My response to Katherine Buckingham, the Labour Party’s head of disputes and discipline

This is my personal response to the email from Katherine Buckingham, the Labour Party’s head of disputes and discipline.

Dear Katherine,

It would be easy to begin this open letter with a simple declaration: There are no grounds whatsoever for the suspension of Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party (the “City Party”).

There is no evidence — and certainly no proof — of any “abusive behaviour” at the party’s annual meeting on Saturday, July 9. Quite the opposite.

Nor is there any evidence — or even any public complaint — that “the ballots results [sic] were not properly reached”; nor that anyone expressed any justifiable concern that “the safety of members at the meeting was compromised”.

All these unsubstantiated charges were mentioned in your letter of July 14, a letter that suspended the 6,200-member City Party, that “voided” the election of a new leadership team, that banned the party from meeting to make a supporting nomination in the Labour Party leadership election, and that stopped the party even from organising leadership hustings.

In truth, the atmosphere inside and outside the venue of the annual meeting was friendly and comradely; the sense of anticipation was almost palpable; the organisation and conduct of the meeting was impeccable; the behaviour of candidates and audience was flawless.

It would be easy to make such a simple declaration, while pointing to the formal statements of nearly 100 eye-witnesses — totalling nearly 30,000 words — that I have already forwarded to you.

In addition, I would — and do — attach a statement from Matt Tully, the young man at the centre of the “spitting” incident-that-never-was. As CCTV footage has proved, there was no spitting.

I would — and do — attach Mr Tully’s complaint against Councillor Warren Morgan, the leader of the Labour Group on Brighton and Hove City Council, who — careless about the truth or otherwise of his malevolent allegations — repeated them within minutes of the election of a new pro-Corbyn leadership team. Even after Mr Tully made himself known to him and was robust in his rebuttal of them.

Cllr Morgan has since been the subject of a charge of bringing the Labour Party into disrepute.

What has been done about this complaint? Has Cllr Morgan been suspended, as is the usual custom and practice? If not, why not?

How did all this alleged abuse and spitting, all these safety hazards, escape the attention of more than 600 people who attended the annual meeting?

Nearly three weeks later — and two weeks after City Party was suspended — the Labour Party NEC began inviting evidence. Unhelpfully vague, however, you are now investigating “recent events” and seeking views on “current issues”; these views would be the subject of a report “in due course”. This is post hoc obfuscation, a delaying tactic designed to find evidence after the event.

It would be easy to state such a simple truth and leave it at that.

But I am not ready to leave it at that. I owe it to you — and all the members joining the remarkable social movement that will power the Labour Party to victory at the next general election — to say a little about how, in the five years since its formation, the City Party has proved itself to be in the thrall of a closed, inward-looking, undemocratic clique at whose heart are individuals who owe more allegiance to Progress — the well-funded network of social democrats who constitute a party within a party — than to democratic socialists who are the lifeblood of the Labour Party.

Cllr Morgan, leader of the Labour Group on Brighton and Hove City Council, and Peter Kyle, the Labour MP for Hove, are both prominent members of Progress, whose funding has largely been provided by Lord Sainsbury, the billionaire who founded and funded the SDP in the 1980s.

Inevitably, each of the points made below deserve an essay in themselves. Which is a task I have set myself over coming days and weeks, during which time I will publish all the evidence I have accrued since 2011.

For now, though, I will state the facts baldly:

· The idea of a City Party — covering the three constituencies of Brighton Pavilion, Brighton Kemptown, and Hove — was promoted and secured in 2011 by a minority who wanted to exercise a direct command-and-control hold over a party that, at the time, comprised about 1,300 members; a key advantage would be that all-member meetings would be sovereign;

· The City Party emerged following concerns — particularly from GMB officers — that the GMB spent £23,000 to support Labour Party candidates for Brighton and Hove City Council in May 2011, but saw the Green Party become the biggest party with 23 council seats. The Conservative Party won 18 seats and the Labour Party secured 13. More specifically, GMB officers urged Councillor Gill Mitchell should “step aside” as leader of the Labour Group at the time; Cllr Mitchell subsequently made way for Cllr Morgan in April 2013;

· The City Party was initially chaired by a very inadequate and untrained individual, who was subsequently selected to be a council candidate and was elected (to become a very inadequate councillor); the next chair was a very mediocre individual, who was subsequently selected to be a council candidate and failed to be elected. Meanwhile, attendance at all-member meetings was poor, not helped by a failure to send out agendas in advance of meetings; for three years, we had treasurers who managed to provide finance reports only once a year — even when the City Party was attracting record funds from donors as diverse as property developers, Lib Dem-supporting hedge-fund financiers, and little-known individuals with little or no connection to the Labour Party in Brighton and Hove. None of those in power seemed concerned by this state of affairs;

· By April 2013, timetables for the selection of parliamentary candidates had been published: Hove (“open selection”); Brighton Pavilion (women-only); and Brighton Kemptown (women-only); the precise synchronicity of the Hove and Brighton Kemptown timetables was authorised by Malcolm Powers, the then regional director of the Labour Party, primarily to facilitate the selection of Simon Burgess, a former Labour councillor backed by the GMB, to win selection in Hove. After being the subject of two (rejected) complaints to the NEC about alleged abuse of Labour Party rules, Mr Burgess — one of 16 men and no women on the long list — was narrowly defeated by Mr Kyle. one of three men and no women on the short list;

· Between March 2014 and September 2014, there was a systematic and shameful — and successful — attempt to de-select Councillor Leigh Farrow, a Labour councillor in Moulsecoomb and Bevendean. When the Moulsecoomb and Bevendean Branch Labour Party objected, it was suspended; members were then allowed to vote for a replacement candidate; two members responded to an invitation to a selection meeting, before which they were not allowed to know the name/names of the candidate(s); when they attended, the two members were told there was only one candidate: Daniel Yates. Who was selected as candidate and was ultimately elected as a councillor in May 2015;

· As a direct result of my coverage of this shameful affair — I was at the time co-owner and editor of Brighton & Hove Independent, a local free newspaper — I was suspended from the Labour Party on September 17 2014; on August 5 2015, I was re-instated — after it emerged the only complainant had been Mr Powers, the Labour Party regional director, who had been tasked by the NEC to investigate his own complaint — and who had then delegated this task to his junior colleague, Harry Gregson, who is now the acting regional director. Despite all this, the NEC decided the complaint did not even merit further investigation; Mr Powers moved from his job a few months later.

· Since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party — and the quadrupling of membership of the City Party — the democracy and campaigning in and by the party has improved immensely, especially under the leadership of the outgoing chair Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who last week was elected as a councillor in East Brighton (with Cllr Morgan and Cllr Mitchell). Mr Russell-Moyle’s organisation of the July 9 annual meeting — and his diligence as returning officer — was exemplary. (If anyone thought contrary, why on earth would they have re-instated him and his fellow executive members?);

· Finally, let’s not mince our words. The Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party did only one thing wrong on July 9: the biggest party unit in the country, with the biggest turnout, with the biggest number of votes, and the biggest majority voted for candidates who supported Jeremy Corbyn. Including me, as secretary, with 66% of 606 votes;

· Earlier, on July 1, Cllr Morgan — in a secret email to unknown recipients — had warned the City Party faced “a takeover by a group of individuals from Momentum, TUSC, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and other fringe left-wing groups…”. Strangely, he never publicly or formally complained about these individuals — until after the votes were counted. The only people who took over the City Party on July 9 were the members, taking the party back from a powerful clique of self-serving power-brokers who shut down all attempts at democratic debate about imposing a 67% council tax increase on the 15,000 poorest families in Brighton and Hove, about cutting provision for children with special needs, or about destroying hundreds of council jobs. This from a group of individuals who publicly complain about Conservative funding cuts while privately support pro-austerity policies put forward by the likes of Chris Leslie, Labour’s former shadow chancellor.

I, of course, trust that you and your colleagues are dispassionate investigators who wish to establish the truth and deliver justice, not only to 6,200 democratic socialists in Brighton and Hove, but also to 600,000 members across the country.

For Brighton and Hove truly is now the epicentre of the battle for the soul of the Labour Party. It is a battle all democratic socialists must win.