Only a couple of days left to add your thoughts to the NEC letter

From @LabourList

UPDATE: If you haven’t already, please do take the survey drawn up by the activists who wrote the initial letter to the NEC. It will help them to gain a broad cross-section of what Labour supporters think about the expenses debacle and how the Party should progress as a result. Fill in the survey here.

Fred Grindrod, one of the people, who wrote the letter to the NEC last week, has sent an email to Labour supporters asking them to contribute opinions by completing an online survey. Please see the letter below.

Dear Friends,

It’s been almost a week since we sent our letter to the NEC around to you and thanks to your courage got an incredible amount of signatories and support.

As you are no doubt aware, the Labour Party has responded to one of our “asks” in setting up the NEC subcommittee to investigate some MP’s expenses. However there is still an ongoing debate around what action will be taken for those who have brought the party into disrepute and what ‘disrepute’ should actually mean.

This week we were promised firm and fair action to begin repairing the damage to our Party – sadly inflicted by a small minority of our own MPs. To help clarify how the PM and NEC should progress from here, we would greatly value your opinions on the situation as things stand.

Please can you and your colleagues spend two minutes to fill in the brief survey here.

We also encourage you to continue to send the original NEC letter (below) to your Party colleagues and urge them to sign. Signatures are still coming in!

If you experience any problems with the survey, please let me know by replying to this email.

Thanks for all the individual messages of support and ideas – we really appreciate them.

In solidarity,

Fred Grindrod
(National Policy Forum and Former Parliamentary Candidate)

Original letter to the NEC, 17/5/2009:

Dear NEC Chair,

We are writing to you to register our protest at the conduct of many Labour MPs, ministers and cabinet ministers in allowance and expense claims funded by hard working British taxpayers during the tenure of this Parliament. We are also gravely concerned that the Party Leadership has failed to take charge of a critical situation on an issue so fundamentally defining to the character and reputation of our Party, its supporters and activists.

We are particularly disappointed with a number of aspects of the leadership’s response including:

– The continued reference by Labour spokespeople to the ‘system’ being wrong and ‘needing reform’. Undoubtedly this is the case. But the ‘system’ does not force Labour Ministers and MPs to make specific claims that abuse public trust and in some cases are an abuse of public money. Making an expense claim is a matter of individual responsibility. Our Party has been left looking incredibly insensitive and out of touch with hard-working and fair minded citizens.

– The Prime Minister, and the collective leadership of the Labour Party, have been negligent in protecting the reputation of the party by failing to speedily apologise for our MPs, by failing to take immediate and clear disciplinary action, and by regularly appearing to side with Ministers and MPs who have made excessive and exaggerated claims in the face of justifiable public anger.

– Many of the claims are for things that, in all conscience, 99% of Labour Party members outside of Parliament would never be able to bring themselves to claim, even if a ‘system’ allowed them to.

Therefore, we ask that the NEC:

– Organise a thorough review of suspected excessive and abusive claims – regardless of whether they were eventually signed off by an over-worked Fees Office.

– Support the immediate removal of the whip from individual MPs who have brought the party into disrepute over this issue and allow CLPs to trigger reselection ballots against them.

We write this in a spirit of solidarity and heartfelt concern for the reputation of the Party that we will continue to work hard for. We are a group of leading loyal activists from across the breadth of the Labour Party, who will not hesitate to defend the future of our Labour movement, which should always stand for fairness, compassion and integrity, no matter how inconvenient living by these values may be.

In solidarity.

(The letter has been signed by over 200 activists – click here to view who signed it)