At the start of Monday morning’s session John Byrne from Hazel Grove CLP raised a point of order on why his CLP’s motion had been ruled out.  

The CAC answer was the same as yesterday, when the Socialist Health Association raised the same point about their NHS motion referring to Palantir:  “You’ll get an email”.  

This is not good enough – what conference gets to debate and doesn’t is a matter for the conference as a whole, not just the submitting CLP.  The CAC should explain their reasoning transparently.  (Of course, we know why they don’t – even a quick look through the motions not ruled out shows dozens that have no contemporary reference or that cover things in the NPF report – including the buses, knife crime motions this morning, for example.  These spurious reasons are simply used to remove from conference floor anything that could lead to real debate).

Juno Cotter from Northern Ireland CLP asked why there is no NI report on the agenda.

The strongest response of conference to anything so far has been the standing ovation for Ed Miliband’s  comments on opposing any links with illegal settlements on the West Bank, and that opposing the Israeli government is not the same thing as opposing the Israeli people.  As a labour movement we need to put that principle into practice, as many CLPs have done by supporting the Israeli Arab-Jewish anti-occupation movement StandingTogether.  UK Friends of Standing Together have a fringe meeting tomorrow evening – 6pm in The Liverpool pub.  Two activists will talk about their involvement in “protective presence” activity in the occupied West Bank – https://actionnetwork.org/events/how-can-we-end-settlers-violence-testimonies-from-protective-presence-activists 

As expected, nothing in any of the motions this morning has prompted any real debate.  Important matters referred to, certainly, but not policy debate to determine Labour’s view.

This afternoon conference will debate five motions:

• Buses – welcoming actions of the government, but not taking up the issue that our buses (including in Manchester) are actually run privately for profit even where publicly commissioned,
• Insourcing and Public Ownership – welcomes Burnham’s commitment to “the greatest wave of insourcing in a generation” but points out that “there is as yet no clear strategy for meeting this commitment”.  Takes up the issue of DB Cargo (private company outsourced to by Network Rail) selling up, and calls for the government “to set out plans to bring the rail freight back in-house by expanding publicly owned rail freight”.
• Rebuilding our economy for working people – quite a confused composite, but positively including a call for a wealth tax and for single worker status.
• Violence against women and girls – useful to bring these policy points into a single place
• Knife crime – says it is a bad thing.

On the fringe

At 4:15 today Mainstream has it’s first full conference event since its launch: a panel – ‘Manchesterism, the Productive State and Building a Democratic Economy’ – at 4.15pm today, at The Clubhouse at Ropewalks Hotel.

At 6pm Labour Left Internationalists conference meeting is at the Quaker Meeting House, with Maria Exall (former TUC president), Sophie Conquest from We Own It, and others.