If Labour’s Campaign Improvement Board behaves as it has elsewhere, the results will be a disaster for local democracy.

The London Borough of Brent’s Labour Party is the latest to be subjected to a ‘Campaign Improvement Board’. Instead of allowing the Party’s local branches to select their council candidates ahead of the 2026 borough elections, selections will be made by external ‘assessors’ recruited by the Party’s London Region.

To see how this has worked in the past, let’s look at what happened to Leicester Council and its Labour Party following a similar experience. A Campaign Improvement Board was sent in to the city ahead of the 2023 city council elections, and local Party members were denied the opportunity to select their candidates. Labour Party rules on eligibility and geographic criteria were suspended, leading to people with no connection to the city or the Party deciding on its future. Those who failed the external panel interview had no right of appeal.

Leicester’s undemocratic selection process resulted in a major cull of sitting councillors. Nineteen sitting councillors were deselected, including all the Hindu councillors, and a high proportion of BAME councillors. All this, just twelve weeks before election day.

“Most councillors who are deselected by democratic means accept the decision, however bruised their feelings might be, as they will have had a fair hearing, a properly conducted vote, and will still have the opportunity to be selected in other wards,”  observed Peter Kenny, a member of Leicester West CLP at  the time.  But the “undemocratic, unfair and opaque nature of the process” in Leicester led to a high percentage of those councillors affected leaving the Party and standing against it.

As a result of these impositions, many members, rightly feeling disenfranchised, refused to campaign in the 2023 local elections. Some quit the Party. Nationally, Labour won 500 seats that year. But in Leicester, the Party lost 22 seats. The Conservatives went from 0 to 17, their best showing in decades. The Green Party and Lib Dems also made gains.  The Labour Mayor saw his vote fall from 61% to 39%.

Certainly, Labour in Leicester had a number of challenging issues confronting  it, which should not be downplayed. But there is no doubt that the mass deselections imposed by the external panel had a major impact. For example, three of Labour’s deselected councillors stood for other parties in their wards and won.

Later that year, Labour’s National Executive suspended Leicester East CLP, accusing the Party of factionalism. It removed all the CLP’s elected officers. The first some heard of it was when the local media broke the news.

Unsurprisingly, Leicester bucked the national trend in the 2024 general election too. Leicester East was the only Tory gain from Labour in the entire country. Leicester South was won by the Independent Shockat Adam. He took the seat from Shadow Paymaster General and leading Labour light Jonathan Ashworth.

Leading Brent Labour Councillor Shama Tatler is believed to be one of the authors of the Campaign Improvement Board Report on Leicester that led to the deselection of candidates, new ones being imposed and the subsequent damage to Leicester Labour Party. She was also parachuted into Chingford after the NEC’s last-minute deselection of popular local Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen in the middle of the 2024 general election campaign. To the dismay of local activists, Tatler failed to achieve what Shaheen might well have done and Tory austerity attack dog Iain Duncan Smith retained the seat. Perhaps for some of those in the leading circles of the Party whose priority is to wage internal factional battles, this was a small price to pay. Most progressive-minded people would take a different view.

Can Brent be saved from such similar ‘reorganisations’?

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