NEC Report - 11 February 2021
Although there have been the NEC Away Day and a special meeting to deal
with the EHRC Action Plan, this was the first ordinary full NEC meeting I have
attended since my election back onto the NEC in November.
Apparently, it was a better meeting that others in 2020 had been. The
mind boggles about what they were like if this was a “better” one. Presumably,
any improvement is down to the changed political balance. There is now a clear
working majority that supports the leadership, making any votes that are forced
performative displays of victimhood by the Hard Left for the benefit of their
reports to the (rapidly dwindling based on the results of recent CLP AGMs) Momentum
email list.
When I served on the NEC from 2010 to 2012 it was characterised by being
a friendly, collegiate body, where people from across the spectrum of party
opinion looked for issues where they could work together, treated each other
respectfully, and were polite and positive towards the leadership and the
General Secretary.
This longstanding culture has been broken and needs to be restored. I am
assured by people who have served in the interim that the breakdown in good
manners and professional behaviour is very recent, and that despite profound
concerns about his leadership, moderate NEC members treated Jeremy Corbyn with
respect and courtesy.
Now we have a situation where the majority on the NEC are behaving in a
comradely, professional way and a minority are being relentlessly uncomradely.
The six and a half hours of the NEC meeting included large sections where
the time of people of good will who are trying to make Labour electable was
wasted in order for people who don’t want Keir to succeed to undermine him with
a litany of negativity.
Time, because of what members choose to focus their questions on, is
disproportionately spent on attack lines about confected internal cause
celebres that excite the hyper-active, have already been extensively aired on
social media and are of very little interest to the mass of party members let
alone Labour or potentially Labour voters (whether Keir should appear next to
our national flag, the end of the Community Organising Unit, suspensions for
ignoring instructions about non-competent business, Jeremy Corbyn’s
disciplinary case, something that Lord Falconer has said). Rather less time is
spent making positive proposals or offering constructive scrutiny that might
help the party staff with their immediate and huge task of rebuilding a party
traumatised by the Corbyn era and winning the bumper lot of elections that are
happening in May.
It is like having an opposition party inside the NEC meeting trying
actively to damage the party. On occasion people were overtly personally rude
as well.
I think this is a terrible waste. There are talented people from across
the political spectrum on the NEC. If everyone played their role as team
players we could achieve so much more, and in fact the left of the party would
be far more likely to advance its agenda by being collegiate and constructive.
This is not a good use of Keir, Angela or David’s time, and their
forbearance, dignity and calm in putting up with this nonsense is extraordinary,
as is Margaret Beckett’s skill as chair.
Keir’s report was delivered from Heathrow where he had been meeting Unite
union reps in solidarity with their dispute over fire and rehire. He outlined
Labour’s approach to the Budget on 3 March and to the May elections, stressing
that we want to “build forward” to a different, more equal future, rather than
“build back” to the pre-Covid world as the Tories want. Keir said Labour will
be fleshing out the detail of our practical “Recovery and Rebuild” policy
proposals, which are in the three areas of health and wellbeing, the economy,
and redistributing power.
Keir reported that Labour had forced Opposition Day debates on topics
that were important to raise in Parliament and divided Tory MPs: fire and
rehire, Universal Credit and Cladding.
In the Q&A I asked Keir to emulate the Biden campaign by consistently
driving home the message about the need to sign up for postal votes.
Keir was on incredible form and dealt with all the questions, positive
and negative, with great answers.
Angela Rayner’s report focused on campaigning but again there were silly
attempts by the Hard Left to extract damaging answers, such as asking for
foolhardy predictions about May’s elections. Have these people never heard of
expectation management? I was pleased that Angela specifically picked up on my
theme about postal voting and set out steps that are being taken.
David Evans read out a letter from the Forde Inquiry, saying they had had
to pause publication of their report while the Information Commissioner’s
Office conducted an investigation into the data breach associated with the leak
that Forde was investigating. The report has already been delayed because the
panel has conducted so many interviews and considered so many submissions. The
letter has now been published on the Forde Inquiry website: https://www.fordeinquiry.org/forde-inquiry-update/
David also covered progress on the Organise to Win 2024 programme of
organisational change, staff diversity, and the EHRC Action Plan, where he reported
on creation of an Antisemitism Advisory Board (biographies here: https://labour.org.uk/antisemitism/action-plan/ ) and said training for staff and the NEC would be completed by 29
April.
On the suspensions for ignoring guidance about non-competent business
about antisemitism there had been no blanket policy of suspensions, they had
been on a case-by-case basis and were being resolved by Disputes Panel
hearings. The key issue was that the EHRC Report had made the Labour Party
legally responsible for the actions of its “agents” down to the level of
councillors and branch and CLP officers. David said he would, after consulting
the NEC, recast and reissue an updated set of guidance in order for CLPs to be
able to frame discussions about antisemitism in a safe and inclusive way. He
would also change the disciplinary process so that members could be issued with
reminders of conduct and formal warnings without them having to be suspended.
I welcomed David’s proposed change to the disciplinary process as I don’t
think it is fair for people breaching the rules in less serious cases to lose
their right to hold office for months and eventually only get a written
reprimand. But I made it clear that I supported the party having taken the
action then available to it to stop uncontrolled debates about issues around
antisemitism, which could have created flash points that would have caused a
hostile environment for Jewish members and could have led to further legal and
EHRC problems for the party. I said that many members had contacted me
demanding the party take action to tackle the unpleasant culture in their CLPs
and desperately wanted positive debates about policy and campaigning, not
meeting after acrimonious meeting focused on the debate around antisemitism and
the disciplinary process.
The membership report revealed we now have over 512,000 members, 19% of
whom have joined since the start of 2020. I urged the party to work with
affiliated unions to bring union members into full individual membership to
redress the longstanding disproportionate bias in the party’s membership
towards older middle class white male graduates and the London and South East
regions.
We were given an update on the review of how the party makes policy,
which will now move to a period of focussed engagement led by Angela, with rule
changes to be proposed at Annual Conference. David said he was committed to
there being a 2021 Annual Conference but Covid meant there were still two
scenarios, a full conference and a socially distant one.
The most important item from my point of view was the update on the May
elections, presented by the newly appointed Executive Director Elections &
Field Delivery, Anna Hutchinson. This is a uniquely challenging double set of
elections, with the added complication of Covid meaning that doorstep
campaigning is unlikely to be possible and in-person voters will be told to
wear a mask and even take their own pen or pencil! The party’s top priorities
are maximising the number of postal voters, which we are describing as “early
voters” as postal voting has connotations of being for older people only; and
using the newly upgraded Dialogue phone canvassing. It was fantastic to hear
that as much canvassing is now being done via Dialogue as was being done
conventionally pre-lockdown. I was pleased that Anna responded positively to my
suggestion of greater use of twinning and targeting of key marginal areas given
that this is particularly easy when almost all the work is being done by phone.
She said the party will be pushing a message to CLPs that every third Dialogue
session they run should be in support of a marginal area.
We agreed that in Sandwell, where there has been a lot of local
infighting (largely unrelated to national left vs. right conflicts), to ensure
the council candidate selections are run fairly they should be untaken by
panels consisting of regional appointees, and we added two of our own NEC
colleagues, Nick Forbes and James Asser, to the panel line-ups.
A working group to come up with a model for re-establishing a student
wing of the Labour Party was agreed. I was very pleased to be appointed to
serve on this as I am a former National Secretary of Labour Students.
We agreed that overseas members in the Labour International CLP should be
allowed to pay the concessionary membership fee if they are unwaged, when
previously all overseas members had been charged the full rate.
Finally, we agreed to sign up the Labour Party to the employer aspects of
the Armed Forces Covenant.
Between the NEC Away Day on 24 November and this meeting I also participated
in the following other meetings. It is not my intention usually to report in detail
on sub-committee meetings because when I was on the NEC before we were under
instruction that reports should only be on full meetings not committees, and in
the case of Disputes Panels the proceedings are confidential:
·
Training for serving on Sexual Harassment
disciplinary panels – 3 December and 2 February
·
Two Disputes Panel hearings.
·
Equalities Committee meeting on EHRC Action Plan – 4
December – this elected James Asser as the new committee Chair.
·
Special full NEC meeting on the EHRC Action Plan – 7
December
·
Development Fund Panel – 10 December – this panel
allocates grants to CLPs
·
Equalities Committee – 14 January – this included
items on the EHRC Action Plan, Women’s Conference, tackling anti-GRT (Gypsy,
Roma and Traveller) racism, and BAME working group.
·
Disputes Panel – 21 January – this elected Shabana
Mahmood as the new Panel Chair and received statistics on total numbers of
cases being resolved etc.
·
Organisation Committee – 21 January – this elected
Wendy Nichols as the new committee Chair. I was elected to the working group on
the parliamentary boundary review, and as the NEC link member for Labour
International CLP. Items considered included the Liverpool Mayor candidate
selection process, boundary review, ensuring high quality candidates, election
of Young Labour equalities positions, membership data access and use for CLP
officers.
·
I have also been elected to the NPF Health and
Social Care Policy Commission, but this has not met yet.
posted by Luke Akehurst at 6:07 pm
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