At the founding conference a month ago, the membership of Your Party voted to determine how the party would be led. The results were clear: a majority supported a collective leadership mostly made up of the rank-and-file — termed the Central Executive Committee — taking the specific form of 16 ordinary members elected on a regional basis in England, plus 2 seats reserved for Scotland and Wales respectively, and 4 seats reserved for elected office holders. We were pleased to see this result, given that a collective leadership was one of the central pillars of our vision for the party, and will elevate and cultivate leaders from the rank-and-file to the head of the largest socialist party in Britain since the 1940s.
We were comparatively displeased a week after the conference when the leadership failed, once again, to hold to the timeline that it had laid out for the release of election procedures, which were supposed to be published on Monday 8th December. Two days later, they broke radio silence to announce in an email that more time was needed to produce and share the election rules, and that they would be out “next week”, alongside a substantial delay to the opening of nominations for candidates (though the election would still culminate on February 27th).
Typically, this timeline was not held to either. The following update did not come “next week” but a further two days into the week after that, i.e. last Tuesday the 23rd. The rules for the election have at long last been clarified — though notably they lay the groundwork for the present ban on dual membership to be enforced, despite the clear rejection of this ban in spirit at conference (having not been granted the opportunity to truly overturn it).
The new proposal from the leadership is equally concerning: They wish to expand the number of English seats to 18, two for each region, with no weighting according to population. They justify this proposal with the argument that since “9 into 16 doesn’t go”, and yet the CEC needs to be gender balanced, each region will need to have two seats in order to avoid the issue of single-seat regions being “gender-locked”.
This is a weak argument for such a dramatic change to the leadership structure that the conference voted for. We are staunchly opposed to such a move, and lay out the following reasons for our opposition:
- It undermines proportionality and disenfranchises members living in more populous areas. Assigning two seats to every region — rather than varying the number from, say, 1 to 3 based on population — means that the votes of members in more populated regions, such as London and the North West, will matter far less than the votes of members in low population regions. This will weaken the party’s internal democracy, and may lead to a CEC with a skewed political make-up relative to the actual political outlook of the majority of the membership.
- It empowers the English regions while leaving Scotland and Wales with only one seat each. This is self-evidently unfair, and it is unusual that the same argument made to justify giving each English region two seats is not seen to apply to Scotland and Wales as well.
- It is a rejection of the decision made by the membership a month ago, and asserts the “right” of the unelected leadership to amend conference decisions on a whim. This is a terrible precedent to set. If the leadership get away with such an undermining of party democracy, they will do so again; the leadership structure was already decided upon by conference, which is the sovereign body of the party.
- It does not account for non-binary people, who are implicitly erased by the binary-focused assumption that 2 seats per region are necessary to achieve gender balance. We must endeavour to break the mindset that gender is strictly binary, and we should not bake such assumptions into any aspect of our party.
- There are much more suitable solutions to the issue of gender-locked seats. One such solution would be to combine regions with single seats where the elected candidate is not a woman in either, and elect the woman candidate with the highest vote from the region in which the winning non-woman candidate received the lower winning total vote.
- The timing and manner of the referendum is inadequate to allow members to properly consider the issue and vote. The announcement went out via email two days before Christmas, and the vote will conclude one day before New Year. This is the worst timing for such a consultation given that many people will not have the time or the will to consider political matters during the holiday season. This guarantees lower engagement from the membership than would otherwise be the case.
We urge members to vote against this proposal for the reasons outlined above. The coming elections will be a struggle between the backwards-looking right wing of the party and the ossified bureaucracy that supports it, and the forward-thinking left wing, which won a number of victories at conference, and which must now build on those victories by winning a majority on the CEC and shaping the party as its elected leadership, not as an implacable internal opposition.
This election is an opportunity to determine the path Your Party takes: will it build on the successes of the conference, hard-won by months of struggle to empower the membership, and provide a collective leadership drawn from the grassroots, willing to build a truly democratic mass workers’ party? Or will it provide a mandate to those who have failed the membership at every chance in the past 5 months, and will only continue to do so if granted a majority on the CEC?
If this vote passes, it will be the first step on a path towards the latter state of affairs. The unelected leadership will be emboldened to make further undemocratic amendments and to act ever more aggressively in limiting the democratic intransigence of a membership clearly to their left and demanding sovereignty over the party. But if members reject this proposal, it will be another blow struck against that entrenched leadership, for the cause of maximum member democracy and a radically democratic mass workers party, one which Britain needs more than ever.
The proposal must be rejected. As such, we urge members to vote NO.