Renewing Party Democracy

Renewing Party Democracy

The LP NEC is having an away day to discuss reforming its rules and internal democracy, mainly in the light of the massive increase in membership to more than half a million members.  Here’s my manifesto for a member led party, I hope to supplement it with some ideas on the use of IT to aid in policy development and expressing the membership voice, but in terms of rules reform …

What do with the registered supporters?

What do with the registered supporters?

Ann Black reports on the September, pre-conference National Executive Committee at Left Futures. These are clearly hard things to write since getting a balance between hope for the future and a description of what’s happening can be hard. I felt the need to comment. on the running of the election where the point needs to be made that barely legal is not good enough. The coming exclusion of registered supporters is a mistake, and the party has changed; most MPs mandate to speak for the Labour Party has expired as has the utility of the National Policy Forum.  …

That time of Year again, Labour’s Elections

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 [See what Ellie has to say here…]. 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. …