Secretary's Annual Report 2000
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Introduction
Whilst 1999 was supposed to have been the year in which Labour began to fulfil it’s 1997 election promises, 2000 was the year in which actual spending commitments were detailed, with huge amounts of new money pledged for the health and education services.
There were setbacks too, in particular the chaos on the railways, paedophilia mania, fuel protests, Tory propaganda against asylum seekers, immigrants, the EU and anything else even slightly liberal or decent. The Tories are also campaigning heavily on the question of “law and order”, an area in which the Party’s election pledge to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” seems to ring somewhat hollow now that crime is apparently increasing.
The leadership has also come unstuck in a number of areas, especially over the Millennium Dome, the London Mayor, the Leader of the Welsh Assembly and the recent Falkirk West by-election. We had another year of appalling local election results and have our smallest majority for some time on Bolton Council.
On a happier note the birth of the latest Blair babe, Leo, is, I suppose, something to celebrate. And it did deflect attention from the awful local election results.
Our membership locally has fallen slightly but there has been a slow and steady influx of new members. The local elections saw the Party losing ground in Bolton with a couple of knife-edge decisions and farcically low voter turnouts. In Deane-Cum-Heaton we turned in a creditable performance with the Tories failing to appreciably increase their majority over the previous year.
2000
The Year
The Branch AGM in January turned up few surprises with virtually the same team (the "usual suspects") being elected to run the Branch. I was appointed Secretary; Graham, Chair; Pauline and Eve, Vice-Chairs and Joyce, Membership Secretary. We had a new Treasurer, George since Trevor has had to resign with his full-time move to true-blue Lakeland. We had a full complement of six Constituency Party delegates. Leilia represented us on the Bolton Local Government Committee for the first part of the year with Amal taking over in the autumn.
Our
Membership in 2000
We ended the year with about xxx members, Joyce continuing her tremendous job of keeping our list up to date, weeding out the non-payers, those who'd moved, disappeared or were simply no longer interested! A few members didn't renew their membership as protest against the perceived continuing right wing policies of the government and one in particular over the Government’s plan to partially privatise the National Air Traffic Control System (NATS).
However, thanks again to Joyce's untiring efforts, we have retained the majority of members and recruited several new ones resulting in our numbers remaining fairly static.
In the run up to the last general election campaign and in the euphoria afterwards we recruited at least xx new members. However, hardly any of those have remained active and the membership of quite a few of those was transitory to say the least. I hope for, but don’t actually expect, some influx of new members come the election this year.
Fund-raising
George took over from Trevor as Treasurer and continued the former’s excellent management of the Branch funds. A full statement of our accounts is presented separately.
We held only one fundraising event during the year, the traditional Annual Midsummer Barbecue at Graham and Anne’s house. During a very wet summer the weather held out and we had an excellent time as well as making a major contribution to Branch funds. The now-traditional Branch members’ Christmas Party was postponed due to other commitments by those most closely involved in its organisation. However, we have planned a “Real New Millennium” party to take place on 13th January and, although not intended to be a fundraiser it’s hoped that there will be some contribution to Branch funds. On their own, the fundraising events during the last twelve months will not be enough to finance the Branch's activities during the year.
This means that the Branch's main fundraiser, the Deane-Cum-Heaton Stakeholder Society (100 Club), is even more important than ever. Unfortunately the 100 Club membership has decreased slightly to about xxx by the year-end. It includes several contributors who are no longer Party members or have moved to other Branches. Therefore, if we are to fully fund our own Branch's activities and help other sections of the Party wherever possible, we need many more members. We have talked quite a lot about ways in which we could increase the 100 Club membership but haven’t, so far, taken any action. We must do something soon. On a brighter note, Branch funds do stand at over £xxxx and we should be able to donate at least £3,000 to the Bolton West general election campaign.
Branch
Meetings
Branch meetings have been generally well attended with 12 to 20 members usually being present. We’ve been very fortunate in that several members have continued to offer their homes as venues and my special thanks to Graham and Anne, Pauline and John, Alan and Joyce, Eve, Leilia and George (separately!).
We were quite successful in getting guest speakers to our meetings:
March Ruth Kelly July Clifford Morris September Marc Schmid and Gary Arthurs October Jeremy Lavin December Bob Howarth
Most gratifying has been the vigour and enthusiasm with which members have entered into the discussions regardless of whether or not there has been a speaker.
We would like to continue to have a guest speaker at as many meetings as possible and suggestions of who to invite will be most welcome.
Surf
the Web With Deane-Cum-Heaton
During the year I've done my best to keep the Branch's Internet Web site (http://gillatt.org/labour) and have moved it to a new location. A further move to a permanent new home is planned for 2001. I started putting on a lot of the papers coming from Party HQ as well as Ruth’s Parliamentary Reports but converting the Word documents to html is much more time consuming than I had imagined and I’ve now abandoned that idea.
I continue to get responses to the site and it has been described by Labour Left Briefing as “I don't know what the politics of this ward are like but it's a great site — every ward should have one like this!” Please don’t tell labour party HQ! We’ve had more than 1,200 visitors since the counter was reset in October 2000 and a number of interesting comments in the guest book.
Local
Election '2000
Our Branch’s candidate this year was James Woodrow who excellently represented us and worked very hard, often alone on the telephone from the Party offices. Ably supported by our enthusiastic band of leafleters, organised by Joyce, we waged a mainly leaflet based campaign. The Tory majority was up slightly at just over 1,300 and although the turnout was low for our ward at 29% it was the highest of the Bolton wards save those in which postal vote experiments were conducted.
Overall Labour again lost ground around the country and in Bolton our overall majority is now eight, the lowest for several years.
Thanks
2000 was quite a different year from 1999 and the year ahead will almost certainly be a general election year. It won’t be easy to retain Bolton West, especially as we won’t be getting the same sort of intensive outside help that we received in 1997. However, with the strong support of all members we can and will do it. The alternative of Hague and his cronies is just too awful to contemplate.
As Secretary I am happy to have served the Branch for another year but it would have been impossible for me to carry out my job without the help and support of very many Party members. I would therefore like to specially thank Graham, George, Pauline, Eve and Joyce, the other Branch Officers and all those ordinary members without whose help we would have been a pointless debating society.
Most of all, though, I would like to thank Noelene, my wife, who as well as a very hectic life as a student has had to put up with me monopolising the computer so much of the time and has supported me throughout the year.
Thank you and best wishes for 2001.
John Gillatt
Branch Secretary
January 2001
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