Prime Time: The new Progress campaign for Labour primaries

By Jessica Asato / @Jessica_Asato

Today, Progress launched its campaign to persuade the Labour party to introduce primaries for parliamentary and mayoral selections. Following the Totnes success for the Tories and David Miliband’s intervention in Tribune, we felt that it was time to have a frank debate in the Labour Party about the merits of introducing primaries for real. There has already been lots of good debate about primaries on LabourList so I want to use this post to answer some of the criticisms which have been rightly raised over the last few days and months.

1. Primaries will spell the end of the Labour Party as we know it:

This has been the most frequent criticism raised by Compass Chair Neal Lawson and in Tribune’s editorial after it published David Miliband’s support for primaries. The argument goes that primaries will leave party membership emaciated, since the only solid thing left for party members to do is vote for their parliamentary candidate. But this assumes that party members won’t have a say in drawing up the initial shortlist to put to registered supporters. Retaining this authority over candidate selection is important, not only to give structure to your rights as a member, but also so that candidates are selected according to their values and competency for the job.

The other thing this assumes is that primaries will weaken the membership, rather than contribute to it. In fact, introducing the public to the Labour Party through primaries, which is a positive act in favour of a Labour candidate, could encourage them to join. Particularly if they realised that there was an initial stage of selection they could influence through becoming a member. When membership is at one of its lowest points in our history, surely we should be reaching out to more potential members not fewer?

2. Primaries are too costly and will lead to only wealthy candidates being selected:

The first part of this concern has been raised by Luciana Berger and Don Paskini. It is true that the Totnes primary cost the Conservative Party around £40,000, but if all the main parties agreed to hold primaries, they could do so on the same day and state funding could support the costs of opening polling stations or mailing registered supporters, so that no party has an advantage over the other. Alternatively we could experiment with full online voting with access to computer terminals being granted at libraries, schools and workplaces for those who don’t have a computer or internet access at home, which might help to bring the costs down.

As for the second complaint, which has been raised by Paul Halsall, there is no reason why primaries should lead to a money race. After all, the Electoral Commission sets rules for candidature expenditure at the moment, there’s no reason why we couldn’t introduce strict rules that candidates in primaries can’t spend more than £2000, say. The reason why it gets out of hand in the US is because there is a constitutional right to be able to spend as much money as a small country. Fortunately we’re not in that place, so can restrict funding as we see fit. If anything, primaries could end the slightly murky world of union funding for candidates, and personal funding which goes unregulated in the Labour Party during selections at the moment and no one seems to make a big fuss.

3. Primaries would lead to bland middle-of the road candidates:

Simon Hoggart has suggested that primaries will land us “with a collection of bland, acceptable, uncontroversial, middle-of-the-road, white bread MPs, holding no very strong opinions about anything”. An initial cynical reply might be that this sounds remarkably like the accusation already levelled at MPs. But there is no reason why voters would choose bland candidates. After all, independent candidates such as Martin Bell and Richard Taylor in Wyre Forest were chosen by the electorate, so why would they act any differently in a primary? Primaries in America do not result in ‘bland’ candidates, and in fact, Sarah Wollaston, the candidate chosen in Totnes was the exact opposite of a faceless party hack, as Nick Bye so graciously describes in his defeat. But even if voters do select middle-of-the-road candidates, that’s their choice. If they lose the election, maybe they will choose differently next time, or if they stink at being an MP, they can be deselected next time round. Let’s give the electorate a bit of room to make choices and learn from their actions.

4. Primaries won’t solve the democratic deficit / voters don’t want to vote in more elections / there are more important democraticconcerns such as changing the voting system:

This was an argument brought up by Neal Lawson in a piece he wrote for Comment is Free. I’m certainly not arguing that primaries on their own will solve the problems this country faces, either in the field of democratic renewal or the economic crisis. Progress also supports the Vote for a Change campaign to get the government to support a referendum at the general election on proportional representation. We’re also running a campaign for a Citizens’ Convention. So we agree that this is just part of a suite of measures that need to be taken to mend our broken political system. And as for the economic crisis, well, there’s a great big debate to be had on that, and we’re not suggesting primaries are going to produce the answers on the future of the market and the role of the state. But we believe that primaries could be one step along the road towards democratic renewal, and with the Tories and Lib Dems in favour we might have the chance to make it a practical reality. In fact, it’s galling to see the Tories take this on and use it for their own political advantage, rather than because it’s a good thing to engage citizens per se. This should be Labour territory and we should be leading the pack.

There are lots more arguments against primaries, and not all of them have satisfactory answers. I have chosen four, but do post your own and I will try and answer them as the day goes on. If you support primaries do consider joining Progress’ campaign, and take the debate to your local branch or GC. That’s the democratic way of making a difference in the Labour Party, so let’s use it as members should.