In an Early Day Motion (576) yesterday, Gordon Prentice MP has called on the House to call on Labour National Executive Council to request that their special meeting on Government proposals for replacing Trident be televised by the BBC. The EDM states:That this House notes that the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC) has called a special meeting of the National Policy Forum in February to consider the Government's proposals to retain and upgrade the UK's nuclear weapons at a cost of up to 20,000,000,000; believes it is totally inappropriate for this to be a closed meeting; and calls on the NEC to invite the BBC and other broadcasters to televise the event and transmit it live to the nation.Now I don't know what the rules are exactly, but is it appropriate to use the House of Commons Early Day Motion system to lobby the internal workings of a political party?
What's more, would it be appropriate to televise an internal Labour Party policy debate on public broadcast TV where the likely bias of that "debate" is obvious from the outset? I think not.
3 comments:
Couldn't they just film it and post it on Google Video?
On the other hand, televising an NEC meeting could do for labour what It's a Royal Knockout did for the monarchy.
Film it - Im sure it would be great TV zzzzzzzzzz
I don't see why not myself. Conferences (internal party meetings) and press conferences and launches and so on and so forth are televised. So why not a National Policy Forum on Trident?
This is after all supposed to influence government policy, as would be any PLP meeting Tony Lloyd MP convenes on the subject.
Only trouble is the NPF is rather stacked with NL 'company yes people' some of whom were the source of platform friendly motions in 2005. Allegedly from their constituencies.
But not presented, or discussed, never mind endorsed at the general or exec committees of those CLPs. In other words invalid motions. Misrepresented as local party policy.
Though naturally there was the double whammy of keeping the topics concerned off the agenda anyway. So the friendly "Iraq" motion from Burnley CLP I think it was was not needed because the Iraq motion was spiked.
This year in Manchester they used the same tactics to spike any debate on Trident, Iraq or Civil Liberties.
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