Reporting on the Lewisham Deptford General Committee is still not happening so here is a report from me, about what happened yesterday. We had a guest speaker on trans rights and then considered phase 1 of the democracy review, which was about CLPs and the membership. For more see below/overleaf ….
The Executive Committee had agreed to hear a guest speaker, Natasha Kennedy who came to speak about Trans-rights. If you’ve missed it, this is a debate centred on self-id occurring within the country as the Tory Government had proposed to change the law to permit a form of self-id, allowing trans-sexuals to choose their own gender identity as opposed to the current law which requires the agreement of a Doctor. The Tories, I believe, have changed their mind, but the Labour Party has agreed, as we do with membership of our BAME forums, to allow self-identifying trans-women to benefit from the positive discrimination measures that exist within the party. This is not without some controversy. Anyway, Natasha presented one side of the argument and shared her experiences.
Another thing you might have heard about is Labour’s Democracy Review. This is being conducted in three phases and the current phase is about local parties. Ammar, our Chair, summarised the problems as follows,
- How can the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) better reflect the local community?
- What changes (if any) are needed to the way we work at Constituency level?
- How do we get our increased membership more involved in the Party?
- How do we get more people into the Party?
He then asked people to call our their answers, with between a 15 sec and 30 sec comment? While not “in the traditions of the movement”, this worked very well. Many more people were able to speak and to comment on what they wanted. In retrospect, it worked well. Because of Ammar’s framing questions, we did not speak about the Socialist Societies, but I have documented on this blog, what I think and submitted my ideas to the Democracy Review.
Here is my complete matrix
| Question | solution 1 | solution 2 | solution 3 |
| How can the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) better reflect the local community? | Reduce the membership fees | Listen to the membership & engage with community organisations. | |
| What changes (if any) are needed to the way we work at Constituency level? | Adopt the Nolan Principles[1] | Increase the share of membership fees remitted to CLPs | Develop forums for Disability and LGBT |
| How do we get our increased membership more involved in the Party? | Listen to them & share power i.e. show how their ideas can change Labour | Do more Politics | Stop shaming people about doorstep work |
| How do we get more people into the Party? | Make our public officials accountable, i.e. make member’s voices count inside the Labour Party | Stop Expelling them and refusing membership to people with campaigning history |
I managed to get the Nolan Principles into the CLP submission, and when someone else raised a criticism of the Stakhanovite doorstep warriors, they were politely cheered. The CLP also agreed to ask for much more money from the subs and to reduce the membership fees.
We then turned to the motions, many of which are still left from last year.
We passed emergency motions supporting the UCU strike, and calling on the London Region rule changes to be implemented for this year’s conference.
[1] Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty & Leadership
ooOOOoo
These are personal notes taken from the meeting and not to be taken as a formal record. i.e. all opinions are my own etc