The Trade Union Gateway

Sadly, Clive Lewis didn’t make it onto the Labour Leadership ballot paper, and we move onto the next stage. The candidates now need support from the affiliates or from 33 CLPs.

The affiliates rule is,

At least 3 affiliates (at least 2 of which shall be trade union affiliates) compromising 5 per cent of affiliated membership

Some of them, LIsa Nandy, Emily Thornbury and Jess Phillips, I am talking about you, will have some difficulty reaching this threshold, there are now only 12 Unions affiliated, six of which are above 5%. …

Accepting or rejecting Labour’s members

It’s that time again, people are scrutinising applications to join the Labour Party in great detail. I was asked my advice, and wrote and posted this. I am strongly of the view that we should on the whole take people at face value and believe them if they state they’ve changed their mind. I think we are all agreed that expulsions and exclusions should only be used in exceptional cases; they must not become a tactic of member management as was sought to be done in 2015/2016. Before you read the bollocks below/overleaf, if you want to join the Labour Party, you can do so here. The rest of this article looks at Labour’s membership rules; there are two ways of being expelled from the LP and one way in which membership can be denied. …

What happened?

What happened?

So what happened? Where does it leave me and my allies? I have been doing a lot of reading much of which I have bookmarked on my diigo feed, tagged GE2019. I wanted to write something deep, insightful and original, but others got there first. The result has two highlights, the loss of seats in the East Midands, North East, East Coast, primarily leave seats, primarily seats that have voted Labour forever but secondly an overall loss of votes to “Remain” parties. Labour’s so-called Lexiters were quick out the gate blaming Labour’s promise for a second referendum as the core cause of the loss of these seats. Reality requires a deeper look; it also requires the recognition that some of those seats will have been lost because remain supporting labour voters chose to vote elsewhere. Would the result have been better or worse if we had not promised the second referendum? How many of these seats did we lose by less than the Green/LibDem vote? How many of the seats in the Leave voting majorities that we held, might we have lost if remain supporters had been less committed to us? It could have been worse! For a more detailed insight I need to wait for the Electoral Commission spreadsheet. I say more below/overleaf …  …