Constitutional change is welcome, but we also need to reform the Labour Party

By Jessica Asato / @Jessica_Asato

The vast majority of political commentators ignore what happens in the constituency Labour parties meeting every month in fusty church halls and tatty pub function rooms across the country. Quite rightly the focus is on those at the top. But it is in the branch meetings of the Labour party and trade unions where Labour’s problems start, and where we must shine a light to understand how Labour might try to reconnect.

On evaluation, Labour’s structures are an unhappy merger of old-fashioned, soviet-sounding bodies such as the local ‘General Committee’ and powerless New Labour creations such as the National Policy Forum. As part of New Labour’s drive to protect policy-making from hard left elements of the party, a new system of policy formulation was created called ‘Partnership in Power’. Scarred by the 1980s where Militant organised in the party and issues such as unilateral disarmament dominated party thinking, modernisers sought to create structures which aimed to give voice to the mainstream of the party. The problem was that the vast majority of people who joined Labour in the build-up to victory in 1997 for one reason or another failed to get involved in policy formulation and very quickly the new structures were probably accurately seen as a way of silencing the grassroots of the party.

By all accounts the new system has become irrelevant to most Labour members, who are now resigned to letting the government make policy and railing about it afterwards. Which means that most Labour meetings have reverted back to pointless discussions, devoid of serious argument or real facts, which are resolved by how many people are bothered to turn up for the evening. Motions are still written, and amended, and sent to various Secretaries of State destined to end up in yet another waste paper basket. To debate ideas and practical policy measures at a local party meeting is like stepping into a time warp. It is a perplexing situation given the many years of modernisation and innovation that we have seen Labour pursue in government, but it is not surprising given that Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown since, have had no appetite for reforming the party. Producer capture, a pet buzzword of public service reformers, is rife in the Labour party.

Local parties very seldomly involve local residents in their discussions about policy. To get away from the inward-looking nature of party debates, a duty should be introduced on all constituency Labour parties to hold meetings each year which allow local people to set the agenda. Instead of Palestine, Columbian trade unionists and trident being key topics for discussion, party members might have to face up to the fact that the vast majority of residents care about more mundane things such as the lack of activities for young people, school places and unaffordable housing. Equally though, local residents might benefit from hearing debates about the plight of Darfur and the reasons why refugees should be given asylum in the UK, or why it’s important to tackle poverty. At the same time as we argue that citizens should be given the right to influence Parliament through citizen-initiated bills and the right of recall, so should our local parties be expected to throw open its doors to the public.

Labour’s manifesto process, for example, should demand that local parties can only submit ideas and policy documents to the general policy-making pot if they can show that they have reached their conclusions with the involvement of the public. Not only will this bring in a sense of reality to Labour’s internal debates, it will also force members to become better informed and to internalise arguments rather than parrot their own prejudices. The Labour movement needs to return to the days of the Workers Education Association set up in 1906, whereby those who are involved are continually increasing the sum total of their knowledge, and crucially, improving the political education and involvement of the least advantaged in our society. It is extraordinary that in all the debates over the last decade about voter apathy, and all the hand-wringing about the fact that it is those from the poorest social backgrounds who turn out the least, Labour has done absolutely nothing as a party to focus its efforts on engaging the very people it says it exists to support. This could be funded, as they do in Sweden, by a state levy to support political education and training.

The triumph of the BNP shows that Labour at a local level has failed to make progressive arguments about migration and the nature of the EU within core Labour communities, preferring to leave it to the government who sadly have decided that giving the EU a dressing down at every opportunity and creating lists of banned migrants to the UK will convince people that Labour is on their side. It is a strategy which has catastrophically failed and progressives can only reconnect with those voters, who are in the most vulnerable situations and deserve a Labour voice, by becoming a mass political movement again.

Jessica Asato is Acting Director of Progress.