I have just cast my votes in the Labour Party’s internal elections. I am eligable to vote in the Member’s section of the NEC, and for the National Policy Forum. I resolved when I rebooted my Labour Party membership not to vote either of the slates that run for the NEC. In voting for the new Leader, we voted to move on from the factions that existed and ran riot throughout the Labour Governments. I feel that Progress and the CLPD and its interregnum brand the Grass Roots Alliance shared the leadership on the NEC and let the Party down. So I don’t vote for them.
For the NEC, I voted for Joanna Baxter and Ellie Reeves, Joanna because of this and this, and Ellie because she, until recently, was a CLP comrade . The election statements in the booklet are pretty much reduced to, I’ll work hard, represent the members and report back. Hard to choose on the back of that; it’s not that I want lazy elitists, but I want to know more about their views, what they stand for and what sort of party they want. There was one brave exception to this rule.
In fact looking at Joanna’s reports, I wonder what the NEC does; New Labour gutted it, I wonder if it could have met my expectations and acted as a brake on some of the more egregious right wing excesses.
I voted for Gavron, Heather, Ogilvy and Ryan for the National Policy Forum, non of them said they’d vote for its abolition, but Gary Heather actually talked about rebuilding the authority of Conference. I don’t know if he’d seen the CLPD proposed rule changes, publicised here at Left Futures, I shall certainly be giving them a good read and seeing if my local comrades want to support them. …