By Pete Sunter, secretary, Carlisle CLP, personal capacity
The Northern Regional Labour conference organising meeting started as a small group of people getting together to help Jamie Driscoll in his successful bid to become mayor of North of Tyneside. Using the networking skills and organising savvy developed during this time, it was felt that the group should broaden out and aim to be more influential in the Northern Region of the Labour Party as a whole. It was about this point that Cumbria came on board and talks were held, again on a small scale, to develop a plan to bring left wing members of the Labour Party together and to get someone of the left onto the Regional Executive Committee.
Regional conference planned for November
As the March Regional Conference was postponed due to Covid-19, the group continued to meet and expand on WhatsApp. Eventually, the big majority of the CLPs in the Northern Region had members attached to this group. The new date planned for the Regional Conference is now November, but the meeting agreed that we need to be discussing tactics to develop a left slate in order to be ready as soon as possible. To this end the Zoom conference call on Sunday allowed people to “meet” and discuss the issues at hand.
A format was agreed of two speakers on a) changes to the political landscape post-CV19 and b) implications for the left under new Party leadership, with sessions on Q&A session and the bread and butter of forming the network to develop a slate.
We were lucky enough to get Jamie Driscoll (North of Tyne Mayor) and Maya Goodfellow as the speakers. Steve Fairfax outlined what the Regional Executive Committee was, how it had been kept opaque in our Region (as ‘Regional Board’ until this year) and that it had hardly been meeting the expectations the Party membership would have of such a body. It was time to organise and move a left slate.
An end to poverty
Jamie Driscoll started with a quotation from the Jam (“What You See Is What You Get”) to emphasise the importance of people of like-mind getting together and talking. We need to change the system in this country – not just to offer people a route out of poverty, but an end to poverty.
Previously, lefts had been organising under the name ‘North of England Labour Left’ (NELL) and their idea was that it would not be hierarchy-rich but would operate as one-member-one-vote; the activists would steer the group. There would be officers, but Jamie envisaged them only needing to be used if, for example, one part of the organisation was out of step with the majority view and wrongly putting forward its view in the name of NELL.
Maya Goodfellow reminded us that this pandemic had shown who the key workers truly were, that the homeless could all be given shelter, that visas could be automatically rolled forward, though it was interesting to note that ‘lowlier’ key workers in hospitals such as cleaners and porters still had to apply to extend visas, with the concomitant bureaucracy and costs. She envisaged a form of austerity would envelop the country again, though this government would find another description for it, but ordinary people would be the ones they expect to pay for the present largesse.
Generations-old inequalities still felt today
Maya also reminded us that injustices such as Windrush had not been solved; that due to inequalities generations-old the black community in Britain was dying from Covid-19 at a rate three times higher than the white community; there’s been no suspension of the disgraceful “hostile environment” for immigrants, many of whom are too scared to access medical care, even at this time, for fear of deportation. When the pandemic eases, the Tories are likely to double down on such things, and the Labour Party needs to be prepared to fight back.
There were two more discussions on organising in our CLP clusters and on ensuring the union delegates to the Regional Executive could have nominations from a left slate as well.
The next steps were up to the CLPs and the union members to organise – in Cumbria comrades made a commitment to meet on Zoom in the near future, to organise our nominations for delegates to the Regional Conference as soon as possible.
The message from the meeting was loud, clear – don’t leave, ORGANISE!
May 5, 2020
