Up and down the country, Your Party members are meeting officially for the first time in their hundreds to discuss the draft founding documents. It’s very exciting, but also enormously frustrating. The assemblies are deliberately designed to avoid producing measurable results. Meeting-wide votes are forbidden and the only output is from open ended feedback forms submitted by tightly controlled discussion groups.
At the South London Your Party regional assembly on 2 November, a small group of Democratic Socialist activists found one way to escape this atomisation and gain a measurable sense of what changes members would like to the draft foundation documents.
During the interval between sessions we taped eight amendment proposals to a wall and encouraged attendees to read them and dot-vote with their opinions.
55 people registered to vote (nearly 10% of total attendance) and the results are quite clear cut (see the end of this report). They generally show an overwhelming preference for our amendment proposals.
South London wasn’t the only regional assembly to stage “grassroots dotocratic action”. The amendments grew out of weeks of constitutional discussions within the Democratic Socialists and were prepared for dotvoting by proto-branch activists in Sheffield and Derbyshire. The South Yorkshire assembly was able to run an entire Local Assembly around discussing these concrete amendments. Their full report is well worth reading and their dot voting results after an hour of debate show even more convincing levels of support for the same amendments.
If you have an upcoming assembly you can easily repeat our action. It is very simple to organise. You don’t need to interrupt proceedings. You just need to find a space where you can tape your sheet and have fellow activists promote the plan in their groups during the first half of your meeting. We also distributed copies of the closely related Democratic Socialists – Key amendments flyer.
If enough assemblies stage similar actions we can bring pressure to bear on the Independent Alliance of MPs to include these amendments for consideration at the founding conference.
The Democratic Socialists are hundreds of ordinary Your Party members from around the country who share an interest in making the best possible grassroots democracy within the party and throughout the nation. We have lots of founding documents materials you might like including,
- Our own (and much more complete) alternatives to the official Your Party draft documents.
- A guide to everything under discussion at Local Assemblies.
- A guide to making your own submission on the founding documents portal.
We also have more plans for the founding conference and beyond. You can sign up to help here.
This action wouldn’t have been possible without the help of many other South London Your Party activists including Conor B, Ewan T, Monty, Michael A, Patrick O and Sam P. I would particularly like to thank Conor, the lead organiser for the South West London Proto-Branch, who provided the materials, Michael for getting the sheets ready for the interval, and Tina for promoting the dotocracy approach.
Results of our ‘Dotocracy exercise’:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |