By Maisie Sanders, Hornsey and Wood Green CLP
In March, London Young Labour held its conference early on the Sunday morning when the clocks went forwards, on Mother’s Day, on the edge of London. The result, unsurprisingly, was a very low attendance – less than a hundred, compared to three or four times that the year before. Even then, the organisers went out of their way to avoid discussion of motions, with the result that only one was discussed in the whole day – a motion (already out of date by the day of the conference) praising the Labour leadership’s non-position on Brexit. For Seema Syeda’s report at the time, see here.
Now they’ve done it again, calling a promised policy conference in deep summer (August 24th), with less than three weeks notice, and with less than a week to submit motions.
London Young Labour’s committee are largely leadership ultra-loyalists, pro-Brexit, some of them Stalinists, and above all a friendship clique. They are so terrified of any challenge to their control of Young Labour, or any challenge to their political positions, particularly from the left, that they behave like Blairites in shutting down democracy. Only worse: under its old, pre-2018 right-wing leadership, London Young Labour was actually more democratic than it is now.
Left-wing activists should make the effort to submit motions (and demand there is adequate time to discuss them), attend the conference, and give the LYL ‘leadership’ the hard time they richly deserve.
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