After it was discovered at the St Ann's Labour Party selection candidate selection meeting that there were people present and voting who should not have been, I came home from the pub (where I'd heard about it) and wrote this article. It has subsequently been edited by site admins to remove the names of people who were embarrassed or in the final case where a journalist said it was potentially libellous. Well here I will attempt to summarise what we have subsequently found out and hopefully take people's attention away from my original appalling rant.
*An individual has asked that their name be replaced with their function in this post on the grounds that they are not seeking public office. This has been done.
Tags for Forum Posts: election2014, labour, st ann's labour, stanns
I can completely see the Labour Party's reasons for what they have said. They cannot run selection processes like this and accept complaints after the meeting. They would have to rerun hundreds of selection meetings if that were the case.
What we have here, and was not highlighted in this complaint, was a ward secretary and an independent invigilator actively working against some of the candidates. For instance Steve Hart's recollection of events is wrong. The person who complained to him was a candidate in the St Ann's meeting, nothing to do with the Seven Sister's meeting downstairs. The ward secretary has a lot to answer for too. He seems to have smuggled these people into the room quickly so the complainant could not find them, as well as stopping her from going into the room to check and not doing proper ID checks. I have not found a single person there who had their ID checked and this for me is the crux of the matter and where Zena's complaint pulls punches: John Blake deliberately did not check ID. Put this next to the fact that Claire Kober asked Matt Downie, who was invigilator for Noel Park's selection meeting, to allow an ineligible member to vote... We see why they are covering it up, no?
If you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get to the bottom of the issue, even if you want to. Those of us who think there were irregularities have several different concerns about the eligibility of some voters taking part in the selection process.
One person was definitely not on the freeze list given to candidates. This person appears to be employed by one of the successful candidates and has an address for the purposes of party membership which is a workplace one, a shopfront. So do eight others. This member is actually registered to vote from an address outside the constituency. It also follows that at least one candidate was able to lobby for support but most were not even aware of this member. It was impossible for other candidates to query this person’s membership or entitlement before the meeting.
Four other members attended who may or may not have been matched to names on the list. Of these, there are strong suspicions that one was taking the place of a member registered as a party member at an estate agents but registered as a voter from a residential address in another ward. He is not known at the estate agents and I was told by people who do know him, from the shop he co-owned, that he moved out of the area some time ago (as in years rather than months.)
A third member is registered as a party member at the same estate agents though he owns a shop on the other side of the road, in Harringay ward and lives many miles away. I believe he attended the meeting but I don’t know him from a hole in the ground.
The fourth and fifth people were not known at all to any of those of us complaining now. There are two longstanding members who have never attended any meetings and they are party members at residential addresses (as opposed to shops.) They could possibly have decided to turn up and vote in a selection for the first time, but the candidates I have spoken to knocked at their addresses many times to canvass them. Nobody was ever home. Even they, however, are registered to vote from addresses elsewhere, which suggests they don’t live, or no longer live, at the address held for them by the party. Like I say, we don’t know. And it matters to residents so we should find out.
The whole issue has become very feverish, understandably. It’s not as simple as five people mistakenly wandering into a meeting to support their friend and innocently getting caught up in something controversial. There was a very suspicious spike in membership in the summer which the secretary of Harringay ward noticed and reported. An awful lot of actually ineligible people may have joined the Labour party believing that they could take part in the selection in either ward. They will be able to next time but were too late this time. It’s not exactly stretching things to suspect that their disappointment may have led to them to look for other ways to play a part in local democracy, sooner rather than later, say. Not everybody is a stickler for rules and the Labour Party Rulebook isn’t everybody’s idea of a page-turner.
It is an offence, for example, under party rules, to purchase membership for another person, or to join at the unwaged rate when you are in work. It is a requirement to register to vote if you are eligible and it is against the rules to use a workplace address for the purposes of membership. I’ve never broken any of these rules. However I am concerned to hear assertions that that some of my comrades may have. Surely any political party would want to produce a thorough report.
Rival parties don’t have this controversy mainly but then they don’t, with respect, have safe seats either. That’s why we have to take all of this very seriously indeed.
Julie, Along with other previously Labour voting friends and neighbours in St Ann's Ward I strongly feel that the Labour Party Compliance Unit investigating the complaint should be interviewing you, as you were at the meeting, and not just those people who ran the meeting. And that anyone who still claims the process was fair and correct should be prepared to give a satisfactory answer to each one of your points and observations above. Without that real investigation the elections in this ward will be tainted until there is a new selection round or a rerun.
Those of us who weren't there can't of course know the truth, but until the investigators actually investigate all the allegations properly, or agree to a rerun, we can only presume they have no answers and that the allegations of personation etc are true.
Is there any further appeal route beyond the appeal to the NEC?
The botched investigation is ridiculous anyway as the truth will inevitably come out in due course, and will be compromising to the Labour party, which some of think is a pity.
In my view opposing the terrible and damaging policies of the current Coalition government should be engaging everyone's energies, and so it's a huge diversion of time to have to be caught up in this silly mess of local skullduggery. However, in my experience unless you stand up against corruption where and when you meet it, worse stuff then happens. Good luck to all who are keeping on at this until it is sorted with a rerun.
So apart from Ant, nobody has had an opportunity to bring this up on the doorstep with a Labour Politician?
They've not been by our road as of yet.
So you're in the "voted Labour last time, definitely will again this time" column.
I have it on very good authority that Nora Mulready has insisted to at least one of the local traders that they took passport ID at the selection meeting (not from anyone I have spoken to) and now I hear that Barbara Blake has told a very well known local trader that it is perfectly OK to register in the Labour Party from a business address.
It may be useful to ask in other wards about ID proof. We weren't asked for this in Tottenham Green - maybe all those present were known personally to officers present. Half of them weren't known to me as regular attenders from about the previous year of monthly ward meetings.
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