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Labour selections: Is the party blocking left-wing candidates? [1]

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Date: 2023-04

It was midnight when Maurice Mcleod received the email. Mcleod, a councillor in south London, racial justice activist and former journalist, had found out he would not be allowed to run as a parliamentary candidate for Labour.

“I can’t lie, I was absolutely devastated,” he said. “Not because I think: ‘Oh, I’m brilliant, I should be an MP,’ but I felt that – maybe naively – they would look at me and go: ‘He’s been active in the Black Lives Matter stuff. He brings an audience that we’re not very good at connecting with. He’s worked with Starmer on race policy.’

“But it feels like they just looked at me and went: ‘Yeah, lefty, Corbyn. Blocking you.’”

Labour is predicted to benefit from a huge swing in the UK’s next general election, with scores if not hundreds of potential new seats on the cards. But in its process to select who will stand as potential MPs, accusations of purges, blockings and factionalism continue to arise.

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openDemocracy has heard claims about outsiders being asked to stand in seats they have no connection to, members’ contact details being given early to selected candidates, and direct instructions from Keir Starmer to tighten vetting processes. Some applaud the new rigour applied to potential MPs, or see it as no different from what happened under other leaders. Others say candidate lists are being fixed – something the party has denied. What’s happening inside Labour?

For Mcleod, the decision to exclude him from the Labour longlist felt explicitly factional. One reason given by the National Executive Committee (NEC), which decided the longlist, was that Mcleod had liked a tweet by former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas a few years ago.

“I think they were determined not to allow me to stand,” he said.

The NEC, Labour’s governing body, later told Mcleod that he had been excluded because he had been absent from a council vote on the definition of antisemitism. He says this was a mixup, and that he had left the room assuming (wrongly) he could return.

Is the party purging the left? “Absolutely. I don’t know how anyone would pretend that that’s not what’s happening.”

Selection processes differ from party to party, and leader to leader. They are both important to political makeup and slightly tedious. Currently, individuals who have been a member of Labour for longer than a year can apply to become parliamentary candidates, collecting endorsements from the likes of unions and MPs. They then go through a national panel, a “due diligence” check of social media and any internal complaints, and finally a local panel. At every stage, there are diversity requirements. Up until recently, there was no way to appeal the final decision.

It’s the second stage of this, the “due diligence” check introduced under Starmer, that has resulted in the most pushback over excluded candidates. It has seen numerous applicants on the left of the party removed from longlists for what some see as minor transgressions.

One reason given for the exclusion of would-be Milton Keynes candidate Lauren Townsend was that she had liked a tweet by Nicola Sturgeon. Townsend had been endorsed by six trade unions. Former postal worker Matt Kerr, who had previously run for deputy leader of Scottish Labour, was blocked in Glasgow South West after due diligence found he had tweeted in support of Jeremy Corbyn.

Leigh Drennan – the chair of Labour North West, with endorsements from three unions and nine years as a Labour councillor under her belt – was blocked from standing in Bolton North East after a due diligence process, allegedly for signing a petition. Greg Marshall, who had previously stood as a parliamentary candidate for Boxtowe in 2017 and 2019, was blocked from standing again, despite being the only local candidate and receiving eight union endorsements. (Marshall told the Guardian he had not even been properly informed about the decision to block him, which prompted the entire executive committee of his local CLP to resign in protest, as well as earning the party a public rebuke from former shadow chancellor John McDonnell.)

In Stroud, Labour even blocked its own council leader, Doina Cornell, from the local parliamentary longlist. At the time, Cornell said she was given “spurious and partisan reasons”, with some reports suggesting it had been down to social media posts. She and two other councillors then quit the party, costing Labour its control of the town hall.

Many of those deselected or blocked from standing had previously been backed by the socialist campaign group Momentum. But critics of Labour’s current selection process say the same kind of scrutiny isn’t being applied to those who do not identify with the left of the party.

Barking and Dagenham Council leader Darren Rodwell joked at a Black history event that, as a white man, he had the “worst tan possible for a Black man”. He was allowed to stand for a parliamentary candidate by the party after apologising. Frank McAveety, a former Labour MSP who described a 15-year-old girl as “very attractive”, “dark” and “dusky”, and “very nice and very slim” during a Holyrood committee meeting in 2010 made it onto Labour’s parliamentary shortlist for Glasgow Shettleston.

Sitting Labour MPs also can be removed from standing again – something that was made easier under Corbyn’s leadership, but which ended up taking place under Starmer. In October 2022, Sam Tarry was the first sitting Labour MP to be deselected since Anne Moffat in 2010, a process whereby local members and affiliates can vote not to automatically reselect their MP. Tarry, after losing the selection process, disputed the veracity of a voting system and called for an audit. Zarah Sultana, part of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, faced a trigger ballot process in Coventry, where constituency members were required to vote in order to allow Sultana to stand again in her seat. The 29-year-old eventually won in all branches of her CLP.

At the time, Sultana tweeted: “When the Labour trigger ballot process began, a so-called ‘Labour source’ said ‘every branch is ready to press the button’ to deselect me.”

While there are concerns the left are being cut out, there are also worries about who takes their place. A charity worker who spoke to openDemocracy for this feature was approached by a senior Labour figure to stand for a particular seat – even though he had absolutely no connection to the area and was not even a member of the party at the time.

There is no perfect mould for an MP, and local ties to an area – while important – aren’t always a marker of political rigour or compassion. But the sense that people are being parachuted into seats, cutting out those who have been local councillors or activists for years, has ruffled feathers.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-selection-process-keir-starmer-maurice-mcleod-lauren-townsend/

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