I ATTENDED the Edinburgh Northern and Leith Constituency Labour Party (EN+L CLP) meeting on Thursday referenced in the Sunday National (Calls for cross-party efforts after more Labour officials step down over Gaza, Oct 22). I hope this letter will add context and maybe clarify a couple of things.
EN+L CLP is hopeful our Westminster candidate, USDAW Regional organiser Tracy Gilbert, will displace the current SNP MP Deidre Brock at the next election. Tracy attended aforesaid meeting as did her agent, former councillor Adam Wilson, who is chair of the EN+L CLP and office manager for Labour front-bench spokeswoman Sarah Boyack, who also was in attendance.
READ MORE: Nine Scottish Labour officials quit after being 'gagged' over Gaza
The secretary of the CLP is required to give members at the very least seven days notice of a general meeting. Our meeting on Thursday past was notified to the membership along these lines and the agenda contained a motion that was wide in scope and that I would categorise as generally raising concern about the UK and Scottish party’s governance, well written with no reference to the current conflict between Hamas and Israel. It did mention antisemitism in the context of the unforgivable party machinery in London (for which read one Sir Keir Starmer) banning locally and nationally respected (and elected!) mayor Jamie Driscoll from re-standing in North Tyne.
On Wednesday the secretary (a former civil servant and MBA graduate so familiar, shall we say, with routine admin) issued a new agenda with the motion deleted but without any reasonable, fair or legitimate explanation. Both secretary and chair at the meeting advised they had not done so on the orders of Scottish/UK HQs apropos the motion but they were reading the general rulings from Labour’s high heid yins respectively to apply. This does not hold water as there was no current conflict mentioned.
Notwithstanding, the motion proposer (who you name in the piece) did query the censorship of the motion but moved on to ask that the members reasonably be afforded an opportunity to discuss matters in a certain part of the Middle East in a safe place and measured way. This was declined by the chair, rather impertinently in my view. It should have been put to the meeting.
READ MORE: Keir Starmer just keeps on repeating his mantra while stifling debate
The Sunday National reports six members stood down from the CLP exec. That is true, three were in attendance at the meeting and one of them read an agreed statement on behalf of all six. The three left alongside our “super campaigner” who, when in the past has been asked to deliver 1000 election leaflets in two days, does 2000 in one day and asks for more! The upper echelons in Labour circles need to learn a lesson here: don’t defecate on the heads of your best people!
On a substantive point, the six who have been lost to the EN+L CLP “officer team” (let’s call them escapees from the drudgery of meeting after meeting of Starmer acolytes and apologists) are some of the hardest-working people I have ever known fighting for traditional aims and values of the party. Thankfully they are staying in the party to fight for what they believe in, but are stifled from discussing.
I know few of my kindred CLPs who have exec members like Mike Cowley, an experienced and respected global politics lecturer, and world-renowned and published historian Rory Scothorne, who are able to provide context and detail about the region at this hellish time.
I reluctantly stayed to the end of the meeting to question one of the Edinburgh City Council Labour/Tory coalition heads (planning) about recent reports of a disgracefully high number of young people in our schools being excluded for drug use and possession, but they did not know of this and promised to revert. Disgraceful ignorance in my view in light of Scotland’s drug deaths shame under years of SNP government – but that’s for another day.
Douglas McBean
Edinburgh
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