Compass’ Neal Lawson claims 17-month probe found him ‘not guilty’ over tweet

The director of the Compass campaign group and former New Labour adviser Neal Lawson has said a 17-month probe has cleared him of breaching party rules over a tweet backing cross-party collaboration.

Lawson was warned he risked expulsion in June 2023, saying at the time his “crime” appeared to be “retweeting a Lib Dem MP’s call for some voters to back Green candidates in local elections” and dubbing it “grown-up progressive politics”.

Labour rules state that “prohibited acts” include “supporting (as may be defined by the national executive committee) any political organisation that the NEC in its absolute discretion shall declare to be inimical with the aims and values of the Party”. Carrying out such acts means a member “ceases to be eligible for membership of the party”.

But Lawson appears to have been able to hold on to his party membership. One of the left’s most high-profile campaigners for pluralism, tactical voting and electoral reform in recent years, he wrote in The Guardian that he has now received an email from Labour “telling me I had been found ‘not guilty'”.

Lawson accused Labour of “hypocrisy” given the party “ruthlessly targeted its resources in seats it could win and actively discouraged campaigning elsewhere”.

“In effect it was signalling to its members and voters to back the best-placed progressive to defeat the Tories, which is exactly what I was charged with.”

However, the tweet Lawson reposted was by Lib Dem MP Layla Moran encouraging her supporters to vote Green in a council ward, in return for the Greens not standing for her Oxford West seat.

While the Lib Dem-Green pact was designed to see off the Tories in the parliamentary contest, the quid pro quo council ward pact was intended to help the Greens unseat a Labour lord mayor, which they narrowly later pulled off.

The anti-Labour nature of that aspect of the deal went unmentioned in Moran’s post, which Lawson dubbed “grownup progressive politics”.

It was therefore not immediately clear from Lawson’s post whether he was either aware of or endorsing the whole Lib Dem-Green deal, or backing cross-party cooperation more generally.

Lawson told LabourList the party had accepted he was not himself advocating support for the Greens.

Lawson also wrote: “In most ways I matter not a jot: I was probably being used as a more high-profile example to warn others off such abhorrent behaviour.

“Less robust and less well-connected figures, those for whom their party membership matters enormously, find such a trial a real ordeal. I’ve been let off by people I don’t know in a system operating in the dark. I made a big public fuss. Others can’t, and suffer their fate alone.”

Labour declined to comment.

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