Dewsbury and Batley independent MP Iqbal Mohamed has followed Blackburn colleague Adnan Hussain in resigning from the new Your Party and, like Hussain, has done so with a blast at his treatment during his time with the Corbyn/Sultana outfit, claiming that he was subject to “many false allegations and smears… reported as fact without evidence”.
Iqbal Mohamed: off
His full resignation statement insists that he and his colleagues “have acted professionally, patiently and in good faith” at all times during his period with Your Party – the launch period of the new party that has been marked by rows, divisions, and chaos:
Over the past few months at the invitation of organisers, I have helped steward the launch of Your Party alongside Parliamentary colleagues Adnan Hussain (who voluntarily left Your Party on 14 Nov 2025), Ayoub Khan, Jeremy Corbyn, Shockat Adam and Zarah Sultana (who voluntarily left the Independent Alliance and the Your Party stewarding group on 18 Sept 2025).
After careful consideration, 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.
However, I am confident that my colleagues and I have acted professionally, patiently, and in good faith throughout.
I thank everyone who has dedicated time, energy, and commitment to building and supporting Your Party, and wish them success in their future endeavours. British politics needs a genuine, inclusive force for positive change, and I hope Your Party fulfils that role.
I 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. I am grateful for the sincerity, unity and trust that has defined our work, and look forward to continuing our shared commitment to peace, justice, equality, and truth.
However, not every allegation made against Iqbal Mohamed has been false. He told the Canary that he “fully” supports April’s Supreme Court ruling on gender that has horrified trans and human rights activists and set back the rights of trans people by decades. He also claimed as a cis man that this is not a “transphobic” view:
I fully support the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex being defined as biological male and biological female.
I fully support the rights of biological women to safe protected spaces from biological men. I also support the human rights of trans and all LGBTQ+ people.
None of the above views are transphobic. It would be misogynistic for anyone to advocate for biological women’s rights to safe and private spaces to be shared with biological males.
The EHRC trans code
The Supreme Court ruling has led directly to the appalling Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance on single-sex spaces that means that any woman, trans or not, whom attendants or security consider to look a bit ‘too’ masculine can be excluded from both women’s and men’s toilets by “proportionate means”, whatever that vague phrase is considered to mean.
This guidance has been presented, both by the EHRC and by the media, as if only trans women could possibly fall foul of it and as if that would make it acceptable. As our trans Canary colleague Alex/Rose Cocker has pointed out today:
The EHRC and its transphobic stenographers in the BBC and the Times would like you to believe that this code will only impact trans people. This is a lie, and a deliberate one at that. Transphobes like to believe that they can tell who is trans just by looking at them, because they’ve convinced themselves that all trans women look like men in dresses, and all trans men look like tomboys.
This is false. If it wasn’t, having sex without disclosing that you’re trans wouldn’t be a crime. If trans people always looked like their assigned sex, the EHRC wouldn’t have to suggest that trans men could be banned from men’s and women’s toilets. Likewise, trans advocacy and education group TransActual UK reported that:
Our research has uncovered many stories of cis people, especially gender non-conforming women, being humiliated and excluded by staff or vigilante gender police when using the appropriate facilities and shown that this has already increased since the publication of the EHRC’s draft guidance.
Trans people already face grotesque discrimination that has needed decades of work and courage to unpick to reach the already deeply-flawed situation that prevailed before the Supreme Court ruling and those gains were wiped out with the stroke of a judge’s pen to please anti-trans bigots who dress their prejudice up as ‘women’s rights’. Few of them will mourn the departure of two MPs who oppose their efforts, even if those leaving give lip service to the rights stripped by the court.
Enough, now, in Your Party
Your Party co-founder Jeremy Corbyn said in April that he is “really saddened by the level of vitriol and hatred being directed toward the trans community. We are losing our common humanity.” Zarah Sultana went much further, saying that there is no room for transphobia on the left or in Your Party and that an “ironclad commitment to trans rights is non-negotiable” for any socialist party.
The party needs to decide whose position it is taking and whether trans rights really are human rights that it will fight for as hard as those of any other minoritised person or community. If it does, then it must stop ignoring the rampant transphobia that exists in its ranks – and make sure that Your Party is not a place for anyone with those views.
Featured image via the Canary
