We told you so – new evidence confirms NEC power-grab rule package unlawful

Even before events began to unfold at Labour’s annual Conference last month, the SKWAWKBOX warned that the right-wing Labour ‘machine’ was attempting a ‘silent coup’ – exploiting some rules and ignoring others to ram through a rule change intended to cancel leader Jeremy Corbyn’s democratically-achieved majority on the ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) against vehement opposition from those who understood what they were trying to do. Including this writer.

Subsequently, this blog also carried an exclusive interview with an NEC member, who confirmed that the party’s rules and procedures were trampled in the plotters’ unseemly eagerness to achieve their goal.

Now, new evidence has emerged that confirms not only the desperate lengths to which the plotters were prepared to go in order to nullify a huge democratic landslide, but that they acted in an unprecedentedly illegal manner.

A new Left Futures article reveals that it wasn’t only at the Conference that the rules were ignored and broken, but also that:

• contrary to what was claimed at the Conference, the CAC (conference arrangements committee) had not been sent a package of rules by the NEC, but a list of individual rule changes to be voted on by delegates
• that a staff member misled the CAC by advising them that it was a package deal
• that there is no precedent whatever for rules being forced through as a ‘take it or leave it’ package at an annual Conference – which means that delegates were lied to from the platform when it was claimed this was standard practice

A masterstroke by Jeremy Corbyn undid some of the damage of the rule change that had levered two unelected, anti-Corbyn members onto the NEC.

But the recent decision by the NEC to support a farcical, fact-free report of homophobic abuse in Angela Eagle’s Wallasey CLP (constituency Labour party), in spite of Corbyn’s ‘whipped’ attempt to prevent the miscarriage of justice, shows that the presence of these two anti-democratically imposed members continues to distort the proper balance and processes in Labour’s ruling body.

It’s clearer than ever that the right-wingers of the Labour party have no intention of ‘unity’ or ‘pulling together’ and that the words are regarded merely as convenient cover for their continued attempts to control the party by undemocratic means. Expulsion is the only real remedy.

In the meantime, if you’re a member of the Labour party (if you’re not, join!), then it’s essential that you move a resolution, in time for your next monthly CLP meeting, demanding the annulment of this completely-illegal power-grab, which cannot be allowed to stand, and the immediate removal of the two additional ‘crowbarred’ members from the NEC.

Please spread the word so everyone knows the same.