Compass

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Compass is described on its website as "the influential left of centre pressure group".[1] The website states, "The organisation is run by an annually elected Management Committee and relevant officers to oversee the actions of Compass".[2]

People

The officers elected for the year 2006/2007 were:

Analysts or policy researchers

Compass Conference 2006 -- some impressions

The organizers

The attraction of the Compass conference was that a range of issues pertaining the left would be discussed, and a "way forward" would be outlined to stem the rot of the Labour party which even the conference organizers saw as heading to a major defeat in the next election. Neal Lawson, Compass director, kicked off the conference by talking in terms of a left perspective, and directions the left should take. Derek Simpson, from Amicus, provided some useful commentary about the state of the left in the UK, and the role of the unions in Labour's future. The introduction was then wrapped up by Ed Balls, MP, who delivered a speech one would have expected to hear at a Labour party conference. What was disconcerting about the crowd was their penchant to applaud when key phrases were expressed by speakers at the plenary meeting; it wasn’t too difficult to jerk them around.

Neal Lawson returned to the podium and stated that the conference was meant to spark a "debate" about where the left in Britain would go, and that the interaction of the members would generate recommendations that would be entered in Compass's manifesto that will be produced after the conference. Participants were given a form wherein they could enter their three main concerns, and a compilation of these would be the basis for the impending Compass manifesto.

The plenary meeting was concluded with a "debate" about renewable energy vs. nuclear power, and the conference attendees could submit a form "for or against the motion". Ten minutes of this "debate" were meant to set the stage for the remainder of the conference.

The reaction from some of the participants was that the conference felt like a "top-down" exercise organized by people who had been responsible for alienating them from politics early in the new Labour government after the 1997 election. The conference seemed like a jamboree for several think tanks to present their mini-agendas with the hope of adding their positions into an overall new-New-Labour platform (seen as a Gordon Brown agenda). The conference organizers will compile the views of several of the participating organizations' positions and incorporate them into a forthcoming joint position in the Compass manifesto.

Opening Plenary speeches

The seminars

There were many seminars organized by participating organizations, and a list of the events can be found in the Compass Conference Program. Of course, one couldn’t participate in all events, but it was evident that some had overflow crowds while others were barely attended. I attended the seminar organized by the Foreign Policy Centre on "The UN's responsibility to protect - how can we prevent another Rwanda?" or what role Britain should play multilaterally (via the UN) in the prevention of the next Rwanda. Mike Gapes, MP, who is a member of the Foreign Policy Committee, discussed at length how the committee had been wringing its hands on what to do about Darfur, and suggested that this was clearly a case where Britain should be pushing for multilateral intervention. He argued for more enlightened interventions and warned against those who wanted to take an isolationist position. James Smith of the Aegis Trust (a think tank/political action group connected to a Holocaust Studies Centre) pontificated about genocide and why Darfur should be at the top of the list of candidates for an humanitarian intervention. Oona King described the mass killings in Congo, about the mass rapes, and how the country had been devastated. She suggested that Congo should be a priority case for intervention. John Kampfner, the editor the New Statesman, weighed in with an account of his experience in Rwanda and why there was a need for more enlightened interventions around the world. The Q&A section included several statements by members of the Foreign Policy Centre who emphasized the point that had been repeated several times during the main presentation: intervention in Darfur should be a priority. A member of the Euston Manifesto was present, and his main point was that Labour needed to accept an interventionist role for Britain, and urged supporting interventions in Darfur and Iran. After the participants who were familiar to the chairman had had their say, I finally managed to make the simple point that it is rather hypocritical to harp on what to do about "genocide" when it comes to "unfriendly regimes", yet to be a full participant in a war of aggression and the implementation of trade sanctions that have resulted in about 1.5 million Iraqis killed or dying from malnutrition/preventable diseases, etc. I also pointed out that Israeli policies which aim to put the Palestinian population "on a diet" are also genocidal, and Britain could easily do something to oppose Israeli actions. This elicited a uniform aggressive response, especially from Mike Gapes, who rejected out of hand that the US was responsible for genocide in Iraq -- it had been Saddam Hussein who had been responsible for genocide to which the US responded, etc.

Another curious seminar was "Human Security: A new approach to Foreign Policy" organized by the LSE Centre for Global Governance. Mary Kaldor, the founder of the LSE group, suggested that their policy recommendation was to make ethics an integral part of British/European foreign policy, and that a cornerstone of such a policy would be a better guarantor for the "security" of the individual in the EU. Their group produced a document ("A Human Security Doctrine for Europe") expanding on this concept for Javier Solana -- a document that was purportedly solicited by him, and he seems to have uttered glowing comments about it. A policy group has been formed at LSE to push this concept of "human security" into European and British policy. Anthony Giddens, Mary Kaldor, and a few other LSE faculty specialize in recasting all the world's woes and possible solutions into the "human security" framework. Most of the participants of the seminar were women, and since there were several references to protecting the human security of women, the crowd seemed to be very pleased and applauded when the term "safeguarding women's security" was uttered. Again, the Euston Manifesto folks were present making a case for intervention to safeguard the human security in Iran and Darfur.

The Participants

Most of the conference attendees were white, a large proportion of women and with an average age in the late 50s. There were very few young participants. There were virtually no black or Asian participants, and if the staff/organizer members were removed from a tally, then it is safe to suggest that there were no minority groups in evidence at all. Some of the young alienated conference participants who left early referred to the crowd as the "quiche eaters brigade".

Conclusion

Compass intends to publish its manifesto within the next few weeks incorporating the results from this conference, and this will be incorporated to this article as soon as it becomes available. It is difficult to imagine that this top-down exercise could result in meaningful policy recommendations, or that it would invigorate Labour's core supporters to become politically active again. As such, there are many questions about what the conference organizers aimed to achieve, but it seems that the provision for a stage for the constituent groups may have been at the center of this exercise. Furthermore, it could also provide the foundation for re-launching/re-branding the discredited "New Labour" into a party platform for Gordon Brown. One should expect Compass to launch a "new-New-Labour".

Contact

Compass - direction for the democratic left
Southbank House
Black Prince Road
London SE1 7SJ
t: +44 (0)20 7463 0633
m: +44 (0)7900 195591
Contact: Gavin Hayes gavin@compassonline.org.uk
Website www.compassonline.org.uk

London Compass Conference

Compass Conference Program (17 June 2006)
Compass Conference 2006 -- some impressions

Compass Materials

Resources

Notes

  1. ↑ Home page, Compass website, accessed 19 April 2009
  2. ↑ About Compass, Compass website, accessed 19 April 2009
  3. ↑ Compass email 30 October 2007
  4. ↑ Compass email 30 October 2007 states Cruddas will run on Compass campaign in Parliament and that he has co-authored an article with Neal Lawson.
  5. ↑ Compass, ThinkPiece 9, Accessed 27-March-2009
  6. ↑ Compass,ThinkPiece 10, Accessed 27-March-2009
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