“The democratic rights of members have been bent out of shape by great slabs of NEC rule changes at successive Conferences.”
By Hugh Briss
Twenty days before the 2020 leadership ballot, Starmer tweeted, “Selections for Labour candidates needs to be more democratic and we should end NEC [National Executive Committee] impositions of candidates. Local Party members should select their candidates for every election.”
Since then, the democratic rights of members have been bent out of shape by great slabs of NEC rule changes at successive Conferences, usually with next to no notice. And instead of more democratic candidate selections, we’ve seen the largest number of impositions in the party’s history. While the purging of sitting MPs and the parachuting of Starmer loyalists into safe seats made the headlines, the purge in local government and the blocking of councillor candidates anywhere on the spectrum to Starmer’s left continues to proceed stealthily up and down the country.
Governance of selections
It is now six years since a GMB-sponsored rule change was passed at the 2019 Conference to replace the largely moribund Local Campaign Forums (LCFs) with Local Government Committees (LGCs), as the lesser evil for the right of the party compared to a more democratic rule change.
Nevertheless, the new leadership regime decided that the proposed composition of LGCs of a third each for councillors, unions, and CLPs still looked a bit too democratic – could they be sure the unions would do what they were told? So they decided not to implement the rule change. Instead, what we have seen trialled in London are “Interim Local Government Committees” which are completely unaccountable to local parties and consist entirely of people appointed by the Regional Director.
These bodies are operating entirely outside the Rule Book. For instance, where it stated in Appendix 4 that “shortlisting and selection meetings shall be convened by the Executive Committee of the CLP concerned” that’s now gone.
Factional assessment teams
Fifteen years ago, applicants could expect to be included in candidate panels if they had a decent campaigning record, showed a reasonable knowledge of local government, and had no serious black marks against them.
Now, under the guise of “professionalising” local government and seeking the “highest quality candidates”, assessment teams have become nakedly factional. Gone are the rights of CLPs to sit on them; instead, they are chock-full of Labour First/ Labour to Win operatives tasked with rooting out any potential disloyalty. This has taken many forms, from the blocking of left-leaning candidates like Anna Rothery for Liverpool Mayor and Jamie Driscoll for Mayor of the North East, to flat-out racialised purges in Enfield and Waltham Forest.
For the favoured few, however, there can be advantageous deregulation: the rules covering 12-month continuous membership and the residency qualification may be waived in undefined “exceptional circumstances”; they’re given early access to membership lists; or are told in advance how their campaigning record will be judged. Add in that “the NEC has an absolute power to cancel or amend procedures for selections” (Rule Book, Chapter 5) and these procedures would not have looked out of place in one of the greyer Eastern Bloc regimes.
Candidate suppression
The goal of these undemocratic methods is to reduce members’ choice of candidates to a bare minimum – or no choice at all where candidates are imposed. Large numbers of new applicants are blocked on the flimsiest of pretexts, and growing numbers of sitting councillors are failed at interview. And it’s not just aimed at the usual suspects on the left. Many are more centrist, but come from an older tradition where Labour cared about genuinely affordable housing, an NHS free from creeping privatisation, and schools whose buildings weren’t falling down.
Even if you made it through the application, interview, and selection procedure, regional directors and/or the NEC can withdraw endorsement from a candidate. This sanction was mainly reserved for serious misconduct, but now, just as we saw with parliamentary candidates before last year’s General Election, it has become another arbitrary means of subverting party democracy.
Winners and losers
A cabinet position can mean a healthy second income and a shot at a Westminster seat, but the life of backbench councillors has become regimented and unfulfilling. With constituency parties bypassed, most campaigning is channelled through councillors. Left out of the loop in most meaningful decision-making, councillors are treated like dogsbodies, expected to campaign all year round, and sent here, there, and everywhere in national election campaigns.
Morale among councillors is low, as the butt of much public anger over winter fuel payments, the two-child benefit limit, disability cuts, and Gaza. And the upshot has been a steady drip of resignations and defections, unprecedented at this stage of a Labour government.
All roads lead back to the erosion of party democracy by officials acting with impunity in a Party that is haemorrhaging members and support, and tightly controlled by what Neal Lawson of Compass calls “one small rigid faction”. The only way out of this doom loop is to reverse these attacks and to campaign for the restoration of local party democracy. Local government selections must return to being rules-based and be overseen by regular, representative, democratic, and accountable LCFs and LGCs.
- This article is from CLPD’s annual briefing, which you can read here.
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