Our party: re-engaging Labour activists and re-building a mass membership movement

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LabourBy Thomas Fairfax

Maybe there is still some time to consider what to do to rebuild the Labour Party after the next general election, whatever the result, before campaigning gets underway in true earnest.

Currently some people will be gearing up to push the current party line on ID cards and replacing Trident, and various other highly divisive issues because they believe in them, or feel that it does more harm than good to be seen as part of a split and fractured party.

Others will just step back, because they can’t bring themselves to help out, even when there are many other issues that potentially bring us all together.

New Labour was born out of a desire to mould the party into an organisation to gain power to enable at least some Labour policies to be put into action, because permanent opposition meant that none could be implemented.

Unfortunately, what has been missing from the advocates for New Labour is any great acceptance that John Smith would have been in all probability Prime Minister, but for his early death, without inventing New Labour.

Most of the successes people mention for this government are those from that first term, and were policies in place before John Smith’s demise. But the things that were once seen as the New Labour group’s strengths are now seen as its weaknesses. Rigid centralised control and the quashing of dissenting voices have alienated many. The party membership has shrunk as the disenchanted and disenfranchised have voted with their feet.

The whole New Labour ethos of control seems to have affected the whole way this group has exercised power in government: at first tolerating other wings of the party and different strands of thought, and then gradually purging them, as the exercise of patronage over the party at large extends. There are still dissenting voices, but they are on the backbenches in Parliament, or more often outside of Parliament, and generally ignored.

Basically the government preaches diversity, but only for everybody else. Diversity of thought is as good for Labour as for any other organisation, and ways should be devised to reinforce it.

This may be the wrong time to raise such issues, but it must be the time to start thinking about them, because the NEC don’t plan to make any study into democratising the party and giving voice to the activists again until 2011, when they merely plan to make a report on it.

They appear to accept that something needs mending, but feel no urgency to get started. The long grass is clearly beckoning for the planned report.

So what are your ideas for returning some balance into the way the party is run?

To get the ball rolling, here are some thoughts of my own on minimal changes (probably unworkable, but you have to start somewhere).

* Modify the candidate selection process for Westminster constituencies.

* The candidate list must include at least two people who are local and chosen by a ballot of the constituency party membership.

* The Constituency candidate selection committee should feel able to reject all but two of the potential candidates proposed by the central party, before the final selection ballot of all constituency members.

The benefit of this would be that, eventually, a larger number of candidates would be unbeholden to the central party organisation for their position in Parliament, and to those who might end up controlling it.

The central organisation can still reasonably expect some of their people chosen, but only where they are not trying to put square pegs into round holes. The benefit is that it would become very difficult for a small group to again manipulate the process with relative impunity on a national scale. We might even end up with more candidates in touch with the views and concerns of those people who live and work in their constituency.

Importantly, the activists would also get a stronger voice in selecting somebody who actually reflects many of their views. If their opinions are seen to be valued, then hopefully this will re-build enthusiasm, and cause more people to want to join and engage in actively supporting the party at large.

But above all it’s a relatively simple and minor change; it’s no major surgery that might kill the patient.

I’ve seen other suggestions recently; all seem in some way viable, but each assumes that support for change is already strong enough and doesn’t have to be built up first and organised. The more ideas, the better the chance of formulating something that feels like the party as a whole chose its own direction of travel in returning more democracy to the party members and away from a controlling ‘unelite‘.




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