The Democratic Bloc

It is clear we are in a party where the leadership team can organise, but the lay members are not supposed to. But it is up to us to change that. We have a world to win, so let’s make this party ready to win the fight.

But this is not a reason to refuse to engage – it is a reason to organise like never before ahead of an amendments portal and to organise every member we can prior to the founding conference.

Unfortunately, that is not a serious or transparent democratic process.

Where there is disagreement between breakout groups or within them, some unknown person will be deciding who is right and who is wrong.

They will then re-draft the four core documents on the basis of all of these notes. How they can do this is very unclear because no votes will take place at these assemblies.

Facilitators will take notes of the discussions and feed them back to an unknown group.

3) We do not believe that there is enough transparency over how these assemblies will function. 13,000 facilitators were recruited from the 800,000 sign-ups. These facilitators will run breakout groups of ten people.

2) Our second concern is that the four documents that these regional assemblies are supposed to be debating have not been published. Members deserve time to prepare their critiques of these documents.

1) Our first concern is that these regional assemblies are simply too small. We have been told roughly 20 regional assemblies will take place. We are seeing that some of these assemblies are as small as 300 members – and on a first come first serve basis.

We are pleased to see that regional assemblies have finally been announced. While we would encourage everyone to try to attend these assemblies and participate, we do have significant concerns around the planned meetings.

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3) Amendments

In addition, there will be an online amendment portal in conjunction with regional assemblies.

We are aware of facilitators who raised the question of how members that are on the MOU/Zarah membership list will be able to participate in the portal…

The subsequent assemblies will then discuss both the original documents and the revised documents. This means there will be multiple versions of the constitution by the time of the founding conference.

2) Versions of the four documents

A new version of each document will be published after the first three assemblies on the basis of the notes taken by facilitators.

We have no guarantees that any of these notes will be published.

There will be no votes in the regional assemblies. So there is no clear democratic decision making process.

Someone in this process will then collate these notes to create new versions of each of the four documents.

1) Meaningful listening

Facilitators will run breakout groups of 10 members that are themed on the four documents and take notes which will then be fed back to the lead facilitators.

Apart from the obvious concerns, we have some serious issues with the plan for how regional assemblies are set to run…

Even the facilitators haven’t been told the venue or the time.

And we are only a matter of days out from these events supposedly taking place.

Facilitators have been told that regional assemblies will be taking place in Norwich on Saturday. Manchester and East London will follow on Sunday.

Yet members have not been invited yet!

Official regional assemblies are set to take place THIS WEEKEND across the country.

But members are being kept in the dark.

Here is everything we know:

Last night #DemBloc shared on Twitter and Facebook the following 👇

MAJOR UPDATE:

Facilitators were told this morning that East London regional assembly has been postponed.

We don’t know any more information at this time.

[More context in the thread 🧵]

#YourParty