Are Ealing's residents aware that LBE "Leader" Peter Mason sits on Labour's NEC?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/6b018858b54c8899The ruthless Labour machine that helped Starmer block BurnhamOnce an unruly Leftist rabble, the little-known National Executive Committee is fiercely loyal to the PM – and lets him stamp out dissentYou have almost certainly never heard of Peter Mason or Peter Wheeler, and it’s a fair bet that Andy Burnham had barely heard of them before this week either, but both of them played a major part in determining his future, and very possibly the future of this country’s leadership.Mason, the leader of Ealing borough council, and Wheeler, Labour councillor for the Ledsham and Manor ward on Cheshire West and Chester council, were two of the eight people who blackballed Burnham’s candidacy for a seat in Parliament at the weekend.Together with Sir Keir Starmer, who also voted to block Burnham, they are among the 10 officers on Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC), which is little understood outside the party membership but which is playing an increasing role in shaping British politics.Its decision to prevent the Mayor of Greater Manchester from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election has almost certainly killed off his ambitions of becoming prime minister, leaving another “what if?” question for future historians to ponder.Thanks to Starmer, and to an extent Sir Tony Blair before him, the NEC has been moulded into the instrument through which Labour prime ministers impose their will on their party, and by extension the country as a whole.What was once an unruly Leftist rabble dominated by the unions is now a machine loyal to the party leader that ruthlessly stamps out dissent.“The NEC has always been vital to the running of the Labour Party, and if a Labour leader loses control of the NEC, it’s as significant as them losing control of the Cabinet,” one Labour veteran explains.“What has changed the most over the past few leaders has been the culture and personnel of the NEC, as much as any rule changes.”The NEC was founded in 1900, as the legal entity of the Labour Party itself and the governing body of what was, at the time, the insurgent challenger to the Tories and the Liberals.As well as setting the party rules and organising the annual conference, by the 1980s it had become the main debating chamber for Labour Party policy. A majority of its members came from the trade unions, which supported unelectable leaders like Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.The unions’ control over the NEC was never more apparent than when it refused to expel members of the Trotskyist Militant tendency in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Ron Hayward was general secretary, much to Foot’s dismay when he became leader in 1980, and it took him a further two years to persuade the NEC to implement a ban.Blair, who was elected leader in 1994, set about reshaping the NEC in his own image, and making it an instrument of the party leader, rather than union barons. He reduced trade union membership to a minority for the first time by creating extra places for loyalists from the Parliamentary Labour Party, councils and MEPs, making it far easier to control.He also watered down the NEC’s power by farming out policy ideas to the National Policy Forum, which can suggest ideas but not impose them on the leadership.Gordon Brown coveted a place on the NEC when he was chancellor, and tried to get onto the committee in 2003, but Blair refused his request, deepening the rift between them. Blair was able to do so because he had a majority of support on the NEC, something that every Labour leader needs to ensure if they want to control their party.Starmer knew as much when he got the job in 2020. He inherited an NEC that was loyal to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and largely controlled by the Left-wing campaign group Momentum, which had won the member-elected seats on the 39-strong committee. Momentum founder Jon Lansman was among them.Former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, who was installed by Sir Keir as NEC chairman, told his biographer Tom Baldwin that the NEC “were horrible; they were insulting and very rude to him from the start… they wanted to get their way and took the view that everybody else could go hang. They just told him to p--- off”.Almost as soon as he got the job, Starmer extracted the resignation of party general secretary Jennie Formby, whom he saw as a roadblock to the changes he wanted to make, then installed Beckett as NEC chairman. Thirteen members of the NEC walked out in protest at her appointment.Thanks to the changes made by Blair, Starmer was swiftly able to wrestle back control of the NEC, forcing out Lansman and other Corbyn loyalists until he had the support of a majority of committee members, something he could not have done when the unions were in control.A former adviser to Starmer says: “The NEC is where the power is and Keir always knew that if he was ever to get into Downing Street, he needed to sort out the anti-Semitism problem and other problems in the party and a big part of that was through the NEC.“He also stopped Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate with the NEC’s backing, so he has always been conscious of the importance of the NEC.”Starmer later set about raising the bar for standing in future Labour leadership contests: instead of needing the backing of 10 per cent of Labour MPs to stand, contenders would need 20 per cent, a move that was designed to ensure that fringe candidates like Corbyn could never stand again.Then Starmer, helped by his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, imposed his own culture on the NEC, using it to send bold signals to the wider party and the country as a whole.“Blair would never have taken the decision to block Andy Burnham within 24 hours of him putting his name forward for selection,” says the Labour veteran. “There would have been more of a process and more consultations, it would have been more subtle and he would not have got so directly involved.“I don’t think any leader other than Keir would have attended an officers’ meeting and personally voted to block Burnham. These are brutal decisions and it tells you a lot about the character of Keir, he is pretty spiky when he wants to be.”Before 1988, candidate selection was largely left to local party associations, but then Labour lost the safe seat of Glasgow Govan when the colourful Marxist trade union leader “Hong Kong” Bob Gillespie (so called because he had Hong Kong tattooed on his knuckles after a drunken night out there in his Royal Navy days) was beaten by the SNP’s Jim Sillars and the selection rules were tightened.Ironically, Burnham was among those who had benefited from NEC support over local associations in the past.In 2001 he was “parachuted” onto a shortlist for the parliamentary seat of Leigh in Greater Manchester, meaning that some grassroots candidates missed out. He won, and remained an MP for the next 16 years.A further irony is that just three weeks before his own leadership ballot in 2020, Starmer tweeted:The selections for Labour candidates needs to be more democratic and we should end NEC impositions of candidates. Local Party members should select their candidates for every election.It was a comment that would come back to haunt him long before the Burnham saga played out, as he and McSweeney set about bringing candidate selection under even closer control of the NEC, which under the Labour Party rule book now has “an absolute power to cancel or amend procedures for selections”.The full committee of the NEC comprises 39 members, of which a third – 13 – comes from the unions. The others are the leader, deputy leader and treasurer of the Labour Party; six MPs; two local councillors; nine representatives of constituency Labour Parties; one from the Socialist and Co-operative Societies; one each from Scottish and Welsh Labour and one each from Bame Labour, Young Labour and a disabled member.The general secretary of the party, currently Hollie Ridley, is the secretary of the NEC but does not have a vote, while the chief whip and the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party also attend as non-voting members.The true power, though, lies with the 10 officers, who will meet to make major decisions in between scheduled meetings of the full committee, particularly if decisions are needed quickly.It was these 10 officers who decided Burnham’s fate and alongside Starmer and his deputy leader Lucy Powell (the only one to vote in Burnham’s favour) they comprise Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary (and non-voting chairman), another potential future contender for the Labour crown; together with Wheeler, Mason, party treasurer Mike Payne, Unison member Ann Black and three of Starmer’s MPs.Given Starmer’s apparent influence over the panel, at a time when he is increasingly facing questions about his leadership from within the parliamentary party, his only regret might be that the NEC plays no role in triggering a challenge, meaning it couldn’t block a contest and would only set the timetable for a subsequent election. In the meantime, he can console himself that, like Blair before him, he’s making up for lost time by using the panel to face down the Left – in this case seeing off their best hope of a challenger.A Labour peer says: “Burnham being blocked is the Left getting a taste of their own medicine.“The Left under Corbyn behaved appallingly in making sure good candidates like Roger Godsiff [the former Birmingham Hall Green MP who had defied the Labour whip on key Brexit votes] got deselected.“So those on the Left who want Andy Burnham to be selected to fight a parliamentary seat so that he can mount a leadership challenge really don’t have a leg to stand on.”
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