On Monday 23 September 2024 the Conference Arrangements Committee published the voting figures for the Priorities Ballots which decide the topics to reach the floor of conference (six chosen by the unions, six by the Constituency Labour Parties [CLPs]).
The headline result was that the right wing (Labour To Win) swept the board on CLP priorities, with six topics mostly chosen to be bland and get little debate. The right still commands a large chunk of CLP delegates who may not be hardbitten right-wingers, but who accept the argument that (because of “the media”) the conference best not make trouble for the Labour leaders.
In more detail:
- The right’s victory was not overwhelming. The top left-recommended priority, housing, was only 11,000 votes short of the bottom right-recommended priority, “opportunity” (108,000 to 119,000).
- The right’s total priorities vote was 47% of the CLP aggregate, and maybe 42% of CLPs voted the full right-wing “slate” of priorities. With a more concentrated vote by left and middle-of-the-road CLPs, we could get spikier topics onto the floor of conference.
- The non-right priorities, however, was very scattered. Many of the top non-right priority votes went to topics not pushed by the left. I guess those topics got votes because they cover important issues (violence against women and girls, social care, mental health). The left didn’t push them because close examination of the motions submitted showed to be bland. There was less than there was back in the day of CLPs “wasting” their priorities votes by voting for topics already prioritised by the unions, but there was some of that (for example, 21,000 CLP votes for “the future of local government”, already prioritised by the unions).
- I don’t know, but I’d guess many CLP delegates voted on priorities without reading the motions, or at least without reading them closely. Presumably through deliberate delay, the codelegates didn’t get the motions until the morning when they voted on priorities. And this is the Labour Party, not some high-voltage Marxist operation. Close reading and close study are not part of the culture. (Example: the motion from my own CLP, on social care, has disappeared. It wasn’t in the motions book, and it wasn’t in the list of motions ruled out. I’ve talked with one of our delegates, a left-winger, and with our CLP chair, an Open Labour person. Neither had noticed that the motion had disappeared until I told them, both were baffled, and I’ve heard back from neither).
- The total CLP vote on priorities was 1,710,969. Divide by six because each CLP could vote for six priorities, and by 600 because that is the rough average membership for a CLP, and that gives 475 CLPs voting. Probably fewer, because smaller CLPs are less likely to send delegates. Probably a fair number of CLPs didn’t vote in the priorities ballot.
- The left “operation” on the CLPs priorities ballot was poor. The “patient safety” topic – not an obvious top priority, but important because it was where the CAC had hived off the Socialist Health Association motion – got only 13,662 votes (20-odd CLPs?). “Equalities” (in fact trans rights) got only 16,357, and was not even recommended at all by the CLPD and Momentum, only by LLI. It’s difficult, because we too get the list of “topics” and motions only at the last minute. Labour Left Internationalists has since 2021 not mobilised the resources to do “instant” bulletins at conference, rather than distribute a general bulletin produced in advance. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy still has its daily “Yellow Pages”, but not even the keenest CLPDer would deny that it is a pale shadow of what it was
- A better left “operation” would help. So would a “common-sense” reform: to have the Conference Arrangements Committee list the topics in advance, and require CLPs to slot their motions under one or another. This would also prevent the CAC quelling debate by dispersing motions in an artificial multiplication of topics (four in this conference for health, for example).