whe "Nottingham" Legal Action
; by Geoff Coggan Some weeks ago The Week reported that I and two other members of the Nottinghan Labour Party, who were barred from office in the disciplinary witchhunting that followed the expulsion of Ken Coates, had issued a High Court Writ against the NEC, The action has now been settled out of court, with the NEC publicly -conceding every point raised and agreeing to meet our legal costs of approximately ot gee The NEC's own legal costs as defendants are of course additional to
gs.
This legal action was never sought by ourselves, Indeed, we did everything possible to permit Sara Barker to withdraw gracefully, or with as much grace as she can muster on such occasions, Although we had been deprived of the basic rights of Party membership last May, we nevertheless undertook, pat— iently and privately, to seek redress, Letter after letter was sent to Transport House. By December we had had enough, but we decided to make one last attempt to settle the matter without embarrassment or cost to the Party, and we therefore instructed our solicitor to set out in precise and clearly understood terms the several points on which legality and natural justice had been perverted, It was also made clear that failure to reach a satisfactory conclusion at this late stage must inevitably mean placing the case in legal hands for further dction, According to Sara Barker's next letter to us, our argument had been placed before the NEC, who had decided to uphold their previous decision of last May. We then had no alternative but to proceed with a High Court Writ against Sara Barker, Len Williams and members of the NEC, The Writ introduced no new material whatsoever. Every point it raised had already been raised in letter after letter to Transport House, and there was nothing for the NEC to concede that it could not have conceded months before, Yet, faced by the prospect of having to defend its attitude in public, the resolve of the NEC to adhere to its previous decisions suddenly collapsed, On the face of it, it seems that the NEC was quite prepared to endorse the most scandalous and indefensible acts of injustice, so long as it could do so quietly, On this interpretation the rights and wrongs of the case do not appear to have mattered one whit. Yet I find this explanation, which implies a callous disregard of democratic rights by every member of the NEC, a difficult one to admit - though I can well believe it of most of them. It seems more probable that the NEC customarily delegates such decisions to the National Agent's office, or to some other sub-section of the Party bureaucracy, and that its ow contribution is limited to endorsing recommendations “on the nod", The fact that many NEC members have Cabinet and other executive responsibilities which must severely limit the time at their disposal is no argument - except to add to the many other arguments against members of the: Government accepting NEC nomination, Clearly some urgent rethinking of the NEC's responsibilities towards individual members of the Labour Party is necessary. It is also imperative that all other disciplimary cases which have been similarly disposed of "on the nod" are now exhumed.