They are simply the party members to whom has fallen the honour of giving practical expression to the ideals of the Labour movement.Labour Party rules specify that MPs will face a "trigger ballot" procedure where each branch of the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) and each affiliate (trade union and socialist society) branch will have a simple majority vote on whether they wish their sitting MP to automatically stand again in the next general election, or whether they wish to have a full selection process.
[4] Before 1970 the process for reconsidering support for a sitting MP required three Constituency General Committee (GC) meetings to be called for the purpose of considering whether to support the MP, followed by a meeting of affiliates to the CLP where affiliate GC delegates were mandated to vote a certain way.
[7] The rules governing reselection were amended at Labour Party Conference in 1970 making it marginally less difficult to challenge a sitting MP.
[5] At Labour Party Conference in 1974 the NEC reported that they had conducted a review of the rules and concluded that no changes were required.
These motions were ruled out of order on the grounds that they breached the '1968 rule'[9][5] However, Ian Mikardo announced on behalf of the NEC that "We shall put down at next year's Annual Conference all the amendments to the constitution necessary to provide automatic reselection in the way and in the sense that the sponsors of those sixty-odd resolutions want.
At Labour Party Conference in 1978 the NEC broke this commitment and did not bring forward the proposal for automatic reselection.
"[10] In 1990 Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party, scrapped mandatory reselection, replacing it with a system of trigger ballots.