The elections for the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) seats on Labour’s National Executive (NEC) will this year be conducted by Single Transferable Vote (STV).
Long campaigned for by Open Labour, the move has been voted through by the NEC on 30 June for a process starting 10 July. As noted by Jon Lansman in an NEC report-back for Momentum, many of those who voted for this also voted against the use of STV or AV in other sections. While pleading they want democracy, they also continued the lockdown bar on CLPs making political decisions, with the exception only of NEC nominations and candidate selections.
Solidarity is in favour of STV or similar being used to conduct elections for all sections of the NEC and for most committees in the labour movement. But an existing committee deciding unilaterally on a change in how it is elected, rather than having a rule change at conference, is bad practice.
So some protest is justified. But STV is how the election will be conducted. The legal challenge to it (with support from Unite the Union) looks like a dead end.
This makes the push for a single unified left slate for the CLP section more difficult and less imperative.
