Winning a Socialist Left block on Labour’s NEC
Published
by
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
JVL Introduction
The six Grassroots Voice (#GV6) candidates for Labour’s NEC are backed by a broad alliance of rank and file organisations as well as by Jeremy Corbyn, the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and by the Fire Brigades Union and Bakers’ Union.
Guidance on how to order your preferences in order to secure the maximum number of NEC places for the left is available here.
[Updated 12 October 2020]
This article was originally published by Grassroots Labour. Read the original here.
Winning a Socialist Left block on the NEC
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It is very important to re-establish the very successful Labour Manifesto from the 2017 General Election when Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership nearly overturned the Tory majority. The policies were very popular with the electorate, as was the 2019 manifesto except for the muddled policy on Brexit, against Corbyn’s better judgment.
The huge membership of the Labour Party was due to Corbyn becoming leader, and the current leader won on a ticket that proposed to continue with the popular policies that are sorely needed now to re-establish public services, education, housing, the National Health Sevice and the Green New deal which is being stolen by by the current Tory leadership.
We need now to push clearly for Corbyn’s policies and support the Grassroots Voice Six to make sure this Voice is heard in the NEC.
Socialists need to organise and fight back against the Blarite conspirators.
The NEC nomination was a postcode lottery with many Labour Party members disenfranchised by living where their CLP did not bother to hold nomination meetings. Congratulations to everyone for achieving what they have so far, and let us hope the next stage in the process is not so unfairly weighted against the GV6.
I do hope we get more guidance as I am a one vote only person, not used to this type of voting and ignorance can cause problems and only the left seem to try and explain this form of voting, I do not want to make a mistake as this is important and I am just holding on to my membership at the moment as the left are being side lined so much.
Abe Hayeem`s comment – “the muddled policy on Brexit against Corbyn`s better judgement” as one of the reason for 2019 defeat is interesting!
As far as I am aware did not the “Blairite” conspirator have a great deal to do with influencing Labour Party strategy on Brexit?
No doubt the “Blairite`s” integrity was as flawless then as it is now?
To deserve JVL support, candidates must oppose the Zionist witchhunt explicitly and in terms. Some LtW candidates are boasting of the expulsions and suspensions they have conducted. Only the Labour Left Alliance candidates have done this. Put them top.
Of course RC is right, it’s important to be uncompromising in stating your beliefs and positions, and JVL’s own position on the witch hunt is crystal clear. But we also know that fighting it needs the strongest possible left representation on the NEC. Realistically it is only members of the Grassroots Voice slate that can do that and each one of them that gets elected will be better on this issue than any from Labour to Win.The #GV6 manifesto calls for natural justice at the core of a “fair, robust and transparent internal disciplinary process”. By backing their campaign we earn the right to hold them to account on this if elected.
Putting Labour Left Alliance candidates in the top slots could lead to the early elimination of one or more GV candidates, all of whom would be deprived of crucial high preferences by this strategy. It will be centre and right candidates, not those of LLA, who will benefit.
Naomi’s realism depends on precise counts, which are of course not available (the truly democratic method is successive eliminating ballot, which for this size of election would bankrupt the party still further than Starmer’s bung to the traitors). So we have to speculate on what effect candidates’ manifestoes will have on democrats and socialist and (who knows how many?) waverers.
A clear commitment will build genuinely left support for the future as well as for 2020. LLA offers everything GV offers, and more; if LLA is as permanently marginal as Naomi implies, high preference votes cast for them will not damage GV in our probable joint constituency.
Those who are seriously tempted by LtW are not worth bothering about – I believe we each have up to 42 preferences to express, and comrades wshould use ALL preferences to put them at the very bottom, below the ‘singletons’ who appear on no slate. Keen readers of this website will have noticed the manoeuvres of the Open Labour faction, who endorse ‘JLM’s monopoly of Jewish members’ representation (for them, we are ‘wrong sort of Jews’) ( Ann Black and Jermain Jackman, who was originally explicit in upholding the JLM monopoly. Any candidate who takes a similar line should on your ballot paper go down to just above LtW.
Some help identifying “other candidates who support a progressive policy agenda” (and those ho clearly don’t) would have been helpful -the candidate statements are not really useful.