Alf Up A Tree

What’s striking about The Canary’s piece today is how confidently it repeats one person’s narrative while skipping the most basic facts about the Independent Alliance MPs role, conference organisation and MOU. The article leans heavily on the idea that Zarah has been “shut out” of organising conference. But none of the IA MPs are organising conference or assemblies. Their temporary role was to steward the birthing process through to conference, including: - setting up Your Party Ltd - securing EC registration - appointing an Executive Conference Committee with the experience to deliver assemblies, the founding conference and essential administration until members elect the leadership and CEC. After that, their role ends. When Zarah joined the IA, she agreed to collective, majority decision making. She later proposed that she personally run conference, and the IA voted 5–1 for an executive team with the necessary track record. The “sexist boys’ club” framing appeared after that vote. None of this context appears in the article. The Canary also presents Zarah as a heroic figure who “took a massive legal risk alone” by taking over MOU because “no one else would”. Missing entirely is the fact that she became a director of MOU on 28 Oct - after governance and data-handling problems had already arisen around the clone site and the unauthorised 18 Sept portal. She was already directly involved in that situation in a way the other IA MPs were not. Directors of Your Party Ltd have a duty to avoid conflicts of interest and cannot responsibly take control of an external company where compliance issues are unresolved, liabilities unclear, and obligations could conflict. That is simply basic good governance. Instead, The Canary retells a version of events and frames the whole thing as a “power struggle” - rather than what it actually is: the need to sort out poor governance and ensure the new party does not inherit liabilities it didn’t create. Yesterday we saw left media: Novara Media and Turn Left, repeating provably false claims about the IA MPs being “single issue Gaza”. Today we see an uncritical, unverified story about conference and MOU. The pattern is the same: dramatic narrative over basic fact checking. We should all be asking the obvious question: who benefits when the real governance issues are replaced with a personality story that simply isn’t supported by the record? Unity built on sand collapses. Integrity and accountability aren’t optional. thecanary.co/opinion/2025/11…