NEC Report – 25 November 2021
The November NEC meeting is the Away Day when we don’t tackle ordinary business but instead hear a series of strategic presentations from senior staff.
It isn’t very “Away” as
we met at Labour’s Southside HQ in London, but it was the first time since the
initial Covid lockdown, aside from conference, that we have held a primarily in
person meeting, and that was enjoyable and useful in terms of being able to
speak to each other and key staff in the margins of the meeting. In fact, the
meeting was successfully run as a hybrid, with about two thirds of us in the
room and the remainder on a Zoom call. Alice Perry as the new NEC Chair very
ably made this work so that both in person and online attendees were all able to
have their say, and the meeting concluded on time at just after 5.30pm, a mere
seven hours including a lunch break and a fire alarm drill!
At the start of the
meeting Alice notified the NEC that the long-awaited Forde Report would now be
circulated at some point ahead of our next meeting in January. She also said
that a motion from Laura Pidcock and Nadia Jama opposing the retrospective
implementation of proscriptions of four organisations would be taken at the
January meeting.
The first presentation
was on the party’s Organise to Win restructuring. We were told that the party
had achieved 80% of the £5.5m savings it needed to make to balance its
finances, and had reduced staffing from over 400 in April, to a more normal
mid-term level of 320 now, through voluntary redundancies. The new structure
would be finalised by January. The next set of priorities are parliamentary
selections and reselections, the local elections in May (especially where these
are in areas that are also marginal in the next General Election), developing
new canvassing scripts, advising MPs on how to use their incumbency to defend
their seats, transforming our digital campaigning, responding to the boundary
review, and using an Organising Academy to increase the skills of specialist volunteers.
I asked the party to prioritise recruiting more Regional Organisers as soon as
we start increasing staffing in the run-up to the General Election.
We then heard about
lessons from our sister party, the SPD’s, victory in Germany. They had held their
nerve stuck to their plan even though they had been running third for most of
the electoral cycle, and it paid off in the final weeks of the campaign.
Everything had been focused on Olaf Scholz as Chancellor candidate and his
competence and trustworthiness. German politics has been becoming increasingly
volatile with fewer core voters for the two main parties, as in the UK. The SPD
had a very clear narrative around three themes of Future, Respect and Europe,
and a concise policy offer that was set out very early and not added to during
the campaign. Two thirds of the campaign budget was spent on dominating the
street battle with billboards (parties are allowed to flypost on street
furniture in German elections). All materials offline and online kept to a very
simple design with black and white photos and only one colour – reclaiming red.
The campaign emphasised both change and reassurance and was strongly
centralised. I said that whilst we cannot flypost on the streets we needed to
improve quantity and quality of the UK version of this outdoor publicity, which
is garden stake posters.
Anneliese Dodds
presented on the internal culture of the party and our efforts to improve it.
She outlined the new complaints process and new codes of conduct and training not
just on antisemitism as required by the EHRC but also on Islamophobia and
anti-black racism. She outlined steps being taken on harassment and trans
awareness. Abuse of party staff was now a specific offence in the rules. We
need to create a culture that is supportive of each other and what we are doing
and achieving. Laura Pidcock said she felt the disciplinary actions being taken
were alienating many members and were unfair, but I said that whilst there were
cases where people had been administratively suspended for far too long because
of the backlog of cases, we also had to prioritise justice for the victims of
abuse and discrimination, particularly given that the EHRC had found us to have
harassed our own Jewish members. I urged an end to the demonisation and
hyperbolic criticism of Keir and David Evans, where there are exaggerated
claims of purges and mischaracterisation of minor policy changes as though our
leaders are Thatcherites.
We then heard a
presentation about the local elections next May. 6470 council seats are being
contested, including every seat in Birmingham, London, Scotland and Wales and a
third of the seats in most metropolitan boroughs. When these seats were last
fought in 2018 the vote share across the country had been quite good – 35% each
for Lab and Con, 16% Lib Dem and 12% UKIP. Whilst Labour had gained a net 71
seats that year in England, this was driven by excellent results in London
which offset losses in other areas. Labour had lost 133 seats in Scotland and
108 in Wales. Understandably the party is focusing resources on marginal wards
in councils that could change control and which overlap with marginal
parliamentary seats. I asked for reports to be given to us on the number of
candidates fielded, so that we could ensure every voter had a chance to vote
Labour and we didn’t fail to contest wards. I also asked for specific training,
scripts and advice to be provided to areas where the main challenger to Labour
is the Green Party, as this requires a different political response to areas
where there is a straight fight between Labour and the Tories.
Then we were given a
presentation about the General Election, talking us through the key metrics of
activity that would be expected of candidates and CLPs in seats we need to gain
to form a Labour Government. Keir emphasised the importance of due diligence
and high-quality candidate selection as the recent Tory sleaze means every
candidate will be under intense scrutiny. I asked for a clear twinning scheme
where non-marginal seats would be linked to and given metrics for the support
they would give a nearby marginal.
Finally, there was a
fascinating presentation on the latest internal polling and focus group
research by Deborah Mattinson. She talked us through the issues the public
think are most important, and segmented the electorate and highlighted the
groups of voters we have most chance of persuading to switch from Conservative
to Labour.
After the Away Day
presentations, there was a short business meeting that started poignantly with
a minute’s silence in honour of the late Andy Howell. There was some to-ing and
fro-ing about the NEC procedures for tabling late papers, which seemed to leave
everyone satisfied. We renamed the Disputes Panel the Complaints and
Disciplinary Sub Committee to make its role clearer. We delayed the start of
next year’s internal elections by a week to 21 January to enable the deadlines
for the National Policy Forum elections, which the unions want further
consultation about, to be agreed at the Organisation Committee on 18 January. I
successfully got the nomination thresholds reduced for the national committee
elections for the new National Labour Students organisation, so that it will be
easier for candidates to get on the ballot and members will get more choice and
fewer uncontested elections.
The meeting ended on a
high note with a very powerful exposition of the paper on NEC Aims and
Objectives from Morgan McSweeney, Elections Director. Morgan said that after
dealing with crucial internal issues the party now has to refocus externally on
the voters. There could be a General Election at any time between now and 2 May
2024, and it isn’t clear on which boundaries as the new ones only get implemented
on 1 July 2023. We need candidates who are insurgents and hungry to win, and
the Labour rosette on a candidate needs to be seen by voters as a mark of
quality. Both the standards and the diversity of our candidates can be
increased. We need to revolutionise our digital campaigning. We have to change
the whole way we work and campaign in order to build new coalitions of voters
large enough to win a majority Labour government. The National Policy Forum
process needs to be completed so that we are on a speedy pathway to an
election-winning manifesto. And our culture needs to be transformed.
There was a
half-hearted attempt to reopen the question about a moratorium on the
retrospective application of the disciplinary action towards proscribed
organisations, but as this was raised after the chair had declared the meeting
closed, those of us present in person departed to the pub in good spirits,
feeling it had been a focused and constructive meeting.
Since the previous NEC
meeting on 17 September, I have 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:
Annual Conference
including two NEC meetings and the NEC AGM
Equalities Committee
Disputes Panel main
meeting
Organisation Committee
4 Disputes Panels
3 panels relating to
local or regional issues
Boundary Review Working
Group
1 Comments:
I believe we are missing a real trick in not having a policy that explicitly support Community Weaalth Building. CWB has been implemented in a number of LAs and we in North Ayrshire are pioneering it in Scotland. IMO it has the potential to deliver solutions to and, importatntly, with the cooperation of our communities that are real, local and targeed, and may be impossible in other ways while we have Tory and SNP Governments that oppose or (in the case of the SNP are incompetent) local solutions to local problems. Do you know, Luke, if there is any awareness of or support for CWB at shadow cabinet level?
9:58 am, January 26, 2022
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