A tale of two internal party elections

Parliament is back. MPs return to Westminster this afternoon after their summer break. Before they do, we can expect the results of the Conservative leadership contest from around 12.30pm. Liz Truss is widely expected to be announced as the next leader of the Tory Party and therefore also our next Prime Minister.

But Labour’s own internal elections have also just finished. The results of the national executive committee (NEC), national policy forum, Young Labour and national Labour students committee were announced late last week. These elections can seem obscure and are something that many members and most people outside of the party do not pay attention to – but they matter. They elect people to positions that have key decision-making powers and influence the direction of the party, and they provide an insight into how the different factions within the party are faring.

The best place to look for this factional health check is the election of Constituency Labour Party (CLP) representatives to the NEC – Labour’s governing body – which is decided using a single-transferable vote system. Labour to Win declared a victory here as the pro-Keir Starmer slate gained a seat. Momentum secured three seats after backing four candidates – incumbent Mish Rahman was unsuccessful. ‘Soft-left’ group Open Labour’s Ann Black was returned to the NEC. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi – a candidate not backed by Momentum but endorsed by other left-wing groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour and Red Labour – was also elected.

The final scores on the doors for the CLP section, then, is four for Labour to Win, four for the various left groups including three of Momentum’s candidates, and one for Open Labour. Momentum will be pleased with its victory in the Young Labour elections, with Nabeela Mowlana elected as chair. And the left-wing group also won a majority of seats on the new Labour students body while all of Open Labour’s student candidates were successful, including Ben McGowan for chair. You can see the full results here.

The election of Wimborne-Idrissi, who has been vocal in her support of Jeremy Corbyn after the former leader had the whip removed for his comments on the EHRC report into antisemitism within the party, has caused controversy. Mike Katz, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, said an “otherwise positive set of results in Labour’s NEC ballot” had been “marred” by the election of Wimborne-Idrissi, who he said “actively denies the scale and severity of Labour’s antisemitism problem”. Wimborne-Idrissi described the response to her election as “frankly disappointing”, adding: “They’ve launched an attack on the only Jewish candidate to be elected on this occasion. That discredits them.”

Momentum will be unhappy at losing Rahman, in effect to a candidate they did not back in Wimborne-Idrissi, and that Lara McNeill lost the youth rep election to the NEC. A left source said after the results were announced that “some decline was inevitable” but that “four left-wingers in the  CLP rep section – level-pegging with the right – is very respectable”. Keir Starmer can be pleased with the results; Luke Akehurst, of the Labour to Win slate and secretary of Labour First, told LabourList that he was “delighted”, adding: “There is a long way still to go and a huge amount of work to get Labour back where it should have been in government. The new NEC is the right NEC to support Keir in that crucial but incredibly difficult task.”