More reading about re-selections, and I came across this. Patrick Seyd describes the case of the Sheffield Brightside deselection of Eddie Griffiths that considers all the other factors at work, see; Patrick Seyd, The rise and fall of the labour left, pp.58-60. I can’t find this for free, I wonder what happened. …
The Death Agony of Social Democracy
In the aftermath of the Stoke & Copeland bye-elections the pressure on Labour, it’s leader and his supporters increased. I made a storify shortly after the event, although it took me a couple of months to finish. I have exposed it here and because of the importance I place on the Avril Paper, I have copied the text of the storify, albeit slightly edited to this article, so you can read it as originally posted in the frame, or via html.
The slightly amended HTML version can be read overleaf, or below. …
Inclusion
While looking up the Labour’s rules for something else, I came across this gem, which seems in fundamental disagreement with the behaviour of the General Secretary and Compliance Unit in auto-excluding people for “supporting … organisations other than official Labour “.
Many Labour supporters are also progressive campaigners, community activists and social entrepreneurs who forge positive change in their own neighbourhoods. We value this contribution and should embrace their activism. We need dialogue and to work in partnership with our Labour supporters. The Party’s organisation needs to match the way people live and reach out beyond its membership to our Labour supporters. Staying permanently in touch with our supporters, our local communities and the voters we seek to serve will mean we stay in government and are always a contender for government.
It’s in Appendix 1 NEC statement on the importance of our members. It’s a rule that means the auto-exclusion cannot be just applied to any one person, whoever they are wants, and therefore cannot be automatic. …
Queen’s Speech and Digital Liberty
I made a storify about the Tory’s post election parliamentary programme, focusing on Digital Liberty issues. I transferred this to the blog, as at the original date of publication, once Storify announced they were abandoning the service.
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Too long?
There’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on about whether Momentum is going to launch a mass purge of the PLP. I doubt they have the organisational skills, however I was interested in just how long members of the PLP had served as MPs and what the politics of the Party were when originally selected. So I scraped a list of the parliament site and organised it as a table. This note talks about the profile of the longevity of PLP members, and which leadership made them. Further thoughts on the political consequences have put in the comments section. …
Free Speech
I wrote a piece for the Clarion on Digital Rights and the new Parliament’s likely agenda. The purpose of the article is to show what might be done if a Labour Government were elected and legislated to allow the internet to be a tool for activism and organising. It’ll take a campaign though, Labour’s record is not great! …
Vulnerable
This popped up in one of my news feeds, it’s at the Daily Mail online site, but interesting and informed. Hastings argues that the two new ‘Fleet’ carriers planned for the Royal Navy, although unfinished are already obsolete.
He argues that they are very expensive and their strike power could be replaced with cruise missiles and drones which require considerably cheaper launch platforms. It is proposed that we buy US F35 warplanes to fly off them which are so expensive, that the numbers to be purchased have been reduced twice. The F35 is multi-role which means that it has an air defence capability but missiles (if you have enough) are good for fleet defence. Hastings also states, that the Navy now only has 17 surface warships all of which would all be needed to defend the carriers at sea which would be very vulnerable to the modern surface to surface anti-ship missiles.
He argues for their cancellation or mothballing, but while the decisions were taken under a Labour Government, the Tories have had seven years to do something about it and inherited responsibility with the publication of the 2010 Strategic Defence Review. …