Vive la difference – primaries non merci

I’m an unashamed Francophile. I love the food, the culture, the wine – in fact I’m writing this half way through a bottle of good claret, in the style of Roy Jenkins, which may explain the panache with which I will now make my case.

I love the French Parti Socialiste – any organisation that once gloried in the name of the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière  must have something going for it. As a kid I took inspiration from Francois Mitterand’s victories at a time when Labour was in the wilderness. Some of my closest allies in European socialist youth politics, who remain dear friends and comrades, were from the Mouvement des Jeunes Socialistes.

But until this week I hadn’t heard many British Labour people look to France as a model for Labour’s renewal. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that the PS, for all its intellectual and ideological vitality, has an electoral record that trumps even our own history of abject defeats. A maximum score in legislative elections of 36%, recent scores of 23%, 24% and 25%. Only two Presidential wins in the entire history of the 5th Republic. Permanently divided into six to eight warring factions.

So I have been a bit surprised to see the French Socialist primary this weekend seized on as evidence that Labours should embrace primary elections: ballots of the general public to elect party candidates. At least the French Socialist primary was a primary: primary supporters have also cited Israel’s Labour leadership “primary”. It wasn’t one. It was a ballot of party members only.

An extremely eloquent argument in favour of the French example being imported here has been set out by Rob Philpott of Progress.

It’s worth a read.

But Rob is just as wrong to suggest that French models of internal party democracy should be emulated by Labour as he would be to suggest we should follow American ones.

The PS does not have an organic union link like Labour and never has had. This partly explains its relative weakness – it has no stable base in the working class and hence is a party dominated by middle class intellectuals. To engage with the mass electorate, the only tool available to the PS is a primary. We already open our leadership elections to millions of members of affiliated unions, and if we stopped giving them a specific share in the electoral college that link with all its benefits of funding, activists and rootedness in bread-and-butter workplace issues, would be severed.

The PS has always had far fewer members than Labour, usually about 25% of the number, and far less socially representative of ordinary voters. We aspire to be a mass membership party. They don’t, hence resorting to primaries to engage beyond a narrow base.

The PS was not using a primary to elect its leader in parliament. Our leader is also the leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party so it is only right that Labour MPs also have a say in electing them.

The PS was not electing its leader at all. Its leader remains Martine Aubry, who lost the presidential primary, but was elected as leader by members alone in 2008.

The primary was for a presidential candidate. We don’t have presidential elections in the UK so a personality based system like primaries is inappropriate for our political system where people vote for the party, not the person.

I am delighted for the PS that 2.7 million people voted in their primary.

As a partisan moderate I am delighted they picked Francois Hollande, the more centrist of the two run-off candidates. I really hope he beats Sarkozy.

But the system Labour already has allows this many people to vote for leader already if they want to as members, union levy payers, or, since conference, registered supporters. The bar for participation as a Labour registered supporter is lower – no fee and a postal ballot – than for voting in French PS primaries where you pay €1 and have to go to a polling station. And we’ve done this whilst using the electoral college to retain appropriate roles in leadership elections for MPs and trade unionists, and making sure that active members paying a full fee have a vote worth lots more than a supporter who just wanders in off the street.

I think we’ve got the balance right. Vive le PS. Vive Francois Hollande. Mais vive la difference.