The following motion was passed by Islington South CLP on 11 January 2023:

We resolve to campaign for, and call on the Labour Party leadership to campaign for, the replacement of the monarchy by a democratic republic, with any post of president limited to ceremonial and formal functions.

Activists may like to add a further sentence when putting it now in other CLPs:

We condemn the arrests of republican organisers, and confiscations of placards and megaphones, around the coronation ceremony on 6 May 2023, and the spending of £250 million of public money on that ceremony.

This branch notes the forthcoming coronation of Charles III, which will cost the British taxpayer 250 million pounds, at a time when front line workers are being told there is no money for a RPI matching payrise.

This branch agrees with the quote by Irish Irish socialist James Connolly, who was right when he said, “Neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity has a representative of British royalty helped forward the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind. 

“A people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings—capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks.”

This branch also notes the comments this week by Princess Anne about the function of the royal family

In an interview with CBC News in Canada this week, the king’s sister, admitted one of its key functions. She said,
“I would just underline that the monarchy provides—with the constitution—a degree of long-term stability that is actually quite hard to come by any other way.”
She was saying that amid the tumult of class struggle, the monarchy acts as a glue to hold society together in the interests of those who have power and wealth. Monarchy says inequality is unavoidable and basic to society.

This branch believes that the monarchy upholds class structures that keep the working class down, that it is way past its sell by date, has no room in a modern society and can only be got rid of, in a similar way to the working class got rid of the Russian royal family in 1917, and a similar way to how the French removed Louis XVI in 1793.

This branch requests that the regional organiser asks LU how much money was spent on badges, signage, and other resources, linked to the coronation, at a time they are making job losses and attacking our terms, because they say there is not enough money.

Down with the royalty.
All power to the working class.

From the Labour Campaign for Council Housing

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Britain’s housing crisis denies millions of people their right to a decent home. Labour in government must resolve this with a new generation of council housing, liberating those living in the poor quality and expensive private rental sector. Abolishing Right to Buy, as in Wales and Scotland, will stop the loss of desperately needed homes, and rent revenue for councils. It has the added advantage of being a cost-free policy.

The shocking death of Awaab Ishak and the growing numbers living in unsafe homes highlights the urgency of improving quality, standards and enforcement across tenures. Retrofitting all existing homes, including non-carbon heating, is necessary for improving living conditions as well as tackling climate change.

This conference determines that Labour commits to:

+ Fund 150,000 social rent homes a year, including at least 100,000 Housing Revenue Account (HRA) council homes with secure tenancies;

+ End “affordable rent” and fixed term tenancies;

+ Fund the retrofitting of all council housing;

+ Invest in Direct Labour Organisations to create well paid, unionised jobs and apprenticeships to deliver this;

+ Abolish right to buy;

+ Review council housing debt to address the under-funding of HRAs;

* Reintroduce rent controls;

+ Compulsory registration and regulation of private rental homes, with high energy efficiency and quality standards;

+ License landlords and agents, and increase funding for councils to regulate the sector;

+ Empower councils to restrict, license and tax holiday homes and AirBnBs;

+ Properly regulate temporary and supported accommodation.

(244 words)

We offer the wording below as a basis for motions for Labour conference 2023. The deadline for receipt of motions is 5pm, Thursday 21 September (conference Sunday 8 to Wednesday 11 October 2023), but some CLPs will decide their motions much earlier. Motions must be 250 words or less, and motion titles ten words or less.

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Break from the Brexit disaster

Conference notes:

1. That far more people want to rejoin the EU than stay out, and the gap is growing. The ten polls to 17 April favoured rejoin average 49% to 34.3%. Specific polling shows a big anti-Brexit shift in the “Red Wall”.
2. The vast chaos and damage Brexit is causing on many fronts – reinforcing the Tories’ attacks on rights, living standards and services.
3. That a March 2023 Omnisis poll found 72% supporting “mutual free movement” between the UK and Europe, 14% against. Leaver voters supported 66-20.

Conference believes:

1. That accepting even the Tories’ ultra-hard Brexit as beyond criticism means failing to show the leadership required of any kind of internationalist and working-class party.
2. That hard Brexit and withdrawal from the Single Market have brought economic damage for working people.
3. That greater free movement would not be an unfortunate overhead of mitigating Brexit damage, but a positive benefit.
4. That Labour must stand up for migrants and for working-class unity and solidarity against Tory politics of scapegoating and bigotry.

Conference resolves:

1. That Labour will
– indict the Tories’ Brexit policy
– pledge to rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union and restore UK-EU free movement.
– campaign for the pro-migrants’ rights policies we passed in 2019, counterposing repealing all anti-union laws, better pay and workers’ rights and restored public services to Tory scapegoating.
– aim to rejoin the EU.

(235 words not inc title)

We offer the wording below as a basis for motions for Labour conference 2023. The deadline for receipt of motions is 5pm, Thursday 21 September (conference Sunday 8 to Wednesday 11 October 2023), but some CLPs will decide their motions much earlier. Motions must be 250 words or less, and motion titles ten words or less.

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The New Deal for Workers and the right to strike

Conference condemns the Tories’ drive to further restrict workers’ rights to strike and organise, including through the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill and the Public Order Bill.

This adds to what are already among the most restrictive anti-strike laws outside authoritarian regimes: by leagues the most restrictive in Western Europe. Existing laws prevent industrial action in solidarity with other workers and in direct pursuit of political demands about how our industries and society are run – while severely hindering all industrial action.

Conference welcomes commitments to repeal the MSL Bill, as well as commitments in the “New Deal for Workers” to expand union rights. However we underline repeated conference policy for abolition of all laws aimed against the right to strike. The next Labour government must act on this and repeal them all.

Conference resolves:

1. To reaffirm Labour’s opposition to all laws introduced to limit rights to organise and strike
2. To urge CLPs to work with unions to campaign against anti-union laws
3. When next in government, Labour should repeal all anti-union and anti-strike laws (including the Public Order Bill) and replace them with positive legal workers’ rights, including rights:
– to strike freely by procedures, at times (without notice periods) and for demands of workers’ own choosing;
– for unions to determine their own decision-making procedures, including but not only through electronic and workplace voting;
– to picket any workplace freely;
– to strike in solidarity with other workers;
– to strike over any issue, including political issues.

(250 words not inc title)

To add a signature to this statement from the Labour Campaign for Council Housing, “Labour should commit to ending Right to Buy”, email labourcouncilhousingcampaign@gmail.com

It has already been signed by 14 council Labour groups, and many councillors, MPs, etc. Not so many trade union organisations or student Labour clubs, yet.

https://thelabourcampaignforcouncilhousing.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/rtb-statement-4.pdf

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W: the undersigned agree with Lisa Nandy that “the idea of a home for life handed on in common ownership to future generations is an idea worth fighting for.” That requires the ending of the disastrous Right to Buy policy. In Scotland and Wales it has already been ended.

In England there are now less than 1.6 million council homes left. Even if councils were able to keep all receipts for sales they would have to build more than 12,000 council homes a year just to replace homes sold and demolished. That many haven’t been built since 1990.

RTB not only means the loss of homes but councils losing rental stream, leaving them with less money for the maintenance and renewal of their existing stock.

Many homes sold under RTB end up in the private rented sector; an estimated 40%. This drives up the housing benefit bill because of the much higher private rents.

Labour conferences in 2019 and 2021 voted overwhelmingly for RTB to be ended. It was incorporated in the 2019 manifesto. At the 2021 conference Lucy Powell said that it is the right thing to do and that is what the members want.

Ending RTB will stop the loss of homes and ensure that for the first time since it was introduced all new council house building will increase the stock and enable the waiting lists to begin to fall. It is also without cost and will stop the loss of rental income to councils.

We therefore call on Labour to commit to ending RTB when in government.

https://www.policyforum.labour.org.uk/commissions/coalition-to-keep-campsfield-closed-policy-submission (you can “vote” on that page to recommend the submission)

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A motion concerning ‘free movement, equality and rights for migrants’ passed almost unanimously at the Labour Party Conference in 2019. This motion committed to ‘close all detention centres’.

We call upon Labour policymakers to honour and reinforce the 2019 commitment to close all detention centres ahead of the elections in 2023.

The government has published detailed plans for reopening Campsfield House Detention centre following its closure in 2018. While it was open, the centre saw hunger strikes, self-harm, and the tragic suicides of 19-year-old Ramazan Komluca in 2005 and Ianos Dragutan in 2011.

The site plans for Campsfield House represent a significant expansion of the facility, yet levels of distress are higher in larger and more securitised IRCs, where the criminalisation of detainees is most stark. There is a wealth of empirical evidence that immigration detention has immediate and long-term negative consequences on people’s medical and mental health.

Similar plans to expand Campsfield House in 2015 were withdrawn following broad opposition from politicians and the public.

We ask the Labour policy forum to confirm that work would cease on Campsfield House (and all other detention centres in the pipeline), and that no plans will be made to open new detention centres.

Choosing to spend taxpayer money on expanding the detention estate during a cost-of-living crisis is a shockingly bad use of public resources.

Evidence collected by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford suggests that 86% of people leaving detention in 2021 were released on bail, and that most made successful claims to asylum or other forms of humanitarian protection.

It costs the Home Office £107 per day to hold one person in immigration detention, the highest per-capita cost since records began in 2013. In addition to the £94 million spent on immigration detention in the financial year 2021-22, the Home Office was forced to pay out an astounding £12.7 million in compensation to people detained unlawfully.

These funds would be better spent clearing the asylum backlog, addressing the crisis in our National Health Service, and helping support struggling families with the rising costs of food and energy bills.

Individuals can be detained without trial, without proper judicial oversight and with little chance of bail and the UK continues to be the only country in Europe without a statutory upper time limit on detention. Vulnerable people who should not be detained, including survivors of torture, trafficking and gender- and sexuality-based violence are routinely held in detention. There are multiple reports of abuse and mistreatment at existing removal sites.

For these reasons, we ask Labour policymakers to reaffirm their commitment to closing all detention centres, to cease work on those currently being planned for and built, and to explore community-based alternatives to detention.