Your CLP will be meeting to discuss motions to put forward to Labour Party Conference later in the month. Local Labour parties can put forward suggested motions to be debated at a national level.

If you still have time to suggest a motion, below are two model motions we would encourage you to put forward. They are in support of 0.7% aid and an independent DFID (with thanks to Caroline Pinder from LCID’s Speakers Network for updating it), and in solidarity with the Uyghur people (with thanks to Labour To Win). You can find the text of both motions below:

Cuts to UK aid budget and independence of DFID

Conference notes:  

1. The government’s decision to merge the Department for International Development (DFID) with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) to form the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
2. Cuts to the aid budget for 2021-2022 by £5 billion, from the 0.7% target to 0.5% of GNI.

Conference believes: 

1. These decisions put UK aid in jeopardy. When development agencies sit under the Foreign Office, their focus gets subverted and impacts the UK’s ability to reduce global poverty. 
2. Having a Secretary of State for International Development in the Cabinet is essential to ensure global development issues are discussed at the highest levels of government.
3. The timing of this cut to the aid budget is reckless as the global crisis caused by COVID-19 will be exacerbated in the world’s poorest countries.
4. The UK has been a global leader in international development. Signalling a retreat into narrow self-interest undermines the emergence of a “Global Britain” which will directly impact the UK’s influence on promotion of human rights and its ‘soft power’ capabilities.

Conference resolves: 

That the Labour Party’s Leader, the Parliamentary Party and the National Policy Forum, should:

a) Seek to maintain the 0.7% target now, and commit to reinstating 0.7%, and DFID, on Day 1 of a Labour Government with its Secretary of State in the Cabinet

b) Support the retention of the International Development Committee (IDC) to ensure transparency and accountability for aid spending.  

Solidarity with the Uyghurs

Conference notes:

1. The Chinese state is inflicting industrial-scale racist oppression on the Uyghur people along with other ethnic and national minority groups in north-west China. The Uyghurs are majority-Muslim and are the largest national group in the province officially called “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” but known to Uyghurs as East Turkestan.
2. The repression includes arbitrary mass internment and indoctrination of at least a million people in concentration camps; an extreme, intrusive, suffocating regime of mass surveillance; draconian restrictions on cultural, linguistic and religious freedom, including the virtual banning of Muslim religious practice; and the systematic separation of Uyghur children from their families.
3. This has been documented by many human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
4. The Chinese government is tightening its control on Xinjiang because it perceives dissent, lack of “loyalty” to China, and calls for more autonomy or independence, as threats to its economic interests: Xinjiang is a major fossil fuel producer and a key artery into central Asian and Middle Eastern markets.

Conference resolves:

1. To express solidarity with the Uyghur people and other minority groups in Xinjiang.
2. To call upon the Chinese government to close the concentration camps and release all those detained; stop the state harassment and intrusive surveillance of the day-to-day lives of the Uyghurs and other minority peoples in Xinjiang; release Uyghur children to their families; stop the torture and abuse.