Nothing to report?

Submitted by AWL on 8 May, 2019 - 1:06 Author: Keith Road
momentum

Since September the CLP (Constituency Labour Party) representatives on Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) have all been broadly on the left, 8 of them supported by Momentum and all 9 by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

After the September NEC, when they first took their places, they produced a single report of the meeting. They promised they would do that regularly going forward. In principle a joint report reflecting shared views would be a useful complement to individual reports from each member. But in fact only Pete Willsman and Darren Williams (longer-term NEC CLP reps who already produced reports) have continued (at least most months).

None of the other reps, all of whom stood on a platform of accountability and giving power to the membership have done so. Both the joint reports, from September and November, give very little detail. Either the NEC members do not wish to report on matters in any detail, or they found great limits to what they could agree on to report. No ordinary observer can tell.

For a transformative vision of the Labour Party to be realised, members need democracy, and that means being informed.

The only other NEC member to produce regular reports is Alice Perry, one of two local government representatives.

January and March have been and gone and no joint report has been published. Does this reflect growing tension among the CLP reps. Or is it a conscious decision to stop reporting? No minutes are circulated of the NEC, not even of debates where no issue of confidentiality could arise. Momentum chair Jon Lansman has said he is against the NEC having publicly available minutes. So members must for now rely on reports that have been promised but not produced...

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