A consultation on Young Labour / Discrimination - 3 comments
If ou haven't already seen/heard it, LabourHome have interviewed Harriet Harman MP, who has made the following pledges:
- That a year's free Labour Party membership be given to all affiliated Trade Union members under the age of 26.
- That we have selection targets for young people for local authority elections.
I'm afraid I haven't really had time to articulate my response, let alone listen to the interview, but initial thoughts are:
- Why Trade Union members, and not other youngsters?
- What rights and responsibilities will membership entail? Oughtn't we to re-evaluate what it is to be a member (now we're thinking of such matters) before writing off all those membership fees? Let's not lose the opportunity to bind Labour into the social fabric.
- Quotas are essentially unfair. They're not an ineffective substitute, but they're an unethical substitute for a sound analysis of the reasons why young people - or indeed any social group - might not stand for local authority elections. Let's expose and attack negative discrimination before we consider adding positive discrimination to the mix.
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3 comments so far...
But what they, and other forms of position do is force local parties and authorities to go out and recruit young people (or which ever unrepresented group we're talking about) rather than sitting back and wondering why they're not putting themselves forward. We're lucky here in Oxford, and have got loads of young people involved not just as activists and post-holders within the party, but as local councillors (and former portfolio holders) - and this is the same across most parties.
In other parts of the country, young people don't get a look in.
If we don't get proactive, nothing will change and it's quite obvious that voluntary proactivism doesn't work. So let's force every local authority across the country to get out there and do something.
As for the TU / free membership thing, why not? I see your point about all young people, but we also need young people to join trade unions and we need young people who are already in a union to join the Labour party. Let's start with those who are already committed to the values of the Labour movement and take it from there...
I don't see how it would necessarily force local parties and authorities to recruit X - there'll already be sufficient X to fill the quota places. The CLP might sensibly decide that it would like a bigger pool, but there's no great incentive for this to happen.
Sure, we should get proactive, by focussing on the reasons why X don't get involved now, or campaigning more where X will see, but not by effectively using compulsion to help X get council positions. It sounds like you are lucky in Oxford, in which case we ought to find the reasons and try to apply those lessons elsewhere.
hmm. i think the young unionists is a good move, but might be driven more by marketing common sense. we especially need young members. the unions have a few. these people have the added benefit of being proven prepared to stump up reasonable sums of cash to join an organisation with similar articles of faith, which makes them "low hanging fruit" in marketese - a free trial might get us quite a few
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