Primaries

Labour’s rules on Leadership elections, (and candidate selections) would be illegal in the US where the business of political parties is too important to be left to parties, despite the fact they write the laws. Everyone with the right to vote can register for primaries. …

Requisition

Special  Meetings of Labour Party General Committees must be called at the on the written request of at least one third of the affiliated organisations and Party units which are or would be entitled to send delegates to this CLP under a delegate structure. (That probably includes the Co-op, but excludes Young Labour, who do not send delegates to CLP General Committees.) …

Embarrassing

The GMB leadership are breaking a Congress mandate to consult members on ‘supporting nomination’ for Labour Leadership election. The usual suspects support this, members had their say when they elected delegates to Congress and it’s not a good use of money, the money would be better spent recruiting members to affiliated membership of the Labour Party, and let them take part in the decision not fanny around getting you and the CEC of the hook of an embarrassing mandate; I would be interested in hearing the full story though.

If you are a member of one of the Unions affiliated to the Labour Party, were a member before the 12th Jan., and pay the political levy you can still register to vote in the Leadership election, by using https://support.labour.org.uk/

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More on Brexit

More on Brexit

Many the implications of the vote to leave the EU has been exercising my mind. I have finally got my notes & thoughts to publish my initial views on the politics of the aftermath; this article attempts to limit itself to the events and thoughts of the first week after the referendum. I have published them as at the date I started my storify where I collected the sources I wanted to quote. This is because it is one of a planned series, I plan to follow up with a piece on immigration, one on Labour Party and Left unity and one on the mutation of capitalism and politics.

One of the reasons for my delay was that I was asked for a number of quotes in the IT trade press which took some writing time. I have posted the complete quotes as three articles in linkedin pulse, on Cybersecurity, Privacy & Trade and the single market, covering innovation, TTIP & Privacy and net neutrality. …

Cadence

The Labour Party’s ban on meetings does not include CLP Executive Committees. These will often have chosen not to meet over the month of August, but they probably should even if only to approve (or more accurately, not object to) new members. …

Free Streams

Dave Winer posts about twitter and the free internet, at the centre is the pithy quote, “If there’s a platform vendor, it’s not the Internet; If there is no platform vendor, it is.”. He identifies the need for a vendor free messaging service and asks for some help. Personally I use wordpress, RSS and planet to stream out my messages, long and short and this blog is an attempt to locate my short messages and less formed thoughts in one place and format. I am obviously not necessarily so successful on the short bit.

One insight I can offer is that last year, I looked at pump.io  and made some notes. I was interested in a messaging solution that wasn’t SMTP, was open source and could/would be encrypted on the wire. pump.io was the successor of Laconica, a product colleagues at Sun had used to build an internal micro blog service. Last year I got diverted by docker and building a test platform. I have probably solved my functional needs initially by using ello, and latterly by establishing this blog. I plan to return to pump.io in the very near future, I wonder if it’s part of the answer to Dave Winer’s question.

 

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Suspensions

It’s common knowledge that the Labour Party has suspended all party meetings, although there are three reasons for which meetings may still be held. Given their justification, that of exercising a duty of care for the safety of members, this must be disproportionate in the legal sense of the word. …