The fringe & TWT

I was a delegate this year, and so attendance at even the official fringe meetings was not easy, the conference is a very full day. The one thing I have observed is that the reality is that “The World Transformed” creates an additional paywall on attending the fringe and this year they were poor at advertising their events, although I did not buy a ticket and so may not have been as well informed as I might. I am not sure this is truly the way to go, Conference is expensive enough as it is and you’ll know from much of my writing that charging for material which can be distributed for free is both morally & economically wrong, but also restricts the power of your message.

The fact is that TWT competes with the Labour Fringe, although it might be much cheaper to organise inside TWT if you get permission.

Others have made pointed comments about their views on the relevance of some sessions to a socialist party. …

Reference back

Every reference back on the NPF report was carried although with the new majority on the NPF this may change but the key thing is that no notice is required! The platform and front bench can be taken by surprise. I see more restrictions on this being written into the new Conference Standing orders. …

Schools

Today we debated Education, I had been campaigning for this to be discussed to develop strong anti-academy policy, I think we got half way there. I wrote a speech but wasn’t called.

I wanted to make two points, the first is that the purpose of the Education system is to create a public good and not a revenue stream for the private sector and secondly that the profit motive clearly conflicts wit pedagogical excellence. (Someone else did get that word into their speech and like me if I’d been called stumbled on it.)

I am sorry that the words are so weak on the FEs.

Here’s Angela’s speech,

The motion text is below or overleaf.  …

The digital equivalent of stop & search

I got to conference in time for the Justice and Home Affairs policy seminar, although not on time. I was called to speak and I asked about the investigatory powers act; I explained a bit about it since most don’t share my monomania and described how it works in that the telcos and ISSPs collect your call data records and internet usage records and make them available to any of 28 law enforcement agencies, all of this without proving probable cause and that the retrieval is not subject to judicial oversight. I said,

It’s the digital equivalent of stop and search.

I noted that its predecessor has been struck down, that Human Rights law is designed to protect us against the state and asked, noting that Labour had voted for this law, what we were going to do. …

A team huddle

We met as a delegation and agreed to vote in the priorities ballot for the first four topics that we’d debated at the GC apart from Brexit which the Unions were prioritising. We had learnt that Momentum were supporting our motion on Immigration and Justice for Windrush which meant it was likely to be and so chose our team to attend the composite. We had one of the motion’s authors present and so agreed to send her, and also sent one of our delegates from our BAME committee; we are only permitted two attendees. We discussed the Democracy Review proposals including the trigger ballot reform proposal but could not come to an agreement. We decided to individually listen and decide a.k.a. a free vote. …

Who’s missing?

In my last article I reported on the results of the 1st Card Vote and there’s some interesting insights to be learned.

Firstly the Affiliates and CLP votes are counted seperately, normalised as percentages and then added together, and expressed as a percentage. The Affiliates have 50% and CLPs have 50% of the final result.

1.84 million affiliate votes were cast, and ~385,000 CLP votes. That’s a lot of CLP votes missing. The card vote values should be based on membership (individual members in good standing) as at 31 December 2017, which was 564,000. (That seems a bit high based on press reporting, but the source is the Electoral Commission).

32% missing!

This means that ~32% of the membership were not represented. I was to hear later in he week that only 17 Scottish CLPs are in attendance. My CLP is fortunate in that it could fund a large delegation and considers that policy formulation is important but it’s clear that many CLPs either cannot afford to send a delegation and/or do not consider it important enough. In my evidence to the Democracy Review I argued that the cost of conference should be borne by the NEC, As Diana Holland, the Tresurer reported last year and was to report later; the Party is now debt free. …