The election for the two constituency party representatives on Labour’s conference arrangements committee (CAC) is hotting up. After the local elections, the two candidates backed by the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance Katy Clark MP and Pete Willsman began campaigning in earnest. Katy has been MP for North Ayrshire and Arran since 2005 and Pete is [...]
Posts under ‘Activism’
Forty years of CLPD – a cause for celebration
May 14th, 2013 by Billy Hayes.This article first appeared in the CLPD’s Campaign Bulletin 40th Anniversary issue which was published last week, and can be downloaded here. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s fortieth anniversary is indeed cause for celebration. Our campaign has registered a number of important successes in its existence. Yet surely its importance really lies in its [...]
Len McCluskey & Lutfur Rahman uniting the community of East End battleground
May 14th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.There are two stories here. The first is that Unite the Union’s strategy of taking trade unions into the community was launched yesterday in a particularly tangible way with the opening of the first Unite Community Centre. The second is that it represents a collaborative enterprise between Len McCluskey and Lutfur Rahman, independent Mayor of [...]
Mandelson’s got a nerve
May 14th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.It takes quite a lot of gall to be accusing the unions of trying to fix Labour parliamentary selections when you yourself have been engaged on doing exactly that for the last 20 years. When I first joined the PLP in the 1970s, it was composed very broadly of 40% on the Left and 40% [...]
Community campaigning, DM-style (aka not even knowing how your members vote)
May 10th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.In Mark Ferguson’s excellent expose of “community campaigning” in South Shields under David Miliband’s watch, he reveals that the voter contact rate (the percentage of people in the constituency for whom the party has a record of voting preference) in the constituency was as low as 0.2%. Based on the electorate in the by-election, that [...]
Progress seeks to undermine Ed Miliband, again
May 10th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.In the pre-publicity for its annual conference, Labour’s right-wing party-within-a-party could not resist making another attempt to undermine Ed Miliband. Based on an unoriginal and entirely underwhelming Progress article by Peter Kellner, the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour was briefed with the flimsiest of evidence to run a negative story headed Labour election victory in 2015 looks [...]
Obituary – Jim Mortimer, a socialist and trade unionist to the end
May 2nd, 2013 by John Cryer.Jim Mortimer, who has died at the age of 92, was the general secretary of the Labour Party during the turbulent early eighties – perhaps the most difficult time to take on that role since the party was founded. I was distantly related to Jim. An uncle of his, who gloried in the name of [...]
Why the unions need to steer the political mainstream to the left, not abandon it
Apr 30th, 2013 by Andy Newman.Like thousands of Labour activists I have been busy in last few weeks campaigning in the county council elections. I have been out leafleting in the small towns of Chippenham, Corsham and Devizes, where the party is seeking to consolidate the good progress made in last year’s Police and Crime Commissioner elections. At the grassroots, Labour Party [...]
Who are “Labour Teachers”, and why has Michael Gove praised them?
Apr 28th, 2013 by Keith Wright.The Labour party is full of weird and wonderful groups of all shapes and sizes. If you’re active on social media, you may well have come across one particular example, the group that calls itself “Labour Teachers”. You might have also been struck by a line from a speech by Michael Gove to teachers and [...]
Progress, class and parliamentary selections
Apr 25th, 2013 by Ken Livingstone.I am one of those who wants to see more working class people – and a bigger range of people generally – active in the highest levels of politics. So I welcome the emphasis the party is placing on broadening the social composition of parliament. That process is certainly not going to be resolved across the [...]
