Peter Kenyon

No Labour CLP NEC incumbent deserves re-election, unless....

Labour's future as a democratic socialist party as far as I'm concerned hangs on whether it delivers 21st century tools enabling members to have a say.

Yesterday's proceedings of the Organisation Sub-Committee reported first by Luke Akehurst and posted here, suggest that the culture remains top down. While there were words expressed about the use of technology:

•    There will be greater use of technology to facilitate discussion and
to feedback to party units about their submissions. NPF members will
also be involved in giving feedback. All NPF members will get greater
information about the work of the JPC and the Policy Commissions.
•    There will be an online audit trail to track what has happened to amendments.

they are hedged with conditionality.

So the challenge for all members of the NEC CLP section seeking re-election on whichever slate, or none is have you agreed a specification and budget for that technology with a delivery date? Will the policy documents be published in a format that enables any member to see any proposed changes by any other member? Will representative sample voting facilities be included? 

If not, none of you will be getting my vote when the ballot papers arrive to enable me to cast my vote in the 2012 CLP NEC elections.

The race for NEC votes is ON

Tonight I received the following from Labour First/Progress slate candidate for the NEC, Luke Akehurst:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear CLP Secretary,

I hope this will be useful information for you:

Organisation Committee Report

The Organisation Committee of the Labour Party’s National Executive
Committee met on 13 March and considered a number of important reports
about internal Party democracy.

The key item was an early heads-up from Peter Hain about the direction
in which the review of Labour’s policy-making structures initiated as
part of “Refounding Labour” is headed.

Key features of the proposals sketched out by Peter were:
•    Moving to a 5 year policy-making cycle from the current 3 year one,
and away from the “Warwick” style climax to the process.
•    More readable, shorter, accessible policy documents for members to comment on.
•    These would be circulated each year for party units to make
submissions in reaction to, and then each Policy Commission would
draft a report with options and recommendations. These reports would
be debated at a National Policy Forum (NPF) meeting each summer. The
NPF would then send the revised documents to Annual Conference for
agreement.
•    Party units will be able to submit a limited number of amendments.
There will be a “duty to consult” i.e. party units submitting
amendments will need to show they have sounded out stakeholders before
raising an issue. Issues raised which show clear evidence of community
support may be given more weight.
•    In the final year of the cycle, Policy Commissions would draw up an
overarching document based on the policy documents agreed in previous
years. Again this would be shorter than the current style of document.
•    Labour’s Policy Programme would consist of the final year documents
agreed by the policy commissions, NPF, Joint Policy Committee (JPC)
and Annual Conference. This would form the basis of the manifesto
signed off by the Clause V meeting between NEC and Shadow Cabinet.
•    The role of the JPC will be strengthened. It will commission and
agree policy documents, work to increase participation in policy
debate, oversee the amendments process and agree options papers to go
to Annual Conference.
•    Policy Commissions will consider submissions from party units and
come to a consensus view on whether to incorporate them into policy
documents.
•    NPF members not elected to a Policy Commission will now be able to
attend one as an observer.
•    Annual Conference will get to consider alternative positions, not
just one take-it-or-leave it document.
•    There will be greater use of technology to facilitate discussion and
to feedback to party units about their submissions. NPF members will
also be involved in giving feedback. All NPF members will get greater
information about the work of the JPC and the Policy Commissions.
•    There will be an online audit trail to track what has happened to amendments.
•    Greater communication of NPF activity and support for party units to
get involved.
•    Policy Commissions to look more at current issues via conference
calls and online debate.

This all seemed fairly sensible and consistent with members’ calls for
a more transparent process.

This was just an initial discussion – further discussion will happen
at the NEC, leading to rule changes going to Annual Conference this
year.

The Committee also agreed:
•    To trigger a further 14 early parliamentary selections (all 3 seats
in Brighton & Hove based on the anticipated new boundaries, Carlisle,
Redcar, Crewe & Nantwich, Gillingham & Rainham, Milton Keynes N,
Reading E, Bristol S, Gloucester, Cannock Chase, Stafford, Tamworth &
Staffs).
•    A timetable for selecting mayoral candidates where referendums
result in a “yes” vote (freeze date for being a member with voting
rights of 5 May, short-listing by panels of a mixture of Regional
Board and CLP reps on 16 May, OMOV ballot goes out on 25 May, hustings
meetings by 10 June, ballot closes on 13 June and results declared on
15 June). The same ballot dates will apply to the NEC and NPF
elections and the Police Commissioner selections.
•    Labour MPs selected as Mayoral or Police Commissioner candidates
will have to resign from the Commons and trigger by-elections.
•    Guidelines for reorganising CLPs in January 2013 on the new boundaries.
•    Model candidate contracts which involve a commitment to a lot of campaigning!
•    Labour Movement for Europe and Labour Finance & Industry Group are
to become formal affiliates of the Party.

An NPF meeting is likely to be held on 16/17 June.

Luke Akehurst
CLP Rep, NEC

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Note: an NPF meeting is likely to be held on 16/17 June after the ballot papers are sent to members to vote for their NPF representatives, and without any guarantee that it will not, to quote Luke previously, be another rally for the nomenklatura.

0-10 Luke for addressing the key issue for members - having a say.

Labour at a crossroads - control freaks rally

There are two competing visions of the Labour Party. I exaggerate. But for the sake of debate, consider: the Manchester Declaration 2011, and two posts in the last 24 hours one from a former general secretary, Peter Watt yesterday, and the other from the secretary of Labour First, Luke Akehurst.

Peter wants us to believe politics is boring and irrelevant. Luke is providing a smokescreen for party staff acting in defiance of and to the detriment of Ed Miliband's leadership. We will see a lot more of this before Conference 2011.

In the meantime, the authors of the Manchester Declaration 2011 are seeking to offer a vision of the future Labour Party focussed around four core themes:

• A Healthy and Dynamic Party
• An Inclusive Party where everyone is welcome, living our values and representative of our communities
• A Campaigning Party rooted in our communities and making a difference
• A Democratic Party with open, informed policy debate — a partnership of equals

If you want to express your preference for this sort of party, please sign up now on the Labour Democratic Network website.

 

Ed and the mystery of unpublished Refounding Labour submissions

Come on. It's the silly season. How many Labour Party members does it take to publish what they think? More than are currently paid up. On present showing, Labour can't afford openness and transparency, it's still paying off its debts.

Oh, how Ed must yearn for the days of "Tony wants", and "Gordon says". Remember the election that never was in 2007, when reportedly some £1.5 million was spent in preparation for the mockery that was to befall the party? In the 10 months that have elapsed since Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour Party, he has faced some formidable internal obstacles to delivering the change he wants.

None is more poignant than the fate of Labour Party members' submissions to the two reviews he ordered into the Party and how it functions and the policies that help ensure defeat in the 2010 general election. They remain secret. For Labour HO eyes only. 

Quite how that squares with those stirring Leader commitments sent soaring on the wings of victory into the vastness of the Manchester Conference Centre last Autumn is the stuff of a Monty Python revival. It's four years since I personally introduced the concept of open and transparent consultations to the Labour Party machine. Yes, Peter, the serpent tongue hissed: Best kept for the NEC only. True to form not even the NEC was given a look in, neither then nor now, with the exception of one or two individuals.

So here we are in the year of the rabbit. Whoever is staring into the headlights deserves what might befall them. I want to know why when the Leader of my political party, to which I pay my dues, says that submissions to the Refounding Labour consultation should be published, and yet I am still waiting.

One excuse cited by one of the constituency labour party (CLP) representatives on the party's national executive committee (NEC) Luke Akehurst is that some submissions are marked confidential not for publication. Well frankly, anyone in a democratic socialist party who is not prepared to defend their submissions in public deserves to have their contribution binned. Though on second thoughts maybe there is the 'whistleblower' type submission that would be best kept offline and used for performance management purposes, rather than an excuse for holding up publication of the rest.

Then there is the question about everyone else who gritted their teeth, ignored previous experience of submissions disappearing into a black hole and took the trouble to set out a few home truths. Were they asked explicitly for permission to publish, remain anonymous, or off the record and not for publication? Someone in Labour Party HO must know why provision was not built in for such considerations in the first place. Was it an administrative oversight? Was it deliberate? At this juncture, I couldn't give a monkey's. I just want to see my personal submissions, my CLP's and everyone else's in the public domain. As a democratic socialist, I can't imagine consultations being any other way.

So, Ed. Remember your last #AskEd twitter session? Your pledge made on Thursday 14 July 2011 was recorded for posterity here . Is there a project plan? I'm happy to volunteer to telephone round the few who don't like to share their email addresses with HO. But that's another story. I'm sure there are enough like me who are happy to crank out up to 50 calls an hour to ask permission. If cost is a worry, I'll be rash and volunteer to raise the necessary funds to cover the costs of scanning hardcopy submissions. For the avoidance of doubt, I'll underwrite the scanning costs now, so that your ambitions can be fulfilled.

Just publish and be praised. All that is at stake is your reputation for keeping your word.

 

Who's BhaiComrade: How has s/he obtained Labour Party membership numbers?

A whiff of further scandal has been scented from east of Aldgate. I have just been sent an exchange of emails possibly providing prima facie evidence of a further contravention of Labour Party rules by a clique that helped deny Lutfur Abbas of the Labour nomination to run for the post of elected mayor of Tower Hamlets.

The author operating under the psuedonym BhaiComrade is not known to my source. But s/he knew my source's Labour Party membership number.

Replying to a round robin my source was told emphatically by BhaiComrade:

..........member xxxxxxxxxx is not on is not on approved list.

I'm confident Luke Akehurst as a newly elected member of Labour's National Executive Committee will be first to demand an investigation into this possible group within a group contrary to Rule.

Language in Labour Party politics: an apology?

ConDem housing benefit policy changes have occasioned the use of vivid metaphor to illustrate what is actually involved for many tens of thousands of people. Leading Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee apologised this morning on BBC Radio 4 for using the expression 'final solution' in her column on the subject on 25 October. Here's the context:

Rent was always the glitch in the benefit system, and Beveridge never found a logical answer. Well, here at last is a final solution he never considered: put all poor people in distant dumping grounds where nobody wants to live because there is no work, then call them workless scroungers, lacking in aspiration for the children they have taken out of class to throw together in schools where nobody's parents work. 

Chris Bryant MP for Labour and Boris Johnson, London's Conservative elected mayor have both used the expression 'social cleansing'. Johnson ramped up the debate referring to Kosovo, where events triggered by Serbia's then dictatorship were a stark reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. Four days on from Toynbee's use of the expression 'final solution', there is much greater public awareness of the issues surrounding the ConDem's intentions regarding housing benefit. There is a severe shortage in inner-city areas of social housing for large families, and private landlords have become increasingly greedy. All of us us in the Labour Party have to put our hands up and admit that in government under former leader Tony Blair we completely failed in our responsibilities to tackle these issues. A recovery plan was initiated under Gordon Brown, but it was woefully late and the electorate punished us. We are going to have to apologise for that if we hope to win back the electorate's trust.

Whatever Labour's shortcomings nothing justifies the ConDem proposals. By the use of vivid language a political outrage with profound human consequences is now better understood. It seems likely that the political consensus will settle around the expression - ConDem social cleansing:  a policy driving relatively poor people mainly in work and their families out of their homes to be replaced by better off people.

Earlier this week. I was pilloried on Luke Akehurst's blog for the use of the German expression "Obergruppenführer" to describe the current and former London Labour Party regional directors, or regional secretaries as they used to known when I first joined the Labour Party. An apology was demanded.

It is childish, tasteless, insulting and gratuitous to use a title associated with the organisation that perpetrated the holocaust to describe Labour Party officials who have been trying to deal with very complex and volatile political situations in a professional way.

What's more, as Party employees they can't answer back.

Peter should apologise to them. This is completely uncomradely and unacceptable language.

I might oblige Luke one day, not to mention Terry and Ken, whom I know well, like and have worked with closely from time to time. My current self-appointed task as a member of the Labour Party is to illustrate a fundamental and now long-standing internal organisational problem. Ed Miliband has 'inherited' a party structure and operational culture which is, for the most part, inconsistent with the needs of a democratically-run, solvent, ethical 21st century mass political party in which members have a proper say.

There is a highly disciplined command and control structure operated by Head Office staff through eleven regional parties - with their own 'boards', but staff answerable and accountable to a 'super' regional director at Head Office. There is a veneer of accountability to the Party's National Executive Committee. De facto control is in the hands of the senior management team, answerable previously to No.10, at least under Tony Blair. There is incontrovertible evidence that they had started to develop their own agenda when Gordon Brown was in Downing Street. Now Ed Miliband's leadership is at risk, unless these issues are dealt with. We know that Luke and Labour First members believe the staff can do no wrong. But that is not the experience of too many other members. So I am open to suggestions as to how the key post holders should be described given the current command and control culture, and the urgent need for change.

Tally ho! The Labour Party hunts down its prey - members with minds of their own

For a party that abolished fox-hunting, the blood lust inside the Labour Party seems to know no bounds. My scoop on the Tower Hamlets Labour Group meeting earlier this week in the House of Commons has flushed out some of the 'hunt' both here and on Twitter. The twisted thinking that they give vent to highlights a profound problem for all political parties in democratic societies. How do they cope with members who have minds of their own?

For right-wing Labourite commentatators such as Paul Richards and Luke Akehurst, the decision of Lutfur Rahman to run as an independent candidate for the elected mayoral post in Tower Hamlets meant not just automatic expulsion, but a denial of 'natural justice'. Labourpaul aka Paul Richards twittered:

@PeterKenyon basic democratic principle: if you join Labour, you can't back other candidates. Unity is strength, etc.

To which I replied:

@Labourpaul Basic democratic principle you ensure natural justice.

In a rapid fire exchange that followed Luke Akehurst delivered a triumphant blast on his hunting horn:

 @PeterKenyon You could have made the natural justice argument if he hadn't run vs Lab. By doing so Lutfur destroyed own case.

So there you have it from Labour First recruiting sergeant and member of the Hunt extraordinaire, we will hunt you down whatever.

Luke had set out his reaction to the news of Labour's defeat last Thursday here, the following day. As a former NEC member, I urged caution:

Dear Luke

As a member of the NEC that read the complaints lodged at short notice and some 72 hours before the close of nominations for candidates to run as for the position of elected mayor of TH, I urge you to focus on the allegations.

Either uphold them or dismiss them observing due process and the entitlement of all parties to natural justice.

I hope you have better luck than the previous NEC did over the Erith and Thamesmead ballot box break-in and voting paper tampering.

This goes to the nub of a problem facing Labour's new Leader: how can you aspire to mass-membership when at the first whiff of independent thinking there are other members baying to hunt down and expel them? For me the answer is simple. Labour has to have robust processes in place to protect all members' rights. The Lutfur Rahman case presents a real opportunity to examine member baiting, hunting and 'slaughter'.

I'm glad to see I am not alone in pressing for the inquiry proposed and voted for at the NEC on 21 September to be completed.

Trial by Jeory's recent post suggests:

Which way new party leader Ed Miliband nods his brainy head will be crucial. The feeling among senior Labour figures is that he will lay off Ken, but I suspect he will also order an investigation into the so-called “Abbas dossier”, which in fact was authored not only by Helal Abbas, but also a number of others involved in the shambolic Labour selection campaign.

If that investigation finds the dossier was as weak as some suspect and, depending on how Lutfur acts and performs as an independent Mayor, it is not inconceivable that he and others two years or so down the line could be readmitted into the fold.

Given the baying from the  hounds in Westminster as reported earlier today by Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard, Ed Miliband's obvious course of action is to insist the allegations against Lutfur Rahman are properly investigated and as a matter of urgency.

Those in the Parliamentary Labour Party scenting blood are right in one respect. Silence is not an option for our new Leader. Tally ho!

 

 

2.   
   @Labourpaul Basic democratic principle you ensure natural justice.

Tower Hamlets' MPs and Labour's NEC are risking further scandal

Labour lost the Tower Hamlet's elected Mayoral election on Thursday. So what's the machine's next move? Organise to undermine the democratically-elected mayor's efforts to form an administration.

According to respected local resident and journalist Ted Jeory's blog:

Labour’s London boss Ken Clark is understood to have decreed to his councillors that they can not remain in the party and serve with Lutfur. So anyone wanting to take Lutfur’s shilling will have to defect.

Note the possessive adjective 'his' councillors. What is going on? The London Labour Party's regional director is not in charge of a Politburo. He acts under authority from the National Executive Committee. We can be certain that there has been NO meeting of the NEC since the TH mayoral election.

What we do know is that some questionable allegations were made at an NEC meeting on 21 September against the winner of an all member ballot for the Labour Party nomination to stand for the post of elected mayor of TH. Questionable allegations? Well, yes. The accused was not given any chance to respond, so the allegations remain open to question.

My former Hackney Labour Party colleague, Luke Akehurst, a well known member of Labour First - the party within the Labour Party that continues to operate with impunity possibly contrary to Rule, opines that there are parallels to be drawn with Hackney in the mid-1990s. As the chief whip of Hackney Labour Group appointed in 1995 by the then London Obergruppenführer Terry Ashton, on the authority of Tom Sawyer, general secretary at the time, I am no stranger to the dark arts of Labour Party politics. Likening Tower Hamlets Labour Parties today to Hackney Labour Parties then is, Luke, both ill-informed and ill-advised.

There is a simple and straightforward opportunity for the Labour Party to make amends for years of unwarranted and gross interference in the rights of members in that borough. It commits to co-operating with the newly elected Mayor whilst maintaining its Manifesto commitments to the electorate in the May council elections.

Instead we have the unedifying prospect of an abuse of parliamentary facilities by the two Labour MPs hosting a Labour Group meeting in the Palace of Westminster allegedly to subvert the democratic will of the local electorate. Abuse? To book a room in Houses of Parliament requires the sponsorship of an MP. What's wrong with the usual facilities in TH?

I only hope the wires are buzzing tonight to stop the folly and enable an urgently needed rapproachment to take place between the victor and the Labour Party. I have never met Lutfur Rahman. But I know him as the only Labour Council leader who, when in office, secured support from his Council for a full set of recommendations concerning the implementation of a London Living Wage. As for all the allegations about Islamisation, I see that balanced and objective commentator Melanie Phillips has picked up the baton (again). Enough said.

An urgent review of the allegations leading to Lutfur Rahman's administrative suspension by Labour's NEC is needed as I have already suggested in unsolicited advice to Luke Akehurst on his blog. On the basis of what I know now, compared to a month ago - I would be inclined to say,  "Case dismissed". Lutfur Rahman should probably have been the official Labour Party candidate in the first place. At least that's what TH Labour Party members decided in a ballot administered by current Obergruppenführer Ken Clark. That's good enough for me. It's their right to decide under Labour Party Rules.

As for the local MPs, they are making a very good case for the urgent reintroduction of compulsory reselection of Labour sitting MPs as prospective parliamentary candidates.

Leading Labour First activist backs Party rebuild

Leading Labour First activist, Luke Akehurst has a list of suggestions for our Leader following publication of the latest YouGov poll putting the Labour Party more points than I care to mention behind the Tories.

It is good to be able to say I agree with the main thrust of these remarks. But what stands out is this:

Re-build the Party starting at the grassroots. We can't hope to sell a 4th Labour term to the public if we don't have members and activists out their selling it.

He should join Save the Labour Party.  We need the broadest possible consensus about what incentives to offer members to 'sell' a 4th Labour term. Members having a say, for starters?