By Vince Mills
The online executive meeting of Glasgow Kelvin CLP on 12th October was entirely routine until it came to Any Other Business when I suggested that given the crisis in Gaza, we should discuss it at the full Constituency Labour Party meeting scheduled for 19th October. Someone thought that it would be best to put a motion to the meeting to help structure the debate. We agreed this and also that we would take the CLP banner to the demonstration on Gaza being called by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity campaign in Glasgow on Saturday 14th.
After the meeting the Secretary, Peter Duffy, and myself as Policy Officer put together a motion and we duly attended the PSC demonstration on Saturday, but on that very day the Secretary received a communication from David Evans, General Secretary of the Labour Party ‘asking’ that Party members did not attend demonstrations and asking also that they do not bring their banners with them. The Secretary reasoned that it was an ‘ask’ and not an instruction and anyway the decision had been made and it would have been impossible to get a meeting of the executive together in advance of the demonstration. So, we attended with the banner.
The Secretary then circulated notice of the meeting, giving an executive report which included the decision to attend the demonstration and the motion to be discussed. He had barely sent that notice out when Scottish Party Secretaries received a new communication from Scottish Party headquarters. This email stated that “any motions no matter how well intentioned are out of order and should not be debated at party meetings”.
On the basis of this message, nine members of our Executive Committee, including myself, decided to resign rather than be complicit in silencing our members and also to ensure that the Chair, Jim Mackechnie, was not open to disciplinary action, because he had made it clear he would have allowed the motion to be discussed had the CLP meeting gone ahead. We were followed by six members of the Edinburgh Northern and Leith Executive Committee who walked out of their CLP when the Chair refused to discuss a motion on Gaza because of the advice sent by David Evans.
This may all seem deplorable, but clear, in relation to the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party’s attitude to the crisis in Gaza. Not so. Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, has let it be known that he does not share the position being argued by the UK leadership on public support for Palestinians, despite the advice which the Scottish Labour Party itself had circulated.
Pauline McNeil MSP, a long-time supporter of Palestinian rights, spoke at the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration in Glasgow on 21st October on behalf of the Scottish Labour Party. Demonstrators close to me were chanting “Starmer out” while she spoke. Today, 23rd October, Anas used his column in the Scottish Daily Record to write, after condemnation of the Hamas attack on 7th October, that: “There must be free flow of medicine, food, water and electricity into Gaza and the following of international law. Humanitarian corridors must be established, and we must always remember that all human life is equal – an Israeli life and a Palestinian life are equal.”
Motions couched in similar terms, sympathetic to the suffering Gazans, but shorn of political critique, have been passed by Glasgow City Council Labour group and Aberdeen CLPs (three CLPs meet together) despite the fact they clearly breach the advice given by the Scottish Labour Party to its CLP Secretaries that any motion, no matter how well intentioned, is out of order and should not be debated at Party meetings.
All of this leaves Scottish Labour Party members in some confusion. The advice from the Scottish Labour Party on motions has not been rescinded, but clearly some motions are being discussed and the Scottish Labour Party has sent official speakers to demonstrations which also tests the ‘advice’ sent out by Evans.
More seriously, the fundamental nature of the crisis in the Middle East, the colonising project of Israel, supported by the US and its allies, is not being explored and exposed in the Labour Party, allowing the media to present the current bloodbath as a conflict between two equal powers and not the oppression of an impoverished colony by its colonial master.
If Scottish Labour really is to take a different path from the UK’s leadership’s position, then the Scottish Labour Party should do what the Labour Party Rule book states, as one of the Aims and Values for CLPs:
“…provide the opportunity for all individual members of the Party within the constituency to contribute to the development of the aims and policies … and … participate fully in discussion to broaden the political education of members of the Party and to increase their influence over the formulation of the Party programme.” (Chapter 7, Clause II, 2D)
The Scottish Executive of the Labour Party should have an emergency meeting to generate a statement on the current crisis. That statement could then provide the basis of the “political education of members” mentioned in the rules. That would also require the Scottish Labour Executive to withdraw the current advice being offered to CLPs secretaries. Faced with the likely catastrophe that the Israeli assault on Gaza poses, anything less is political dereliction.
Vince Mills was Policy Officer of Glasgow Kelvin CLP until his recent resignation. He is Chair of the West of Scotland Education branch of Unite, joint secretary of Radical Options for Scotland and Europe and a member of the Red Paper Collective and the Campaign for Socialism.
Image: Palestine march, London, October 14th. c/o Bryn Griffiths
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