Not yet decided!

Labour Conference failed yesterday to take the opportunity to declare itself a remain party. I am of course deeply disappointed. I am told of resignations already.

The debate was conducted in the best traditions of the Labour Party which means lots of games were played. The quality of the debate was not good but one or two speeches shone out.

The Party Leadership, which does not want to declare for remain, at least not for now had been so frightened of the result that it sought to agree a statement; this would and did allow them to insert new words onto the Agenda, although the fear that they would repeat the 2016 trick of ensuring that an NEC statement supplanted member’s motions was not repeated. Otherwise only the words proposed by member organisations can be debated. They had great difficulty getting their statement carried, convening two meetings, cancelling one and eventually agreeing by email.

Jon Lansman documented his dissatisfaction with the means, at least, if not the content of the decision but strangely Momentum changed their mind, and I believe asked their supporters with “listen & decide” mandates to oppose the Remain position (Composite 13) Composite 13 Brexit lab19 and support the NEC Statement NEC Statement Brexit( basically the Harold Wilson position) and Composite 14 Composite 14 Brexit lab19 which is basically, No Tory Brexit. This advice was obviously not meant to be taken by CLPs with strong mandates although I am not sure everyone that got the memo understood that!

The Composite meeting was long, although not as long as the meeting on the Green New Deal; the Leadership firstly tried their tactic from last year arguing the only one motion should be put and that the Composite should be agreed by consensus, which since they were in a minority again, wasn’t going to happen this time. The huge problem the platform had is that the large majority of the members of the composite meeting had mandates to support the words that ended up in the “Remain Now” motion. The other problem that Remainers have is that much of the Leader loyalists are actually Lexiters influenced by the Communist Party and economistic Trotskyists, places from which their leadership came. WRT to the composite meeting, the lesson from 2018 had been learnt,

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!

The debate can be seen on Youtube; the Party have published the whole afternoon session.

It was not a high quality debate as there is little meeting of minds, but to give you a taste, here’s Simon Hannah moving Composite 13.

The bulk of the pro-leadership arguments were straight forward personal loyalism; there was a bit about losing our already lost heartlands, but not so much and some arguing we are the party of the 99% we need to bring the country together. To my mind the argument that we have more remain votes to lose was not made powerfully enough but there is more than sufficient idealism in Urte Mackene’s speech.

There can be “no socialism in one country;I wonder when that became true?

Kier Starmer summed up the debate, you can see his speech here and then in the best traditions of the Labour movement the vote was stitched up and a card vote denied! It interests me that Jennie Formby arrived on the platform 10 minutes before the end of the debate and played a critical role in guiding the Chair, who first called Composite 13 carried, on advice seemed to change her mind, and then denied a Card Vote.

Card votes are more accurate than one person’s judgement, and a show of hands overestimates the power of small CLPs and underestimates the power of the Unions. It was wrong  to deny it to conference and the membership and reminds me of the bad old days of 2016. In my mind this was done to demoralise those who had campaigned to see Composite 13 carried, to prove that they’re in charge but as others have said, the effort exhausted them.

But we’ve come so far … is it one more push.