CLP Youth Officer training booklet During my election to the NEC one of my main priorities was to that ensure we are giving young members new skills and providing resources, this was also something I included in my NEC paper. Over the past few months I have been working with the party to launch a new programme of training for members across the country. The first booklet, ‘How to be an effective youth officer’, was launched last week and is the first of many new training resources for young members! Alongside this I have been travelling around the country to deliver workshops for youth officers in the Eastern region, Wales and East Midlands and hope to do many more over the next few months. Check out the booklet here: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/labourclp85/pages/116/attachments/original/1479390830/Being_a_Youth_Officer.pdf?1479390830 A new registration process for Young Labour groups Another thing I have been working with the party to deliver this year is a more formal process of registering for Young Labour groups to make it easier for those wanting to get involved to find out what Young Labour structures and groups exist in their area. As a result of this we have devised a new registration process which will require all existing Young Labour groups and those wanting to set up groups to register the details with their regional office which will then form a database of Young Labour groups. This will be up and running in the next few months so please keep an eye out. Equalities sub-committee Every 2 months the NEC has 3 subcommittee meetings: Equalities, Disputes and Organisation. Firstly, we had our bi-monthly Equalities committee meeting. We heard a report back from women’s conference and discussed how we can look forward to our now more powerful women’s conference in the future, with its own policy making powers. I stressed the importance of ensuring young women members are encouraged to be delegates at this as women’s conference throughout the years is generally dominated by women over the age of 27. With the conference taking on more important roles I will be working as part of our NEC working group to ensure young women are fully involved in this conference and look at ways of going about ensuring that. Next we had planned to discuss anti-Semitism within the party and look at how we can turn the reports into action. Conference passed the first 6 recommendations of the Chakrabarti report which was an important step but we now must work hard for our Jewish members. I raised the issues that young Jewish members have got in touch with me about. I talked about not dismissing the home office select committee report as ‘biased’, as a parliamentary committee I think it is important that we take their concerns and everyone who has given evidence to it seriously. Next I wanted to push that we ensure Jewish Labour Movement have a place on our equalities sub-committee which was welcomed and accepted. I’m looking forward to working with them to ensure the legitimacy of current and further reports are upheld. I welcome all reports we have had so far from Baroness Jan Royall, Shami Chakrabarti and the Home Office Select Committee, but we now must turn these words into action. Whilst Jewish members are still put off from attending meetings I will be fighting to ensure their concerns are taken seriously. It was agreed at the end of Equalities Committee that a meeting amongst all groups concerned will be taking place in the near future and I am still waiting on confirmation for this date. Disputes panel During disputes panel we agreed that all members who have been suspended due to the leadership election will receive correspondence by 1st November. Ensuring suspended members aren’t in prolonged limbo is incredibly important so I am glad we are dealing with this quickly and efficiently. I also raised my concern with safeguarding for members under the age of 18 and how we need to be looking at this for future issues in terms of how we run our now much larger CLPs. As the youth rep on the NEC I am uncomfortable with members under the ages of 18 even being invited to hostile meetings and stressed the need for quick action on all cases. We have developed a new safeguarding policy which you can find here: http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/8680_16-Safeguarding-children.pdf Oxford Brookes Labour Club Visit After a full day of meetings, I travelled across to Oxford to speak at Oxford Brookes University Labour club, it was a great meeting in which I talked about my experiences from joining the party to being on the NEC. The majority of the room were new members which is really positive and I was therefore able to go through the different structures of the party which members said was helpful. We then had a good Q&A and there were loads of interesting questions. Thanks to Oxford Brookes for inviting me! Women’s Conference Working Group The following week I attended a meeting with women from the NEC to discuss the rule changes we had passed at conference with regards to a women’s conference that will now be able to pass policy. This is a fantastic change we worked hard to get through conference as it gives women’s conference more powers within the party. We agreed the upcoming rules for 2017 and delegate percentages for CLPs and affiliates as a first step. Again I raised the issue of ensuring that young women are able to participate in these processes, as young women are often hugely underrepresented at women’s conference. This is something I’ll be working hard with this committee to ensure so young women feel confident to stand for delegate elections when the women’s delegate places become more important. We also agreed that there would be a certain number of visitor passes to women’s conference so as not to exclude those who do not get elected to be a voting delegate, which is crucial for accessibility. The next meeting of the working group is 5th December. East Midlands youth conference I was thrilled to be asked to chair the East Midlands Young Labour session at their regional conference. I took the opportunity to introduce new members there to Young Labour, what it is and what we do whilst also presenting training for CLP Youth Officers. The CLP youth officer training went down really well and young members had many additional questions to ask me. I was proud to be able to say I was delivering on my commitment to have more training for young members after passing my paper through the NEC on giving Young Labour more resources. Labour Students Political weekend After East Midlands youth conference in Derby I headed straight to Birmingham for my final event of the month, Labour Student’s Political Weekend! I arrived in time to hear the brilliant Jack Dromey MP speak about the importance of trade unions in our modern society and ensuring BREXIT was a fair deal for the country. A highlight of the conference was a session with Ruth Smeeth MP who spoke passionately about her work with Jewish Labour Movement in light of anti-Semitism she has experienced. She also spoke about her experiences running for election as a woman in the general election and it’s truly amazing how hard she worked. The liberation talks are always my favourite part of Labour Students events and in particular Sheri-Ann Bhim’s BAME ambassador talk was fantastic. Sheri-Ann speaks passionately about BAME representation and how we can make the party more diverse. Again there was a huge range of training events and political talks for Labour Students to listen to and take part in over the weekend which is a credit to the organisation and the national office.
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AuthorHere are my Monthly NEC Youth Rep reports and my full NEC meeting reports, starting from March 2016 I'll keep this updated so you know what's going on. Archives
January 2018
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