Emergency motion agreed at LAW conference, July 4 2020
NEC elections 2020
1. The change of the NEC electoral system from first past the post to single transferable vote is clearly an attack on the left membership. It makes it almost impossible for a full ‘left’ slate to ever win again all nine seats in the section elected by the members.
2. The Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance is dead. It should have died a lot sooner. It has always been characterised by bad compromises, backroom deals and the lowest common denominator. Many of its candidates throughout the last decades cannot be described as ‘left’, or even soft left. Ann Black for example served for decades on the NEC, thanks to being backed by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD). Even under Corbyn’s leadership, the vast majority of the nine NEC members failed to speak out or stand up to the witch-hunt and a number of them even fully participated in it – chiefly Jon Lansman and his supporters.
3. There is a chance that – after the victory of the Forward Momentum slate in the Momentum NCG elections – there will be efforts to revive the CLGA. But even without Jon Lansman in the driving seat of the negotiations, this method of divvying up candidates that are deemed ‘acceptable’ to all groups involved in the CLGA backroom deals is deeply apolitical and undemocratic. Instead, it should be the politics of the candidates that decide if they deserve support or not.
4. The new electoral system opens up the possibility to concentrate our fire on one or two candidates who are prepared to stand on a principled political platform, which in our view must include the commitment to:
a) Publish regular reports of NEC meetings, including details of how they and other NEC members have voted.
b) Campaign for the Labour Party’s complaints and disciplinary procedures to be overhauled so that disciplinary procedures are carried out in accordance with the principles of natural justice, and be time-limited: charges not resolved within three months should be automatically dropped. An accused member should be given all the evidence submitted against them and be regarded as innocent until proven guilty. Abolish fast-track expulsions.
c) Campaign for all disciplinary cases processed during the last five years to be re-examined in an unbiased way. The leaked report proves that the Corbyn leadership, in the hope of appeasing the right, displayed an inability and unwillingness to recognise real antisemitism, while eagerly trying to get rid of activists like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson, none of whom can be accused of even a trace of antisemitism.
d) Campaign for Labour to:
– overturn the party’s commitment to the so-called definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism in a number of its examples;
– oppose attempts to label the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as antisemitic;
– oppose the party implementing the Board of Deputies’ 10 Pledges.
5. We should make a choice of which candidates to support based on their record of resistance to the witch hunt.
We do not support candidates who do not commit to oppose the IHRA.
That any candidates commit to opposing the fast track procedures. They were introduced to deal with ‘egregious’ cases. They are being used to deal with EVERY case of ‘antisemitism’