How to ruin the Party

Daniel Mann

Image © Don Shall

It’s another slightly grey Monday here, and things seem as they always are. The city wakes up to a new day and a new week. As ever, Labour has control over the City Council, and down in Westminster, the ConDems are as muddling and incompetent as ever. To a certain extent, I think we in the Labour Party still don’t entirely understand why we’re in opposition, at least not from an internal perspective. But I’ll get to that in just a minute. First, let me introduce myself. I’m Dan, 21, BA in International Relations and currently an MSc student in Social Change at a certain North West redbrick university that’s a part of the Russell Group. It all sounds straightforward, right?

No, it isn’t. You see, I’m American by birth, but British by choice. I grew up in New York, but this is the second occasion that I’ve lived here in the UK. I wasn’t here for the 2010 election but, when I was living in London soon afterwards, I witnessed the numbness that we as a Party found ourselves in, having joined in mid-June of that year. But I digress. When I moved back ‘across the pond’, several months ago, I did the natural thing and plunged headfirst into local Party activities here, and I haven’t looked back. One such activity has been my involvement with my local Constituency Labour Party (CLP).

Quite recently, the CLP had its Annual General Meeting (AGM), which was, as ever, held in our Town Hall, an appealing Gothic edifice overlooking the city. As was expected, a great deal of members showed up, including quite a few whom I’d never seen at CLP meetings previous, all but one of which I’ve attended.

Read more of this post