the national Labour party that seems to want to control anything that any councillor wants to say. Or where there is good hard-working councillors that have been serving the community for a number of years, the party nationally seem to dictate who can stand where and when.
From time to time, I get asked to help out with the candidate selection process in my West Midlands region by being part of a three person Interview and Assessment Team, or IAT, whose job it is to interview individuals seeking to join the panel of potential candidates from which local parties subsequently select candidates to stand in local elections. We are expected to ask the would-be candidates about why they want to be elected as a Labour candidate, their campaigning record and history, their understanding of the core concept of equality of opportunity, of the role of a Councillor and the functions of a local authority, and, crucially and specifically, about their understanding of the importance of the October 2020 EHRC report on anti-semitism within Labour , and their personal commitment to upholding the recommendations therein in future.
The IAT then makes a recommendation on the interviewee's suitability (or otherwise) to be a Labour candidate . Due diligence here is of enormous importance, as we saw from the Rochdale by-election debacle, even though similar procedures will have been gone through in respect of Azhar Ali. So the Labour Party nationally may not be seeking to control everything any Labour councillor may say, but it does try to stop absolute twats from getting selected as Labour candidates. Standard practice, that these gobshites seem unable to accept - in which case, bye bye.
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
- By Bones McCoy