Campaign launched for Scottish CLPs to be represented on the NEC

A campaign has been launched to improve the democratic openness and accountability of NEC elections for CLP representatives.

The petition for NEC representation for Scotland is part of a UK-wide campaign which claims that the current model for electing NEC CLP reps is slanted towards London and the South East, and favours those endorsed by big money backers.

The campaign says:

The voices of members should be at the heart of the Labour party, but currently our nations and regions are underrepresented on our party’s highest decision-making body.

Currently our nine CLP representatives on the NEC are elected as nationwide representatives for the whole membership in a nationwide ballot. We need to change this structure to ensure that every nation and region has a dedicated voice while ensuring that we have a gender balanced NEC.

Members rarely get to meet their NEC representatives. When elected, our representatives often struggle to reach all members due to the financial and time commitment of having to be responsible for covering all 647 CLPs.

Currently there is no meaningful way to hold our members representatives to account. If we elected our representatives regionally then we could hold them to account at national and regional conferences.

The NEC is currently London and South East focused. There are no measures in place to ensure that every nation and region in the country has a voice – meaning important issues are overlooked.

The current system is expensive to run for. It shuts people out from running in the election who don’t have the financial or organisational backing to run in such a large scale nationwide election campaign.

The twinning of neighbouring nations and regions can ensure we have gender balanced and regional representation.

As a party with over 550,000 members we need to be putting all members’ voices from across the country at the heart of our highest decision making body. Sign our petition and support our campaign today.

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