Closing the Stable Door II

Tye Labour Party’s inquiry, now known as the “Forde Inquiry” after its independent chair, Dr Martin Forde, into the leaking of its investigation into the activities of its complaints team and senior management has published a call for evidence. It’s web site is at fordeinquiry,org and the call for evidence page is here and behind the image.

I plan to make a submission based on Unanswered Questions, also Closing the Stable Door and a third one based on the various acts in breach of the member’s charter, the rules and the law which impacted me personally.  …

Mushroom Therapy

I have just bookmarked Crispin Flintoff’s video made for Stand up for Labour, as part of his campaign to get the Party to spend more on the CLPs by means of remission of a higher proportion of the membership subs.

From 29:30 Dave from Milton Keynes, kicks off a discussion about the management and reporting of the Party’s finances. Two NEC members, Gurinder Singh and Jon Lansman comment on the exclusion of the NEC from the management of money. It’s really quite shocking. …

Labour Leak – Closing the Stable Door

Labour Leak – Closing the Stable Door

This blog article is one of several albeit the first published on the labourleak. It focuses on fixing the problems identified and implied in the #labourleak in a holistic way. It looks at the controls, briefly on why they failed, how the private sector manages, the question of Union collusion, IT standards & controls, the disciplinary process, the NEC and if genuine professionalism can possibly improve the quality and honesty of the decisions taken by the Labour Party; it concludes by proposing that the rules be changed to place a duty on all role holders to conform to the Nolan Principles, and that whistle blowers have better protection, but on the way recommends that the Labour Party use a series of external certifications, ask the Auditors to to inspect that payments and receipts are handled according to the Party's financial control rules, increase the professionalism of the staff and NEC committees, all of this to guarantee to its members and staff that good practice and not arbitrary actions are the guiding principles of judgement and decision.

About site navigation and search

About site navigation and search

I have tweaked the navigation features on this blog, I have added a category filter at the bottom of all pages and note that for those of you for whom the feedburner subscriptions don’t work, you can use visual ping to set up a visualping,io alert. The tag cloud is still in place and augmented by a 3D version of it. The footnote section of this site also documents the rss/xml feeds as does the feeds page for the site, and the categories page documents the category names. For anything else there remains the search widget.

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Post Brexit Citizenship

Post Brexit Citizenship

I attended the LME/New Europeans webinar on citizenship and Brexit yesterday, here is what I heard and learned.

There are political and economic demands, if we look at the political demands, they include

  • Citizenship rights for all residents, including the right to vote
  • The need for a fast and cheap route for citizenship, many residents have been here for decades
  • The UK currently permits dual citizenship, this should be retained and we need to argue that those European states that prohibit it should allow foreigners to have dual citizenship, this will benefit those in the UK and UK citizens in the EU
  • The current legal regime in the UK means that the hostile environmemnt will be extended to many EU citizens who are long term residents, it shows the injustice of the hostile environment; it must be repealed and both the health surcharge and NRPF must be abolished.
  • Access to Erasmus must be maintained.

Three insights were offered about the UK’s european diaspora, 80% of it are of working age, the stripping of their votes after 15 years absence is hurtful and demeaning. The likely loss of intra-European/Schengen freedom of movement is also a significant loss of rights.

How does Labour and its progressive allies work to defend the rights of its European diaspora.

British citizenship and naturalisation rules need to be exemplary and include voting rights for all residents and then we can argue for reciprocal citizenship rights. The post transition agreements need to ensure that British Citizens in the EU keep their rights to free movement. ( The proposed retaining of the British Isles Common Travel Area might be an effective precedent and enabler for this change.) Once the UK is behaving decently, then it might be possible to argue for fast track citizenship processes for British citizens resident in the EU. (Most European countries will need to consider their language qualification rules, as will the UK if it wants reciprocity.

One of the problems with the reforms immediately above is that it would seem to be Tory Party policy to retain our unfair and racist immigration rules, and thus changing them to make reciprocity worth offering will be politically very difficult.

Another reform in the EU which would make life easier for the UK diaspora would be movement towards a common social security policy. The irony being that this might be more likely now we’re out than if we’d stayed, although, still not easy. …

More Masonry

Paul Mason comments on the Labour Together report; the article examines how to reassemble a majority voting coalition, he argues it’s not just policy, it’s campaigning culture and this I agree about; he also argues that we must be ready to go into coalition with the SNP as we cannot win sufficient Scottish seats while Scottish Labour holds a unionist position. I think he maybe right about economism being sufficient but is too hopeful about Momentum, certainly the election campaigns to its national committee itself suggests that neither its leadership nor its challengers are ready to learn the lessons on political culture that he advocates. The Left needs to recognise why Corbyn’s coalition has fractured and learn how to rebuild a new one otherwise it’s in a minority in the Party and country. …

Labour’s next council slates

It looks like the Labour Party plan to go ahead with Candidate selections for the 2021 local authority elections and possibly the 2022 whole council elections. This is despite the lockdown, and due to the 2019 Conference Rule changes which planned to change the committee structures that manage this process, the bureaucracy’s response was to suspend the old committees and prohibit their AGMs. For most areas, this wouldn’t have mattered, since AGMs must take place after May and the meetings would have to have been postponed due to lock down although the size of the meetings would have made meeting and voting via video conference possible.

I have written previously about the rule change, in this article, which includes a link to the rule change which should now be incorporated in the current Rule Book.

Reform of Labours Candidate Selection

I am worried about the transition to the college based LGCs and I have written a “principles” document, to highlight some outstanding issues and challenges, which includes the size, the electorate for all 3 colleges, candidate eligibility, counting abstentions, conflict of interest, the nature of the due diligence and that TU & CLP delegates are included in the selection committees and that the Procedures Secretary is not a councillor. However it seems that the selections will be done by the incumbent LCFs, so we can postpone those worries.

One area of concern, irrespective of the committee structure, is that the due diligence of candidates is often onerous and factionally biased, I believe it is necessary that candidate assessments may only withhold an endorsement on the grounds that a candidate is not eligible to stand, fails to meet the Labour Party’s eligibility rules, states that they will not conform to the rules on Group conduct and/or other Labour Party rules or for other good reason; the holding of opinions on policy shall not be a reason for non-endorsement.

Two further issues, which ideally required rule changes are the existence of trigger ballots, which it seems for Councillors are not going to be held, but we are unclear what will happen to the Borough Mayors.

The other issue is about conflicts of interest. At the moment the rules only state that familial or marriage relationships are considered conflicts of interest. We should seek to ensure that business relationships, some other commercial relationship such as a rent agreements, a supervisory/supervised relationship in employment or any other issue which might reasonably deemed to exist are declared and appropriately managed. I have written a rule change on this but it is a direct textual amendment to Appendix 4, and Conference can’t amend the Appendices, and there isn’t going to be one. The rule change can be amended to be valid by amending Chapter 5.

Labour Briefing published a scorecard on the LCF’s and found it wanting, an article called, “Local Government Committees – Has the NEC scored an own-goal?“, it seems we won’t find out. This article was written late last year after Conference changed the rules to introduce the ⅓, ⅓, ⅓ based LGC. …