Labour NEC – End bans and proscriptions!

By Ray Goodspeed (Leyton and Wanstead CLP – personal capacity)

A motion to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party (NEC), in the name of left members, Laura Pidcock and Nadia Jama, has revealed another whole layer of absurdity in the squalid farce of the Labour Party disciplinary processes. Bans and proscriptions and other administrative devices are being cynically used to drive out left-wing members and secure the position of the existing leadership at all levels of the party.

The full text of the motion is reprinted at the end of this article. The NEC earlier this week did not allow it on the agenda, but an undertaking has apparently been given that it will be discussed at the NEC in January. We will wait and see!

On 20^th July 2021 the NEC voted to proscribe (i.e. blanket ban) four groups – Socialist Appeal, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour in Exile and Resist – and that was followed by hundreds of summary suspensions and expulsions from the party of people who allegedly ‘supported’ these groups, in very many cases for incidents that happened before the bans were agreed – so-called ‘retrospective action’.

What constitutes ‘support’?

Incredibly, as the Pidcock/Jama motion makes clear, not only did the NEC not discuss making the bans retrospective at the meeting that introduced them, but they did not discuss at all what actually constituted ‘support’. Indeed, even at a subsequent NEC discussion, no agreement could be reached on what ‘support’ for one of the groups looked like! And yet national and regional officials of the party are implementing the bans and imposing penalties regardless, guided, presumably, by a mixture of the opinions of senior officials and factional spite.

There have been several high-profile victims of this, such as the legendary socialist film-maker, Ken Loach, as well as hundreds of ordinary members who have had their reputations trashed and their years, or even several decades, of service to the party thrown away. The national chair of Young Labour was suspended (at 1 am), but then reinstated. It was a mistake, you understand, rather than simple harrassment!

Pamela Fitzpatrick, from Harrow, in north-west London, was expelled on 19^th November. She was the Parliamentary candidate for Harrow East in 2019. She as been a Labour councillor in Harrow since 2014, securing the positions of vice-chair and chair of the Labour group of councillors and chair of the planning committee, but in September she was told that she did not meet the minimum standards to be a councillor!

This year she was elected to Labour’s National Women’s Committee. In 2020 she was even interviewed for the job of Labour Party General Secretary! But now she has been expelled. Her ‘crime’? – simply being interviewed by the paper, Socialist Appeal – 14 months before they were proscribed!

Finally expelled

Jo Bird, a Labour (now Independent) councillor in Liverpool, has finally been expelled. She has been suspended and investigated over and over, most notably and infamously in the run up to elections for the NEC in which she was a candidate who, once she was reinstated, only very narrowly failed to get elected. One alleged incident involved her, a Jew herself, making a joking pun around the words ‘due process/Jew process’ in an aside during a speech.

In each case, she was restored to membership, until they could have another go and continue the harrassment. Now she has been expelled for speaking at a meeting of Labour Against the Witchhunt three years before, and signing their petition in early 2020, more than a year before the NEC introduced the ban.

But Jo is not the only left-wing Jewish member to have been treated this way. Several Jewish Voice for Labour officers have been victimised. They estimate that Jewish members are four times as likely as other members to be suspended or expelled. One, Leah Levane was expelled – ‘auto-excluded’ – during the recent Labour Party Conference, to which she was an elected delegate. Starmer and Evans must now hold the record for expelling Jewish party members – and all in the name of a declared war on antisemitism!

It is important to be clear on this point. It is true that there have been some clear-cut examples of antisemitism in the party. Left Horizons supporters have no time for such behaviour and support disciplinary measures up to and including expulsion to deal with antisemitism and any other kind of racism in the in the ranks of the labour movement. In the long history of the socialist left, the problem of those who dress up their antisemitic bigotry in ‘socialist’ phrases and tried to split the working class has sometimes had to be dealt with (see this article for example).

Factional advantage

But the numbers of Labour Party members who were even investigated, let alone found ‘guilty’, were extremely small and were often more related to the issues of Palestine/Israel. The issue was whipped up into constant headlines and misused for party-political or factional advantage against the left in the party and its leader, and those who campaigned for the rights of Palestinians.

Now, the witchhunt has gone to another level. If you support or defend those who are suspended or expelled, even those not specifically accused of antisemitism themselves, or if you cast doubt on the justice of how their cases were dealt with, or if you speak on the same platform, or if you are interviewed by a newspaper that has supported them, then you too are brought under suspicion. It is the purest McCarthyism, designed to cast the net wider and wider.

The recent proscriptions allow members to be expelled for something they did or said that was not banned at the time they did it– in the clearest possible breach of natural justice – all under the leadership of a former Director of Public Prosecutions. It’s chilling!

The motion proposed by Laura Pidcock and Nadia Jama is very good in pointing out the absurdities of the current situation, such as the retrospective application of the rules and the lack of any definition of ‘support’. But we need to oppose the whole idea of blanket bans and prescriptions.

Natural Justice

All socialist groups have a right to campaign for their ideas in the wider labour movement and the Labour Party itself. Any breaches of the rules by members should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with clear evidence, and following the rules of natural justice and with the knowledge of who had made the accusation. There should be an end to guilt by association or persecution of those who support others where they believe an injustice has been committed.

The Labour right, who have their hands on the leadership party apparatus think that by expelling individuals or whole groups of socialists, they can expel Marxism, or socialist ideas in general, from the party. They feel confident and smug just now. But they will not succeed.

Marxism has been part of the labour and trade union movement in Britain from its very beginnings. Marxists played crucial roles in founding and building some trade unions and the Labour Party itself and Marxism has always been present, based, as it is, on the daily lived experience of working people themselves. It cannot be artificially separated by bans and expulsions, but will attract more and more activists who are looking for an answer to the dead-end of life under capitalism.

—————————————————————————————————–

Motion submitted to the NEC by Laura Pidcock and Nadia Jama

This meeting notes that at the National Executive Committee (NEC) of 20^th July, NEC members were presented with a paper which resolved to proscribe four separate organisations for their incompatibility with “Labour values”. The proscription of those organisations, (Socialist Appeal, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour in Exile and Resist) was passed by a majority at that NEC meeting, but not unanimously.

Throughout the discussion that occurred at that NEC meeting and in the papers preceding the meeting, there was no mention of the retrospective application of the decision to proscribe these organisations, nor, crucially, was there a clear, exhaustive description of what constitutes ‘support’ for the organisations listed.

At the request of many National Committee members, a discussion took place at a subsequent NEC meeting about both of these substantive points of contention – namely, of the retrospective application of the proscription of these organisations and of what constitutes ‘support’ for them. From that discussion it was clear that there were wide-ranging interpretations of what was agreed at the July NEC meeting which made the decision to proscribe the organisations.

This meeting believes that:

1. If the ruling body of the Labour Party (the NEC) cannot agree on what was decided on the 20^th July NEC meeting, particularly in relation to how these rules are implemented, then the Labour Party should not proceed to implement them.
2. Retrospective proscriptions are against the legal principle that people cannot be guilty of a criminal act that was not illegal at the time of the offence. This ‘natural law’ principle is especially pertinent for disciplinary cases, and the Labour Party should adhere to these principles in its dealings with its own members.
3. There is an urgent need for clarity over who determines whether a member has met the threshold to be investigated and the criteria to be employed to determine if a member is given extra time to respond, the criteria that would be used to exonerate the member under investigation and who makes that decision.

Therefore, this meeting resolves that:

1. A discussion must be convened at this NEC meeting to determine what constitutes ‘support’ for these organisations and a detailed examination of the process by which any future groups are proscribed.
2. The retrospective application of this rule ceases and that all members who have faced disciplinary action and investigation because of any ‘support’ for subsequently proscribed organisations before the date of the 20^th July NEC meeting should have that action rescinded.