Labour NEC agenda: missing items - membership

In addition to the scandal of not providing regular management accounts to all Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC) members is the small matter of no membership reports either. I was reminded of this yesterday reading reports of Labour benefactor and former minister Lord Sainsbury's new venture, the Institute of Government.

Sainsbury interviewed by the Times newspaper recalls the daily monitoring of trading figures in retailing:

“In the family supermarket business, every morning you had the previous day’s trade figures, how well you were doing compared with the previous week and the same week last year. Everyone knew exactly what they had to deliver."

There is no reason why the NEC should not have regular membership figures, except that the powers that be do not think membership is critical to the Labour Party's core business. This may help explain why Labour is now languishing at pitifully low levels in the opinion polls after a battering in the Euro/council elections in June. Membership recruitment and retention, together with ensuring members have a say in policy are essential to any Labour electoral recovery plan. That's what I shall be proposing when the NEC next meets on Tuesday 21 July.