ALB
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“Perhaps Summer School may be a better choice.“
Precisely. That’s what we should be (should have been) doing, as opposed to your idea of broadcasting to people all over the world detailed discussions about what alternative heating arrangements to make for a building in London because the boiler has broken down.
Present arrangements are adequate. It was just that, due to circumstances, they weren’t being applied fully. Now they are.
“Is there any good reason why EC meetings should not be videoed by some sort of Skype system and placed on the web?”
Yes, plenty.
First, it would be a waste of resources; if we are to do this sort of thing the priority should be our externally oriented propaganda meetings and not those concerned with internal housekeeping.
Second, these videos would be deadly boring. Three hours of undisciplined discussion, with EC members repeating themselves or what other EC members have already said, about renewing our insurance, breakdown of heating at head office, subcommittee terms of reference, calls for nominations, reports or conference agenda items, even if in the end the EC generally reaches a sensible conclusion. Nobody would watch more than one.
Third, it is not necessary. Adequate arrangements already exist via the minutes on spintcom to inform members, and even non-members, of what the EC discusses and decides.
So, no, we don’t need an EC You Tube channel neither to inform members nor to show to non-members that we are an open, democratic organisation.
I take your point about some of them not having been available before to non-members but the only ones they (and Dave) won’t have seen before are those from August to November as he published from January to July here. Not checked but some of these might have appeared as messages on spintcom, old and/or new.
In any event, for the functioning of party democracy, it is members having speedy access to them that is important and relevant. Providing access for non-members is just icing on the cake to show that all our internal workings are open to public scrutiny, which is a different principle.
Even if we didn’t publish the minutes on the internet they would still have been public in that non-members still had the right to see them by writing for paper copies or visiting head office to consult them. We don’t really need to mollycoddle them. Only party members have that right.
“it’s relatively rare in my experience for the adopted minutes to depart significantly, if indeed at all in the vast majority of cases, from the draft versions.”
You must have suspected when you wrote that that you were giving a hostage to fortune and that I would check my recollection (from seeing EC Minutes at my branch meetings) that, on the contrary, it is relatively rare for the draft minutes not to be amended before adoption.
I did check and only 2 of the 12 draft Minutes were not amended, some significantly. For instance, the January minutes were amended in February:
“Amendment and adoption of the minutes of the January 2018 meeting (p. 8)
Elaborate upon item 2(d)iii in regards to the payment received from next door within the January minutes.
(The contractors next door wish to erect scaffolding which would need to extend onto our land and this to remain in place for up to 20 weeks. Cde Chesham had negotiated a payment to us for the inconvenience in the sum of £100 per week, amounting in total to £2K. This amount has now been paid to us.)
Noted in the treasurers report commission.
Chesham/Shannon–RESOLUTION: “That the amended minutes be adopted.”
(Agreed)”Surely this financial agreement and payment counts as significant.
And the August Meetings were amended in September to:
“Amendment and adoption of the previous meeting minutes (p. 12)
a) Note from the Assistant Secretary (29 August): There appears to be a typographical or chronological error in the recording of the breaks, the first of which is recorded as “Meeting adjourned for break at 3:30PM – resumed at 3:45PM”, and the second as “Meeting adjourned for break at 2:19PM – resumed at 2:30PM”. – Actioned
(b) Re §7(a), the Assistant Secretary requests the minutes be amended to indicate who moved the Notice of Business – Actioned, moved by M.Browne
5(a)ii To read that Comrade Chesham verbally confirmed his resignation from the EC.
3(b)iii to confirm the request of funds by the WSPUS as having been withdrawn.
Notice of business to state M.Browne as having been the mover.
RESOLUTION: Kennedy/Browne -“That the minutes be adopted.” (Agreed).”
I would have thought that the resignation of an EC Member was also significant.
I agree of course that draft Minutes are better than none, but it is not as if these had not been seen before. They will all have been sent to branches and, most of them at least, to those individual members who have elected to receive them either by post or by email. They have also been published on the files section of Spintcom.
I am sure you will agree that it would be much more transparent to have published last year’s minutes as adopted than leaving it up to those interested to have to always check with the following month’s minutes to see if nothing (or rather what) was changed in the one they are looking at.
But these are only the draft minutes and so only of limited interest now, for academics and others interested in how our decision-making procedures work in practice.
What is relevant are the final minutes as amended and adopted. Only these are the official version of what took place and what was decided. These are the only ones that have any standing in terms of the Rulebook.
We shouldn’t forget that we are talking here only about the draft minutes, not the official record which is these as adopted by the EC at the next following meeting often, in fact nearly always, as amended.
As far as I know, the adopted minutes are not published (or for that matter exist) anywhere. Best practice is that they should and be signed by the person who chaired the meeting at which they are adopted. After all, they are the only official record of what was decided At the moment to see what has actually been decided at, say, the January meeting you need to have both the draft minutes for that month and the draft minutes for February which will contain the amendments.
Instead of publishing the draft minutes everywhere it might make more sense to publish them only on spintcom as this is meant primarily for members and to publish here only the final version as amended and adopted.
In any event I don’t see the point of publishing the draft minutes in both places and the adopted minutes nowhere.
I can’t help pointing out that these Minutes are rather unbalanced. While they give a blow-by-blow account of a serious incident at Head Office, all they say about the report on the Party’s campaign in last month’s General Election is:
ii. Report of the Election Committee (29 December):
Noted with thanks.For members equally or more interested in externally-directed Party activity, the report can be found here.
Here is the election committee’s report on the General Election:
Election Committee Report on December 2019 General Election
The Party stood two candidates in the 12 December General Election: in Folkestone & Hythe (a Tory stronghold we had contested before) and Cardiff Central (a Labour stronghold, contested for the first time). The campaigns were organised by the local branches, Kent & Sussex and South Wales respectively. We also inserted an election manifesto in an issue of the i paper distributed in the South of England and Wales and in parts of the Midlands, and had a limited number of leaflets printed for distribution by members and sympathisers outside the two constituencies.
The campaigns were organised locally, with the work of agent and arranging for the printing and for the free Royal Mail distribution of an election communication to be done there. This didn’t work out perfectly as there was a problem with the printers in Folkestone which had to be dealt with centrally, and it proved easier to deal with Royal Mail for artwork approval and delivery centrally.
The result in terms of votes was what we expected: 69 (0.1%) in Folkestone and 88 (0.2%) in Cardiff. The campaign was preceded by local activity in both areas which will continue. Local publicity was generated in terms of, in Folkestone, local press publicity and a soundbite on BBC regional TV and, in Cardiff, an interview on an all-Wales online news site; the branch also placed a display ad in the Cardiff evening newspaper. The branches will be able to give a more detailed report of this.
The total number of leaflets distributed was 55,500 in Folkestone, 45,500 in Cardiff, 160,000 in the i paper, 15,000 outside the constituencies, plus 4,000 of a local newsletter in Folkestone, a total of 280,000.
The number of replies, mostly by post but some by email and one each by text and by letter has been over 100. All but 2 of these came from the insert in the i paper. Most of these asked for a free 3-month trial subscription to the Socialist Standard. The Enquiries Department will be monitoring how many of these taking out a paying subscription at the end of the period.
The total cost was: Folkestone printing £722, Cardiff printing £1,087, Cardiff newspaper display ad £450, insert printing £2,045, insert itself £3,456, general leaflet printing £210, a total printing and distribution cost of £7,970. To which can be added the £500 election deposit for both constituencies, making a grand total of £8,970.There will also have been some local incidental costs (travel). The expenses that need to be reported to the Electoral Commission are done by the Party’s Registered Treasurer.
The result in terms of responses confirmed what we have known for some time: that although it costs relatively little (£1,500, i.e., £1,000 for the printing and £500 for the election deposit), expecting responses to follow up is not a reason in itself for contesting. There needs to be, as there are, other reasons such as branch activity and general publicity, nationally as well as in the constituency. It also confirmed that, although relatively expensive, an insert in the i paper is the best way to get responses; this doesn’t necessarily require standing a candidate anywhere but it is probably helpful to have at least one.
“if it is possible for cdes with access to head office to “borrow” substantial amounts of funds,”
To reassure members who might get the wrong impression, it is not possible for “any” comrade with access to head office to also have access to the relatively small amount of petty cash kept there, let alone to “substantial amounts”. Only those who know a code and where a key is kept would be able to and that’s restricted. Cheques have to be signed by at least two designated persons. We can’t make payments by bacs and there’s a limit to how much can be withdrawn with the bank card ( which I am not sure is used anyway — at one point it was cut in half).
The Party’s financial controls are not that lax. In fact they are pretty strict.
Surely the EC will be meeting next Saturday 1 February as the first Saturday of the month (unless some decision was made at the January meeting we don’t yet know about)? In any event 7 February is a Friday. Also of course there is a new EC since January with a different composition.
I don’t think anybody at Head Office knew or had been informed that you were the North East branch secretary, otherwise you would have been receiving calls for nominations, conference agenda items, etc.
There is one decision of the December EC that should be aware of (and were about to be informed of along with all NE branch members):
RESOLUTION: Browne/Kennedy- “The EC asks the CO to ask North East branch if they wish to disband and which branches they wish to join.” (Agreed)
It should be easy to give you (or any other members) access to EC Minutes. All you need to do is join the new Spintcom and consult the files section. I’m sure the moderator, Matt, could take you through in five minutes how to do this.
The current problem has arisen because the comrade who used to publish the EC Minutes here is no longer in a position to do so, resulting in a suspension of the service.
If this becomes a world pandemic (hope not) maybe we would enter the scenario in Pieter Lawrence’s novel The Last Conflict where the world is threatened by an asteroid hurtling towards it and the authorities everywhere are forced to forget about monetary constraints and set about mobilising resources directly to deal with it (to built underground shelters, if I remember). Not the ideal way for world socialism to come about, but it was just a novel.
