The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has been barred from reporting at the founding conference of Your Party in Liverpool on November 29-30. Our application was refused Wednesday evening with a message which read:

Dear applicant,

Thank you for your interest in attending the Founding Conference of Your Party. Unfortunately, your application has been unsuccessful.

We have a limited capacity for media in the ACC, and sadly that means we are not able to approve accreditation for all those who apply.

You will be able to follow debates on a livestream via our social media - so keep a look out for that.

Kind regards,
Your Party Press Team

This is a risible justification. The ACC is an enormous complex, hosting the M&S Bank Arena with a capacity of 11,000; the Exhibition Centre Liverpool with 8,100 metres squared of subdivisible floorspace; and the BT Convention Centre with a 1,350 seat auditorium, a further 3,725 metres squared of floorspace and 21 breakout rooms.

Yet apparently no space can be found for a single journalist from the WSWS, recognised internationally as an authoritative source of Marxist comment, analysis and news reporting. Published since 1998 and available in over 30 languages, the site has a regular readership of hundreds of thousands of socialist-minded workers and young people from every continent.

While blocking the WSWS, Your Party officials have made space for the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, two of Britain’s leading right-wing tabloids. Both newspapers confirmed Your Party has accredited their reporters. During the 1930s, workers dubbed Viscount Rothermere’s newspaper The Daily Heil due to its support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Express promotes the most vile and fascistic forms of anti-immigrant racism.

The BBC, the Guardian, and countless other media organisations that have been at the forefront of witch-hunting the left, including through manufactured claims of “left-wing antisemitism”, will doubtless be present. The denial of press credentials to the WSWS is an act of targeted political exclusion carried out by the Corbynite apparatus which runs Your Party.

Since its announcement, the WSWS has produced a systematic revolutionary critique of the initiative: its dead-end pseudo-reformist politics, anti-democratic manoeuvres and unprincipled factional infighting. We have been alone in doing so and won a substantial audience of workers and youth, including among Your Party’s supporters.

For all their fraudulent claims to “openness”, “accountability” and “doing politics differently”, the Corbynites in the leadership, led by Jeremy Corbyn himself, are ferociously hostile to this sort of scrutiny. Unable to justify their political positions and actions, they resort in time-honoured fashion to the methods of bureaucratic censorship and exclusion.

Similar acts characterised Keir Starmer’s tightening grip on the Labour Party, with journalists from Declassified UK and Novara Media excluded from its conference this year, and even Owen Jones of the Guardian. It was during Corbyn’s leadership that Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley was first barred from covering the event.

We wrote in July that what would go on to be called Your Party was a “Labour Party Mark II”; this is just the latest confirmation.

Despite Your Party’s efforts, the WSWS will be reporting on the founding conference in the coming days. In the meantime, we encourage workers and young people to read the coverage its organisers wish they could stop:

• Corbyn’s new left party—What it is and what it isn’t
• Corbyn’s new party and the lessons of Syriza
• Corbyn and Sultana’s new party—In their own words
• Zarah Sultana’s bid for leadership of Britain’s new left party: “Corbynism capitulated”
• The UK’s “Your Party” implodes—build the Socialist Equality Party
• Zarah Sultana speaks in Sheffield as Britain’s pseudo-left reaffirms full support for Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party
• Corbyn’s “Your Party” reboot at The World Transformed: Europe’s pseudo-left politicians display their bankruptcy
• An open letter to supporters of Corbyn’s Your Party
• Your Party’s factional warfare: The real issue for workers is reformist delusions or revolution

Messages of protest to Your Party demanding the overturn of their ban on the WSWS should be sent to: press@yourparty.uk