Democracy in the Labour Party

The scan: The Week v8 no7.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Tesseract OCR) from a scan of a stencilled typescript and has not been corrected. Expect misread words; titles in particular are often garbled where the issue printed no contents list. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: capitals heading; heuristic; title from the OCR of the heading.

No doubt readers of The Week will have read in Tribune of the initiative on Labour Party Democracy taken by the Sheffield Trades & Labour Council. The Council hopes that enough support will be forthcoming from CLPs and affiliated trade unions to enable a steering committee to meet at Scarborough during this year's Party Conference, Constitutional amendments to the Party Rules are not admissable this year, but the Council rightly feels that the groundwork needs to be prepared now if any seriously thought out amendments are to stand a chance of acceptance at the 1968 Rules Revision Conference. However, this timely initiative should not divert those concerned.at the lack of democracy within the Party from striving to rectify those cases of injustice which are outstanding now. As Tribune points out in its preamble to the article, "Conference this year must, at some stage, consider what the NEC will say about the wrongly expelled and now reinstated Nottingham members." The fact that the members now have their Party rights fully restored does not close the issue, What Conference will want to know is why it took a High Court Writ to force the NEC into conceding the very same arguments which the members had patiently and privately placed before it months earlier, when the injustice could have been rectified without embarrassing publicity and without the £300 legal expenses which the NEC was obliged to pay in settlement, The same tortuous course is now being followed by the Ken Coates case, Since his unconstitutional expulsion in 1965, Ken Coates has patiently exhausted every avenue of appeal against the decision and the farcical procedures at the NEC Tribunal which confirmed it -— the same Tribunal procedures employed against the now reinstated members, Now he, too, has to seek redress from the courts; and once again the NEC appears to be gambling that the financial realities of a High Court action will force withdrawal, Many of us are determined that there must be no such financial impediment to natural justice, and a Defence Fund is shortly to be launched by prominent members of the labour movement. The Week will carry details in a future issue.