The March NEC was rather
livelier than the previous one in January.
The meeting opened with
fine obituaries for Labour stalwarts Eddie Lopez and Janet Anderson.
Keir Starmer and
Shabana Mahmood then moved and seconded their motion calling for Jeremy Corbyn
to not be endorsed as a parliamentary candidate by the NEC.
Keir said we were all
here for one purpose, to win. He had changed the party irrevocably. We are out of the EHRC special measures, but the job is not complete yet. Now we need
to resolve the issue of Jeremy Corbyn being suspended from the PLP, so we can
move on and focus on the voters. We have to deal with anything that distracts
us or jeopardises the changes we have made. We can’t have the exciting policies
we want to promote in the local elections overshadowed by internal machinations.
Shabana said that every
day we are undoing damage done before 2019. Jeremy’s behaviour since stepping
down as leader has been a threat to us winning the next General Election. The
EHRC found that under his leadership we breached the Equality Act. It has taken
two years of hard work to come out of special measures. We have tackled issues
that brought great shame to our party. Jeremy has failed to move one inch from
his suspension and acknowledge and deal with what he did. We would be failing
our candidates if we don’t protect them from old sores. We have to deal with
this ahead of the local elections. We don’t propose to start a selection
process in Islington North now. This cannot be allowed to fester any longer, we
need to be able to fight a General Election campaign free of the stain the EHRC
found.
There was a very
passionate debate, resulting in the motion passing by 22 votes to 12.
I voted and spoke in favour.
I’ve written up the points I made in my speech into an article for Labourlist
which you can read here: https://labourlist.org/2023/03/luke-akehurst-why-i-voted-for-the-nec-motion-to-block-corbyns-candidacy/
Keir then gave his
leader’s report. He covered the local elections, but not in detail as there was
a full item on this later. He also reported on the launch of the five missions
for a Labour Government, with specific launch events also held so far for the
ones on economic growth and safe streets. The new press conference facilities
at our new HQ had been used for the first time. Finally, he spoke about
Scotland, where the new SNP First Minister Humza Yusaf inherits a woeful
record. Yusaf has been attacked within the SNP because of his total incompetence
in every brief he has held. This is a big opportunity for Labour to win back
seats in Scotland, which will be vital to winning a majority in the Commons.
Keir has been to Scotland five times in recent months.
David Evans then gave
his General Secretary’s report. The EHRC has taken the party out of special
measures after two years. He thanked Anneliese Dodds for doing much of the heavy
lifting on engagement with the EHRC. There is no complacency whatsoever as driving
antisemitism out of the party is not a job that is complete. There are only 37
days until the local elections. An “Exporting London” Officer has been employed
as London has a quarter of the party membership but only one tenth of the
battleground parliamentary seats and no elections this May. We are piloting
innovative ways to get members to campaign where it matters. The local elections
are dominating our work. The new Task Force structure at HQ is working well. Each
task force has short term objectives for the local elections and then ones
until the end of January 2024, in case there is a May 2024 General Election. We
are constantly testing and evaluation campaign techniques. For instance, in the
City of Chester by-election, where we have a very active CLP, we were able to
look at canvassing data and discover there was a 6% increase in propensity to turn
out among voters who had met the parliamentary candidate during the campaign.
Turnout among postal voters was 71%, but only 34% among voters who went to the
polling station (overall turnout was 42%). People who Labour canvassers had
contacted went up to a 57% turnout if contacted once, 64% if twice, 72% if
three times and 80% if four times. This shows the importance of doorstep campaigning.
There had been an Away Day for our 100 new parliamentary candidates on
Saturday. They are brilliant, energetic and committed. David has been
campaigning in Blackpool, Crawley and Medway for the local elections. He
detected huge discontent with the Government but support for Labour is conditional
and provisional, so reassurance through face-to-face contact with Labour is
essential. He reported that the party now has 400,757 members. 23,000 are in arrears,
but this is down from 35,000. The total membership remains at what is a
historically very high level, and is pretty stable, with joiners and leavers
cancelling each other out. On party finances David said the Electoral
Commission report shows 2022 was the best year for Labour since 2008, and
better than 2017 and 2019 combined. Q4 of 2022 was the first quarter since Q1
of 2008 when Labour had raised more money than the Tories, beating them by
£1/4m. There were 550 members in the Rose Network (donating over £1,000 a year)
and 115 in the Chair’s Circle (donating over £5,000 a year), an all-time
record. A multi-million-pound pledge had been made and £1.5m had been received in
Q1 from major donors. The party was introducing a new HR system and working
with Patchwork to recruit people from diverse ethnic and social class backgrounds
for work experience. This will eventually lead to an apprenticeship scheme. We
are on the cusp of 26 new trainee organisers joining the staff, in addition to
the 30 existing trainee organisers, and the 13 digital trainees (all of whom are
women). The diversity of this group of new staff is very impressive. The total
staff headcount is about 400 and following tough decisions 18 months ago to retrench,
and successful fundraising, we are now growing the organisation, as well as
changing its shape to focus on digital, comms and field and enhance the regional
teams.
In the Q&A to David
I stressed the importance of looking after the welfare of parliamentary
candidates and providing mentoring and pointing them to the bursary scheme, as
it is a stressful and physically, mentally and financially demanding.
The NEC then considered
an amendment to our parliamentary selection procedures so that if a candidate
is turned down from being long-listed on due diligence grounds they now have a
right of appeal to a fresh panel. Appeals will be held on a very short
timescale so that the overall timetable of the selection is not delayed. This
proposal was agreed unanimously.
Campaign Director Morgan
McSweeney reported on the local elections. He highlighted Derby, Plymouth and
West Lancashire as key battleground councils. He said voters need to know three
things:
1)
Britain
is worse off because of Government choices.
2)
There
is an alternative, this situation is not inevitable.
3)
Labour
has a long-term plan to give the UK back its future. We have plans now to cut
the cost of living, cut waiting lists and cut crime.
Morgan said we have three
things to do:
1)
Target
the right wards and the right councils where the ground campaign will make a
difference.
2)
Ask
all Labour voters to get a postal vote. This leads to a three times higher
turnout. Almost everyone who will vote in a local election already has the
required Voter ID, but all voters are more likely to vote if they vote by post.
3)
Focus
on getting the debate back onto the cost-of-living crisis. It isn’t a competent
government if it has allowed 10.4% inflation and interest rates to soar, and
the has the OBR saying living standards won’t rise for 5-6 years. The Government
is economically disastrous.
He said we are pushing
hard to find candidates in every seat so every voter has the opportunity to
vote Labour. These elections are the hardest in the cycle for Labour to do this
due to the rural nature of many of the councils up this time. We have never had
100% coverage. In 2019 we had candidates in 77.2% of wards and we are on track
to improve on that. If anyone at local level attempts to hold back from
nominating candidates in order to help other parties, that will be viewed as a
betrayal of Labour and will result in disciplinary action. The campaign launch
is on Thursday. The Tories are aiming to gain back some Southern seats where we
are not in contention that they lost to independents in 2019 in order to offset
losses to us. The end of the campaign will coincide with the run-up to the Coronation,
so it will be difficult to get politics into the media. We are fighting against
a Tory macro-strategy of killing hope, breeding cynicism and saying the country’s
problems are nothing to do with government choices.
We next received a
series of reports about the progress made by the NEC’s Working Group on the
Forde Report and finalised our response to it. The details of this work will be
posted on the party website here in the next few days: https://labour.org.uk/fordereport/
David Evans said that for the first 18 months of his time as General Secretary
he had been focused on dealing with an inherited mess regarding finance, legal
and HR functions. We could not win a General Election without addressing what
we had found. He outlined the following timeline to explain why some of Forde’s
recommendations had been overtaken by events before they were published:
April 2020 Forde Report commissioned
August 2020 Evidence submission to Forde closes
(terms of reference were to look at the 2014-2019 period but this bled over
into events up to August 2020)
October 2020 EHRC Report published
December 2020 EHRC Action Plan agreed
September 2021 Rule changes flowing from EHRC Action Plan
passed by Annual Conference
April 2022 Independent complaints procedure
in place
July 2022 Forde Report published
November 2022 NEC Action Plan in response to Forde agreed
January 2023 EHRC removed party from special measures
Today NEC finalises response
to Forde
We were compelled by
the EHRC to respond well in advance of the Forde Report being published, and
had already started achieving many of the outcomes Forde wanted by other means.
When the EHRC Report
was published we decided to broaden from its focus on antisemitism and
implement all its required actions so that they applied to all protected
characteristics.
Forde made 165
recommendations. We split these into 3 categories in November. 50 had already
been completed. 73 were under way. 42 were not being pursued.
David said he was ashamed
of where we had been, proud of the progress made, but not complacent.
Annelise Dodds reported
on work being done among staff to address all the points made by Forde about
the pay gap, recruitment, retention, and unconscious bias training. She reported
on engagement with the BAME PLP caucus, the LGA Labour Black caucus and the
BAME members’ event.
Executive Director of
Legal Affairs Alex Barros-Curtis said that of the 42 recommendations not being pursued,
36 related to the independent directorate for complaints, a route we had
already decided not to go down for legal reasons two years ago when we agreed
the EHRC Action Plan. The 73 recommendations under way had been split into some
being driven forward by staff, some being driven forward by LOTO and GSO, and
some being looked at by the NEC Working Group.
Vidhya Alakeson,
Director of External Relations, said the NEC Working Group had met three times
and gone through 26 recommendations, turning them into four grouped proposals:
1)
A
code of conduct for members
2)
A
code of conduct for people in leadership positions
3)
Adding
anti-Black racism training to our suite of training courses
4)
A
cultural reset which will be driven forward in the new CLPs after the CLP
boundary changes in October, and will be aimed at creating meaningful debate
but inclusive conversations at CLP level.
David said he would
have counselled Martin Forde against being interviewed by Al Jazeera, but he
and Annelise would be meeting Mr Forde soon to reset the relationship. The NEC
had wanted to invite him to a meeting pre-publication of his report but there
had been no clear consensus about inviting him post-publication. We had been
keen to implement the recommendations and just cracked on with it. There were lessons
learned about clear terms of reference, timescales and budgets when commissioning
reports and these had been implemented in the Liverpool report process.
The recommendations from
the Working Group and final response to the Forde Report were agreed
unanimously.
Anneliese Dodds gave a
National Policy Forum update. Policy Commissions will consider submissions made
since 2021. The Joint Policy Committee will meet on 26th April. It
has agreed procedural guidelines for the full NPF, which will be held in Nottingham
from 21st-23rd July. CLPs will be able to contact the
Policy Team and feed in comments via them to NPF members between 9th
May and 5th June. Keir’s five missions signal priorities but aren’t
everything we will do in government, whereas the six policy commissions are
catch-all – everything fits into one of them.
Finally, we agreed a suite
of new safeguarding policies.
