At October’s Young Labour national committee meeting, committee members, including chair Simon Darvill and NEC rep Bex Bailey, voted to reject two motions as agenda items: on the grounds that it was not the committee’s place to pass substantive motions, and that this should be left to the biennial policy conference.
This has a very worrying implication: that Young Labour will never again be able to take a substantive position on the majority of issues as they arise. The central argument for voting against hearing the motions was: Young Labour does not need to have motions in order to do stuff. We can simply organise meetings and campaigns, so long as we mention it at meetings. But to have no proper process for officially endorsing political positions and priorities between conference is surely unsafe. Continue reading
It has been with a certain detached sense of irony that I have listened to a succession of senior Labour figures – John Prescott, Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and David Blunkett – criticising the strange Labour summer offensive that wasn’t. It is not that they don’t have a point, more that they might have delivered it more effectively privately and without the aid of the media fog horn. But then another thought occurred; perhaps what they are all really asking is; ‘what are Labour’s main policies and when will the rest of us get to hear about them’?