Refounding Labour – The verdict

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Regular readers will know that I’ve had numerous problems with the Refounding Labour process. We were told this was “nothing less than the Refoundation of the Labour Party”. What has come out of this sausage making of a process is less than that. That was always likely to be the case. Besides many of Labour’s problems as an organisation are cultural rather than structural – that will be much harder to fix, and will take much more than a few months of reflection to change.

And it’s the culture of the party that has led to many of the problems that have been faced when trying to deliver reform. We thought that – this time – we might get transparency in the process, but members were left for months on end with little or no feedback on what had happened to their submissions. Documents were drafted in secret and never officially released (or at best, released very late). Neither were the submissions themselves – despite Ed Miliband stating more than two months ago that they would be. That’s a ridiculous state of affairs and doesn’t inspire confidence in the party’s ability to be open and transparent.

Neither does the “take it or leave it” vote on for this afternoon. This is obviously a package, and needs to be considered as such, but they will surely be few delegates who don’t have at least one or two misgivings about the package as a whole. They should have the opportunity to express (and vote according to) these misgivings.

That the process of member engagement and wrangling over the final vote has been so blatantly obtuse will mean that these changes – which will undoubtedly pass – are unlikely to have the impact that they rightly should. The party will need to do a great deal of explaining to members over the coming months if this is still to work. Someone needs to launch something of a rescue mission for Refounding Labour, and it needs to start today.

But process aside, what should be made of these proposals?

On balance (and that’s exactly what this is – a balancing act of sorts), there are some positives to come out of this process. Poorer and rural CLPs will benefit significantly by being able to campaign more effectively, with more money, and be sure that they can still send a delegate to conference.

Registered supporters divides opinion in the party, and some will be concerned that they may have a say in the leadership contest. As I said earlier this week, I’m sceptical about the number of people who will want to be registered supporters. I think it’ll be hard for the party to find the 50,000 registered supporters that it would take to trigger the 3% vote share of the electoral college. And if the party can attract hundreds of thousands of supporters who are willing to get involved in their communities and actively campaign for Labour, then that’s worth doing.

Splitting the registered supporters section between the three existing branches of the electoral college is a smart compromise too – it stops either the member or affiliate sections being dwarfed by non-members, and ensures that members and affiliates retain more of a say (per vote) than a registered supporter. That’s an important safeguard.

The realisation that there is no “one size fits all” approach for local party organisation is to be welcomed too. Not every area of the country is the same. Certainly few local parties are the same. So a recognition that different parties have different needs and want different structures whows a willingness to be more hands off hands off. However that doesn’t sit well with abolishing LGCs. If local parties want to be flexible, then they should be flexible enough to decide whether LGCs are a good idea or not – at the moment they won’t have that luxury.

The clause one change is a symbolic one, and enshrines the idea that we are “more than a party”. The question there is what real and tangible difference will that makes to the way we campaign – again it’s about culture, not structures or constitutions. No-one consults the party rule book before the head out onto the doorstep.

Removing (or at least reducing) multiple votes in the leadership election is also a sensible move. It was embarrassing – and looked undemocratic – that some people had 4, 5 or 6 votes in the last contest. That many of these votes were worth a fraction of other votes isn’t the point, the public thought we were a modern rotten borough – we need to prove that we aren’t.

So this complex set of proposals which will be adopted by the party this afternoon is something of a curate’s egg. It’s not a set of proposals that anyone would have set out to write, but a combination of (flawed) consultation and (fraught) compromise has brought about a document that the majority of the party can live with, and should benefit from. Refounding Labour? Not quite. The rhetoric which some of us (including, admittedly myself) were sometimes taken in by had proved to be an overstatement.

But will the party be changed? Yes. For the better? In many ways. Will it work? Only time will tell. And we’ll be watching every step of the way.

* Before the vote is taken today, we’ll be releasing the Refounding Labour results from our Conference survey *

Soon after the Refounding Labour proposals are voted on, we’ll be hosting a fringe – “What next for party reform?”. Join us at 8pm in Liverpool Town Hall, to hear Peter Hain and others discuss where we go from here.