London Labour Party – Right wing and officials making up the rules.

By Ray Goodspeed – Co-Secretary, Leyton and Wanstead CLP (personal capacity)

All over the country the Labour right, often relying on the Labour Party paid officials, have played fast and loose with the rules of natural justice and even with rules of the party in order to clamp down on the rights of the membership. London Region is no exception.

The latest example is the fiasco of London Regional Conference. The Regional Executive Committee, elected by members, decided to have this year’s conference in November. The rules are categoric that they have the right to set the date. On 1^st June 2021, the Regional Director sent an email to all London Constituency Labour Party (CLP) secretaries, informing them that the dates would now be 24-25^th July, just over seven weeks away! Protests by the Regional Exec, which is firmly controlled by the left, were simply brushed aside.

The deadline for selecting delegates, nominating members of the Executive and submitting motions for discussion at the conference was set at 14^th July. Anyone active in the Labour Party will know that the democratic structures rely on local branches being given time to discuss these matters, which then feed into a General Committee (GC) or All-Members Meeting (AMM).

In my CLP, the June GC (which was our Annual General Meeting) had to be brought forward to 9^th June to meet another tight deadline for National Conference (which was eventually extended anyway). Our normal July GC would be too late, so a Special GC has had to be called for 13^th July, just one day before the deadline, in order to allow our branches and affiliated organisations time to give seven days’ notice, meet, discuss and vote. Some branches will only meet on 12^th July and will have to send their motions and nominations to the secretary (me!) immediately.

Flawed process

Moreover, if there is any vote needed, I will have less than a day to organise an electronic email voting system. The results of the votes in the GC will then have to be sent to the regional office the next day. Such disruptive and confusing procedures are clearly designed to make it as hard as possible for ordinary members to play any serious role in deciding regional policy or electing a regional leadership. This flawed process relies on local party officers being almost permanently on standby, regardless of work or family commitments, and in spite of the stress such deadlines may cause. If enough hurdles are erected, their hope is that this or that CLP will fail to organise themselves in time and fail to send delegates, make nominations or agree a motion for conference.

But it gets worse. The deadline for emergency resolutions is just one week later – 21^st July! That is obviously absurd. Even if some unforeseen cataclysmic event happened during that week, no CLP could possibly meet in time to discuss it, unless, by sheer chance, they already had a meeting scheduled for that week.

But beyond the absurdity and the chaos, this is part of a political strategy of dominance of party procedures to fit the whims of right-wing officials. There have been several examples of CLP chairs and secretaries and other officers being suspended for not following guidelines sent from the national General Secretary, or a regional equivalent, about what issues can and cannot be discussed. These guidelines have no basis whatsoever in the rules. Those suspended are the very same people who give their time and energy, for free, trying to meet unreasonable bureaucratic demands, as well as actually running the local party and organising day-to-day campaigning.

In Chingford and Woodford Green, the chair and vice-chair were suspended on spurious grounds, based on a selective secret filming of a GC meeting. Then, the remaining officers were denied access for months and months to any of the Labour Party databases. The party was effectively run by regional office. When the secretary tried to work around this, he was then suspended. This is a party in a seat that was one of the handful in the country to see a swing to Labour in 2019 and ran an inspiring, model ground campaign, drawing in hundreds of volunteers, to almost unseat Iain Duncan Smith. And they say the left don’t care about winning!

Finally, after months of CLP officers being unable to contact their own members or call any meetings, regional office finally called an AGM and the right prevailed, in what was always a finely balanced CLP. It is probably true that some of the more left-wing members were simply sickened and demoralised and drifted away from activity.

In the Borough of Waltham Forest, which includes my CLP and Chingford WG, as well as Walthamstow, the Local Campaign Forum (LCF), which is responsible for co-ordinating election campaigning on a borough-wide basis and for running the councillor selection processes, has not held a single meeting since 2018! This was ignored by regional officials, even, it must be said, while the Labour Party was nominally controlled by the Corbyn left.

Nonsense

During that period, the LCF would have been controlled (just) by the delegates from the two left CLPs. So, they simply did not hold the AGM and it failed to meet at all for three years. Then the old officers resigned and new officers could not be elected to replace them. Back in March 2021, the three CLP chairs tried to re-constitute it and wrote to all the delegates, but the regional director banned the meeting. Apparently, the LCF could not be called because…..it had no officers who were authorised to call it! Can you imagine any other section of the Labour and trade union movement where such nonsense could be tolerated?

Now that two of the three CLPs are in the hands of the right, and there is a pressing need to select council candidates for the 2022 London Borough elections in May, the regional officials say they are going to re-call the LCF, and start the selection processes. Back in September 2017, while the LCF was under the control of the old guard, they did their best to ensure that almost no left candidates got through to the “panel” ie the list of those vetted and authorised to stand for selection. For a 60-seat council, members were presented with 64 possible candidates!

But that was not good enough for them. All selection processes need a “freeze date”, ie the date when the membership figures are calculated and then frozen and no new members can be added. There is a minimum period of time that someone has to be a member before they can vote. This is usually a few months before. In September 2017 they set the freeze-date in early December 2016 – over nine months before the selection meetings and a full 17 months before the actual borough election in May 2018. This ruled out 40% of the membership of Leyton and Wanstead CLP, overwhelmingly those who joined to support Corbyn – co-incidentally, I am sure. Strange that when Starmer was elected leader, the freeze-date was just a few weeks before. After all this, nearly all the sitting councillors were just nodded through.

Self-perpetuating little oligarchies

So, the LCF is a crucial battle ground and it seems any kind of shenanigans is OK to keep control of it. And this is why the date of London Region Conference is an important political issue. If a member who wants to be a councillor disagrees with the decision of the LCF, they can appeal and most times this will involve members of the Regional Executive. Back in 2017 this was controlled by the right and the appeals came to nought. But once the Exec fell to the left, this presented a danger to the self-perpetuating little local oligarchies that run local government in London.

In May a local member in my constituency who wanted to fight a by-election was ruled out of the short-list, but appealed to the regional executive – and won. She went on to fight an impressive campaign and win the seat. The right, together with their allies among the majority of officials, cannot allow that to happen all across London in council after council so they are desperate to weaken the left grip on the regional Exec before the candidate selection process starts. That’s why we are running round like idiots, trying to implement a stupid set of deadlines.

Regional officials are intervening in a number of London Labour parties to micro-manage their AGMs and the election of officers and, crucially, delegates to regional and national conferences. In Dulwich and West Norwood (DaWN) a local branch, following advice from the Governance and Legal Unit, held elections for GC delegates under an STV voting system and the left won some delegates. Region intervened and asserted that, after all, the elections should have been first past the post and insisted on re-running the vote. You guessed it; the right swept the board.

And again – all representative bodies in the Labour Party have to be equally balanced between men and women. Even if not enough women can be found to stand, the posts or delegate positions must remain vacant until the balance can be maintained. This is common knowledge among party activists. But after Regional Official ran the process in DaWN, they not only had delegations from branches that were not balanced, but the CLP Executive now has only three women members out of 14!! This is extraordinary stuff. It seems that gender equality and the rule book can be just thrown out of the window whenever it suits factional purposes.

Vote for a left Regional Executive

They think that active rank and file party members will just put up with all this but the war will go on, even if some battles are lost. The next step is to ensure that the London Region Executive stays on the left.  The following left candidates are standing and the entire left should support them: –

• Division 1 – London Assembly constituencies of South-West (Hounslow, Kingston, Richmond) and Ealing & Hillingdon – Rheian Davies (Lawyer, REC member 2019-present) and Ranjeev Walia (REC member 2019-present, 2019 Twickenham PPC)
• Division 2 – London Assembly constituencies of West Central (Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster) and Merton & Wandsworth – Murad Qureshi (London Assembly member 2004-16, 2020-21) and Katrina Ffrench (Founder and Director, Unjust UK)
• Division 3 – London Assembly constituencies of Lambeth & Southwark and Croydon & Sutton – Julie Setchfield (CLP Secretary, Croydon Central) and Sam Foster (Bermondsey and Old Southwark)
• Division 4 – London Assembly constituencies of Greenwich & Lewisham and Bexley & Bromley – Munir Malik (REC member 2019-present), and Amy Rushton (Social worker)
• Division 5 – London Assembly constituencies of City & East (City, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Barking & Dagenham) and Havering & Redbridge – Bob Littlewood (Redbridge Cllr and REC member 2019-present) and Sabia Kamali (CEO of the Sister’s Forum)
• Division 6 – London Assembly constituencies of North-East (Hackney, Islington, Waltham Forest and Enfield and Haringey – Emina Ibrahim (Haringey Cllr, REC member 2019-present) and Tom Taylor (CLP Secretary, Leyton and Wanstead CLP, former London Regional Secretary of the PCS trade union)
• Division 7 – London Assembly constituencies of Barnet & Camden and Brent & Harrow – – Jumbo Chan (Brent Cllr and REC member 2019-present) and Shezan Renny (Activist, Holborn and St Pancras CLP)
• London-wide CLP positions – Aydin Dikerdem (Wandsworth Cllr, former community organiser) and Sasha das Gupta (Newham Cllr)

In addition, CLPs can also make nominations for the positions of Women’s Officer, Disabilities Officer, Ethnic Minorities Officer, and LGBT Officer. These positions will be elected by an electoral college, of which CLP delegates will hold 50% and affiliates will hold the other 50%.

Disabled Members’ Officer – Rosa Gomez (Redbridge Cllr)

LGBT  Officer – Bruno Diantantou (Activist, Kensington)

BAME  Officer– Taranjit Chana (Trade unionist)

Women’s Officer – Niamh O’Brady (Trade unionist)

Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), CLP section

• Kathryn Johnson (London CAC, 2019-present)
• Sophia Naqvi (East Ham CLP, Central Ward Vice Chair)
• Conor Bollins (Chair of Kingston & Surbiton CLP)