Though Cowards Flinch

After due consideration, I have decided NOT to ask Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) the country to nominate me for the CLP section of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

As I set out here, I do think I have the experience and capabilities to make an effective member of the NEC, and I would have had a pretty clear personal manifesto on which to campaign for a seat.

This manifesto would have included a quite specific agenda for changing the power balance within the Labour party through the reordering of financial flows within the party, in a way which goes beyond the still fairly rhetorical and tokenist commitments being made by Labour leadership candidates to re-engage the grassroots.  I hope that whatever lefties are elected to the NEC might consider taking up these ideas, although I will be trying to put them through the formal LRC processes in time for their AGM in the Autumn, such that LRC nominees on the NEC are bound by any mandate given to them in this respect.

I feel I might have been able to do a decent job for the Labour left on the NEC, and I was encouraged by the informal support of Labour activists whose judgment I respect when I mooted the idea.

I do have some doubts about the way in which the Grassroots Alliance slate is drawn up by some slightly nebulous form of  ‘consensus’, especially the way in which that consensus may be aimed at providing a slate accommodating of Labour’s ‘non-Blairite centre’ rather than at putting forward those candidates with the best track record and political maturity.

However, I accept willingly that, overall, due process has taken place within the participating organisations , and that my own desire to stand for the NEC emerged too late for me to go about getting myself considered as part of that process. 

Due process may not have been perfect, but there is a clear willingness from participating organisations in the Alliance to do the right thing in terms of democratic transparency.  In the case of my own organisation within the Alliance, the LRC, it is clear that, whatever I think of formal hustings as a process (more on that in later posts) the process is done with rigour, combined with comradely respect between winners and losers.

I have no wish, therefore, to impinge on that process by putting myself forward for nominations independently; to do so would be out of keeping with the organisational discipline that I think Labour needs, and it would potentially create frictions and negative consequences which would far outweigh anything distinctive I could bring to the NEC.

I wish all the candidates nominated by the Grassroots Alliance well, and will be proposing their names to my own CLP.

As for myself, my attention turn to the election for the party’s National Constitutional Committee (CLP section), for which I am definitely seeking nominations from CLPs.

My personal statement in support of my request for nominations for the NCC will form my next post.