, the first of the six MPs in the "steering group" organising the founding of a new left-wing party, announced he was leaving.

Now a week later, and just a week before the party's founding conference is set to begin in Liverpool, a second MP has left the party - Iqbal Mohamed, MP for Batley and Dewsbury in West Yorkshire.

"After careful consideration," Mohamed announced on Friday afternoon on X: "I have decided to leave Your Party and continue serving as I was elected as an Independent Member of Parliament for Dewsbury & Batley.

"The many false allegations and smears made against me and others, and reported as fact without evidence, have been surprising and disappointing."

He said that co-leader Zarah Sultana "voluntarily left the Independent Alliance and the Your Party stewarding group on 18 September 2025".

He added that he will "continue working with my colleagues in the Independent Alliance, which has proven highly effective in advocating for the common good in Parliament over the past eighteen months."

'Sad and hurtful'

The Independent Alliance is a parliamentary grouping made up of three other independents who were elected last year for the first time - Hussain, Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan - and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Mohamed said last week that alongside Hussain, Adam and Khan, he had "voted for Zarah as co-leader against Jeremy's wishes and advice".

He explained that the dissolution of the organising committee (OC) for the new party and the co-leadership of Corbyn and Sultana "was driven by Jeremy due to division and mistrust in the OC and the way forward was agreed between Zarah and Jeremy, not the 4 MPs. We agreed to be stewards.

"The many allegations against us are false. We are being scapegoated and smeared and the media, commentators and the keyboard cowards have all piled in without asking those making the accusations for evidence or verifying the facts."

He said it was "sad and hurtful to see the factions on the Left join in on the attacks and trying to out-left each other with different purity tests which are only dividing and damaging" the party.

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For the party to succeed, it would need to draw together voters of many different backgrounds and political priorities, making Your Party an important player in a coalition with the Green Party. 

But Hussain and Iqbal have signalled that they believe this will not be possible. 

Your Party drew huge attention when it was announced in July and seemed poised to gain significant support, but it has been riven by infighting.

Hundreds of thousands of people signed up and some nationwide opinion polls gave the party 10 percent of the vote share.

But then public disagreements broke out between co-leaders Sultana and Corbyn.

Sultana also suggested Hussain had no place in the party because he said "that trans women are 'not biologically women'", triggering a public spat between the two. 

A major conflict then erupted in late September when Sultana launched a website inviting people to join the party, raising at least £800,000 within a few hours.

But Corbyn and the other independents announced they had nothing to do with the launch and that any direct debits set up should be "immediately cancelled".

'A genuinely broad church'

Last week, Hussain said that he agreed to take part in Your Party's founding because "I believed in the vision of a genuinely broad church: a pluralistic, inclusive political space capable of representing the people who have long been left behind by the mainstream parties.

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"I believed in a movement that welcomed diversity of background and thought: including working-class communities, like my own constituency, people of faith, and those who may be socially conservative yet economically left-leaning, while holding firm to a commitment to equality, justice, and anti-racism," he said. 

Hussain added the party culture has "too often felt toxic, exclusionary and deeply disheartening".

Under its new leader Zack Polanski, the momentum on the British left seems to be behind the Green Party, which has recently been polling evenly with Labour.

Many believed Your Party, with the support of the new independent MPs, could mobilise and win over voters in constituencies with large numbers of working-class and Muslim residents that the Greens might struggle to reach.

But now the party's very survival seems under question.