This very clear and concise information was posted as a comment on the previous article about the Progress infiltration of the SERA organisation, which the Labour right aims to use as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to gain grassroots control of local Labour party structures, as a means of negating Corbyn’s huge democratic support among the party membership.
The original commenter has kindly given permission to use place it in this article so that it can be accessed easily and, hopefully, shared widely:
Some new members of Labour may be unaware that the party is an umbrella organisation with many different unions and socialist societies (like SERA) affiliated to it. You can get delegated to your constituent party from local branches of these affiliated organisations. I suspect that THAT is what the Labour right is up to – getting its cronies to pack the CLP General Committees and AGMs.
To counter this, it is important that Corbyn supporters in the party also do this. Go along to your local union branch and get yourself delegated to your constituency party. Some CLPs have regular delegate-based General Committees that run the CLP and select the MP. Others have ‘all member meetings’ that are open to any member, with just one delegate-based AGM per year. But that AGM is vital to electing the CLP officers and ONLY DELEGATES from Branch (ward) Labour Parties and affiliated unions and Socialist Societies can vote or select the MP.
If your union is NOT affiliated to Labour (mainly white collar unions like NUT), the traditional route for getting delegated to your CLP is via one of the Labour-affiliated Socialist Societies such as SERA. Join one of them and get delegated to your CLP from the local branch. For example, members of the NUT cannot get delegated to their CLP because this union is not affiliated to Labour. NUT members traditionally get around this problem by getting delegated to their CLP via the Labour affiliated society the Socialist Education Association which IS affiliated to Labour.
To find out if your union is affiliated to Labour see here:
http://www.labour.org.uk/pages/trade-union-and-labour-party-liaison-organisation-tuloA full list of Labour-affiliated Socialist Societies is here:
http://www.labour.org.uk/pages/affiliated-organisations
Practical steps that supporters of Labour as a genuine alternative to the toxic right-wing consensus can take to neutralise yet another Progress attempt to commandeer the party away from the burgeoning democratic movement.
Please share so local members know what they need to do.
3 years ago I was informed that Progress had tasked themselves to ensure Progress in every CLP – at that point they already had 3/4’s covered
Interesting. I suspect it’s much higher now but do you still have the original info?
Reblogged this on Declaration Of Opinion .
Reblogged this on Sid's Blog and commented:
Que Sera Sera
Hi Sqwawkbox. Thanks for posting my comment on your earlier post. It has inspired me to start my own blog and I have now re-blogged this post in a slightly extended form there.
The blog is entitled ‘Corbynista’ and it can be found here:
https://corbynistasite.wordpress.com/
The first post containing this article is here:
https://corbynistasite.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/understanding-the-labour-party-as-an-umbrella-organisation/
Excellent! I’ll tweet/reblog later