Opinion: The NEC Elections

By Will Cross (@WillCross61)

The Labour National Executive Committee election results have today been published, and although there was little change in the body’s membership, there are still some interesting conclusions to be drawn from the results.

The political balance of the NEC remains the same, with 3 left wingers, 2 moderates and 1 independent, however, Luke Akehurst has lost his place to Peter Wheeler. I am particularly disappointed in this, as I have been impressed with Luke’s detailed knowledge of the history of Labour and its ideological traditions, and his loyalty and commitment to the party - however, he only narrowly won his seat last time, and he wasn’t helped this time by the negative and personal campaign against him by Left Futures, or his own tendency towards conflict those with differing political views within the party.

Another significant result is that Johanna Baxter was one of the 6 successful candidates. I couldn’t be happier with this result - the Reading Young Labour executive committee endorsed Johanna as their pick, and I told everyone who was interested and then some to vote for her. Having lost the election last time, Johanna was appointed to the NEC to fill a vacancy, but this year she has been elected in her own right - this is particularly impressive as she hasn’t had the backing of either the left or moderate slate, and is, to my knowledge, the first ever independent candidate to be elected to the NEC since it took on its present form in 1998.

The importance of having high profile candidates can bee seen by the fact that Ken Livingstone again topped the poll for the left, despite his numerous shortcomings. The results may be somewhat disappointing for Progress/Labour First, as they have failed to make inroads against the left, and other than Ellie, Peter and Luke, their three other candidates were right down towards the bottom of the poll, suggesting that the moderate wing needs to rethink the type of candidates it puts forward next time. Indeed, the NEC came within a hair's breadth of having 4 left wingers and 1 moderate.

The gap between 6th and 9th place was extremely small, and one result that surprised me was how close the left’s Kate Osamor came to being elected, ending up just 124 votes short on her first attempt. Given the closeness of the results, one issue which concerns me is the extremely shoddy way in which the balloting process was carried out - ballot papers arrived over a week after they were supposed to, with councillors’ papers being the most delayed, some members failed to receive ballot papers at all, the deadline was moved back and yet there was only a 3 hour period on a Monday morning for members to request that their papers be reissued. Most shockingly was the fact that an unknown number of members were sent the wrong ballot papers - my South East ballot contained the PCC candidates for Hampshire, when I in fact live in Berkshire, and despite Electoral Reform Serivces pledging to send out a replacement ballot first class, I only received it after the deadline had passed, as did other local members. With such a small gap between 6th and 9th place, I think it is inevitable that some uncertainly will be cast on the result of the ballot, and Labour needs to investigate the process and consider whether ERS is the right organisation to carry out the internal elections.


The result of the election is displayed below (Red = left slate, Purple = moderate slate, Grey = independents):

Candidate	Votes
LIVINGSTONE, Ken	31682
BLACK, Ann	30240
REEVES, Ellie	23417
SHAWCROFT, Christine	22236
BAXTER, Johanna	20146
WHEELER, Peter	17721
OSAMOR, Kate	17598
AKEHURST, Luke	17475
WILLSMAN, Peter	16786
WILLIAMS, Darren	14641
NOSEGBE, Florence	12745
SMEETH, Ruth	10860
MILLIGAN, Joanne	10034
ATKINSON, Lewis	8968
ALI, Shaukat	6855
GOODLIFFE, Darrell	6147
RICE, Lynda	4864
SIDHU, Rajwant	4726
CARR, Rob	4386