By Dave Levy
The critical task for the Party’s disciplinary process is to restore trust in its fairness. The rules and their enforcement must offer dignity, respect and make the promises of membership rights, including a right to fair process under C2.2.8 of the Party rulebook a reality.
The Forde Report identified the risk that the disciplinary process could be used factionally; the reforms since the EHRC report have not removed that risk nor rebuilt a culture of trust.
The events from earlier this year leading to the resignation of Morgan McSweeney show the factional nature of Labour’s processes and the weakness of its processes in holding its leadership accountable to its policy, values, and rules.
There is a common understanding of how to be fair to victims and the accused, most succinctly stated in Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the preamble of which says, “Everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law. Judgment shall be pronounced publicly.” The Labour Party process avoids several aspects of this definition of minimum rights, most worryingly the right to put a defence of one’s own choosing to the tribunal.
The National Constitutional Committee was originally created to offer independence from the National Executive Committee, which acts as the prosecutor. The process has been made worse by the imposition of an obscurely appointed supervisory board for Equality Act complaints and by the fact that complaints about MPs and staff are no longer dealt with by the NCC, leading to a sense of impunity amongst senior officials.
Another area of weakness and complaint is the Party’s compliance with its rules on candidate selection in particular, which require it “to take action in all selections to encourage a greater level of representation and participation of groups of people in our society who are currently under-represented in our democratic institutions… select more candidates who reflect the full diversity of our society.”
Forde also warned about this, he found that the party prioritized certain forms of discrimination—while complaints concerning anti-Black racism took longer to process or were harder to raise. This is illustrated by the treatment of Diane Abbott and certain London parliamentary and council selections.
I don’t suggest that the election of people with better training and a greater commitment to justice, fairness and dignity will change things but sending the signal that the CLPs want better is an important act.
Personally, I am an experienced Party activist and have acted as a workers’ companion for the last eight years. I am thus experienced in assessing cases of bullying and discrimination and have been trained in employment and equality law.
I am supported by the Centre left Grassroots Alliance and would ask you to vote for me, and my running mates, Rachel Garnham, Caoimhe Ní Dhónaill and Harry Stratton.
Dave Levy is a member of Lewisham North CLP and blogs at https://davelevy.info/blog. He is a member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy Executive Committee.
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