20 Delegates Banned From Conference For Disciplinary Reasons, Labour Says

At the start of the proceedings today Harry Donaldson, the chair of Labour’s constitutional arrangements committee, revealed that 20 delegates have been banned from conference for disciplinary reasons.

Leftwingers have been complaining about this for days. This does not normally happen at a Labour conference, at least on this scale, but the decisions to exclude attendees seems to be related to a decision taken in the summer to ban four far-left groups, partly because of their record on antisemitism. As a result individuals have been expelled from the party.

On Sunday John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said the exclusion of people from conference was Stalinist. Donaldson said this morning he had been asked to give an update on the number of delegates whose accreditation had been withdrawn “due to disciplinary matters”, and he said the total was 20.

But he said this did not mean that constituency Labour parties (CLPs) were losing voting rights. Where organisations have more than one delegate, the vote of the person excluded gets redistributed amongst the remaining delegates, he said. And in the case of a CLP where its sole delegate was excluded, a replacement delegate was agreed. “Therefore no CLP has been disenfranchised as a result of any disciplinary action,” he said.

On Sunday Left Foot Forward reported that several members of the Marxist group Socialist Appeal were among those excluded.

The conference proceedings have now started, and one of the first items was Samantha Dixon, the chief scrutineer, reading out the results of the election to fill four places on the party’s national constitution committee for CLP representatives.

As Sienna Rodgers reports at LabourList, two of the seats were won by candidates backed by Momentum and two were won by candidates backed by Labour to Win, an organisation backing non-left, or “centrist”, candidates.

The results could be read as confirmation that Labour’s activist base is still broadly split, roughly half and half, between Corbynites and non-Corbynites – although factional allegiances are not the only considerations that matter in elections like this.

Luke Akehurst, a member of Labour’s national executive committee and a supporter of Labour to Win, says the results were a setback for Momentum.