Tagged with Young Labour

Let’s make Young Labour accountable

As elections for the national committee of Young Labour loom on the horizon, young members will be asking: what did they ever do for us?

You might think this unfair. It’s possible that the committee members work very hard (I know, in fact, of a number that do.) But with no accountability and no sense of what they’re up to, you can see the problem.

At the last Young Labour conference at which elections for top positions were held – in 2011 – delegates complained that there was no mechanism for holding the previous term’s national committee to account. Party officials attempted to stop the then-chair of Young Labour, Sam Tarry, from addressing the conference. There was time to hear Iain Gray, the ill-fated leader of Scottish Labour, ask “what makes young people tick?” but none to hear back from the people who had supposedly been representing us for the previous two years.

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‘Openness’ critical for Young Labour to be a cohesive force

Recently, Conrad Landin wrote of how some of the boldest and most radical policies passed at Young Labour conference seemed to have disappeared into a policy making abyss.

At a time, coming out of a successful conference, when our party has never been so united and when our people are under attack from this vicious Tory Government, we simply cannot afford for our youth wing to be divided.

The failings of Young Labour’s policy making process, in particular the lack of transparency, have shifted focus from standing up for young people, fighting the Tories and winning for Labour, on to unnecessary internal divisions. Continue reading →

What happened to Young Labour’s ‘radical zeal’?

This year’s Young Labour conference marked a turning point. Not only was the party’s youth wing able to form its own policy for the first time, but the policy thought up was refreshing and radical.

The conference made a crusade against youth homelessness its ‘priority campaign’. A workshop within the conference discussed the issue at length, and then voted on what the campaign would include. The whole of conference then voted for this campaign to be prioritised, thus endorsing the policy is the most explicit way possible.

Shortly after the conference, Kent Young Labour member Rory Weal wrote: Continue reading →

Young European Socialists point the way to a break with neo-liberalism

Over the week of the 13th to the 20th of July, Young Labour and Labour Students attended the 10th summer camp of the European Council of Socialist Youth (ECOSY) in the coastal Camp Veli Joze, Savudrija, Croatia. Counting over forty people, it was the biggest delegation ever sent from Great Britain, up over one-thousand percent from the previous year. The high turnout is a great part down to the work of Curtis McLellan who, although I can’t imagine is a great supporter of Left Futures, did a brilliant job as Labour Students International Officer. After a long plane and coach journey it was quite surreal to suddenly arrive in a beautiful coastal resort for a music concert full of young socialists from across Europe when I had been in my South London flat only that morning.

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Youth Conference showed the next generation’s radical zeal

YC LogoWhilst disagreement and clashing opinions were rife at Young Labour Conference 2012, there is one thing that the 200 strong Conference can probably unanimously agree on: it certainly wasn’t dull.

This Conference was the first of its kind; the first annual Young Labour Conference, the first time members got a direct say on policy, and the first time cows on the train line have prevented the keynote speaker from arriving on time (#cowgate on twitter). Tom Watson did eventually arrive to deliver a speech which reminded delegates of the path the youth wing has taken since its inception in 1993, when he put forward a motion at the national Labour Party Conference.

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