Bristol West Labour members describe AGM as a ‘complete farce’

More than 500 people attended an online AGM for Labour members living in the Bristol West constituency, being admitted as early as 5.30pm to the “bizarre” meeting which did not end until midnight.

For most of the evening, increasingly frustrated members were staring at a blank screen.

The meeting had been set up by staff working at Labour South West Regional Office after the suspensions of the Bristol West co-secretaries and chair and subsequent cancellation of the original AGM in November 2020.

Bristol Labour members have compared the meeting on Thursday, February 11 to being put on hold by a call centre.

“It was like waiting on a call centre phoneline, you hang on and hang on, never knowing when the answer is going to come,” said Kevin Ramage. After 47 years of being an active Labour party member, he described it as “the most bizarre, surreal meeting” he has ever attended.

The meeting was chaired by Chris Cuddihee, a solicitor from Plymouth. Every 20 minutes or so he would appear on the screen to apologise for the delay. There were no other discussions; the chat function had been disabled and all members in the meeting were permanently muted.

For most of the six-and-a-half hour meeting, hundreds of Labour members were left staring at a blank screen

One Labour member, Anita Bennet, believes it was “an abuse of digital democracy” that could have been avoided if the elected “tech-savvy chair” had been allowed to run the meeting.

It is standard procedure at Labour Party AGMs to hear speeches from members standing for election, especially when there are contested positions. On this occasion all positions were contested but no speeches were heard.

Around 100 of the people attending the meeting did not get a chance to vote because they gave up on waiting for their ballot.

Tin Hinson, who had to get up early the next morning to home-school his eight-year-old son, gave up on the meeting at 8.45pm, only to discover in the morning that the vote had taken place.

He told Bristol24/7: “When the deadline rolled around and I still hadn’t received my ballot, I assumed that the vote would have been cancelled because it was a complete farce.”

Message sent from Tin Hinson to the Regional Office staff on the night of the meeting

Labour Party members have been sharing a screenshot of a section of the ballot on social media showing two names next to the same box for the position of treasurer, suggesting that members may have not been entirely clear on who they were voting for.

Andrew Milton, who was re-elected as the social media officer for Bristol West, told Bristol24/7 that the meeting “wasn’t as slick as it could have been” but it was “democratic” and that there were simply “technical issues”.

Regarding the absence of any speeches on the night, he said: “I believe there wasn’t time.”

Kevin Ramage, who stood for the position of vice chair, believes that the issues are much wider than technological failings on the day.

He said: “It may have been for technical reasons, but it did not fall from the sky. The real problem was created because they undemocratically suspended Bristol officers for the crime of defending Jeremy Corbyn and that’s part of a wider civil war that is taking in the Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s leadership.”

Labour South West Regional Office have been contacted for comment.

Main image: Bristol West Labour Party

Read more: Suspended council candidate accuses Labour of ‘crackdown on democracy’