Compliance

One of Shami Chakrabarti’s key recommendations based on the assessment that the Labour Party doesn’t have the skills and knowledge to run a legally safe disciplinary process; she recommends the appointment of a General Counsel and increased training and legal accreditation of members of the Compliance Unit.

I question whether the Compliance Unit should provide the secretariat for the NCC and the Disputes committee. In the private sector, the role of Compliance is to ensure that the whole organisation keeps to the law. It requires a segregation of duties to perform this work. Chakrabarti has recognised this that the same unit cannot prosecute disciplinary offences and ensure that the prosecution is within the law. In corporate governance terms, Compliance is a second line of defence. It should be ensuring that the membership department does its job within the law.

Further complication in structuring the Compliance function is the EU’s recent General Data Protection Regulation. This states that any private sector organisation employing more than 250 staff must have a Data Protection Officer, who is adequately skilled and resourced. This person must understand the Law and “adequate technical protection”. I suspect that the Labour Party head office and the Compliance Unit lacks these skills too.

 

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Legal Nonsense

Labour NEC going on about whether the incumbent  , McNicol receives this legal advice placing all documentation under legal hold against destruction. It also states that the Henderson aka Doughty Chambers advice was commissioned by the Labour Party. Henderson says he’s on the ballot paper since the rules by which he is challenged are those where there is no vacancy. …

Thick

There is an episode of “The thick of it” where Nicola Murray, the Leader of the Labour Party is convinced by her advisors in the interests of common sense and bipartisanship to adopt two of the coalition’s policies. She chooses or has chosen for her two poicies so horrible, that the coalition drop them. How’s that welfare bill vote and supporting Osborne’s mandatory budget surplus work for you now? …

The day after the night before

The day after the night before

That was a shock, a soul deadening shock. In the words of the meme, I felt a grief for the loss of the future I thought I and my children had. How did this happen? How could we have voted to follow the corrupt and the vain, Johnson and Farage. The answer may have been most rapidly and accurately identified by John Harris of the Guardian in an article, entitled “If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out” in which he identifies those whom we’ve known about for years, who can be described in a number of ways. In my micro blog post, “Pebbles”, I describe them as ‘globalisation’s losers’, the working class whose towns, communities and institutions have been smashed during the neo-liberal ascendency, communities that Labour stopped listening to and representing in 1997 leading to a loss of 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010. Making this even more problematic for Labour is that nearly ⅔ of Labour’s voters, voted remain, and just as globalisation’s losers cannot be ignored, nor can Labour’s majority of remainers. What is to be done? …

Labour’s coming leadership election

Labour’s coming leadership election

I was hoping to write a piece on a response to the “Leave”vote and a response to the Chakrabarti Inquiry but Ann Black of Labour’s NEC in a circular wrote and asked what her maillist thought of the shenanigans. I had to reply and decided to share it with you all. She stated she planned to vote to include Jeremy on the ballot paper, which I support but asked for opinion on if there should be a freeze date for inclusion on the electoral roll and what to do about registered supporters. I argue to include all members, including those that have just joined in the ballot for Leader. I also argue that the Party should offer its supporters an opportunity to register and join in the ballot. I also commented that the collapse of the National Policy Forum is an opportunity. …