Miliband’s reforms go much further than anticipated: they also owe a surprising debt to the legacy of the New Left

When Ed Miliband launched his review of Labour’s structure in a speech at St Brides last July, many commentators concluded it to be an ill-thought through initiative, a hasty over-reaction to negative press coverage of the on-going parliamentary selection in Falkirk. Unsurprisingly, the proposals generated considerable critical feedback amongst the party’s affiliated trade unions. Some observers concluded, given the realities of the party’s organisation, the Labour leader would be forced into some sort of embarrassing climb down.

On the face of it, the proposals voted through at last Saturday’s special conference, stand in marked contrast to those initial interpretations of Miliband’s speech and of his prospects of success. The Labour party has, of course, a long history of papering over disputes with the flimsiest of rhetorical devices: remember the statement of party objects in 1960 with which Hugh Gaitskell failed to replace Clause IV of the 1918 constitution; the solemn and binding agreement which gave Harold Wilson a way out of the debacle surrounding In Place of Strife in 1969; or the St Valentine’s Day pact of 1979 which pretended to patch up the Winter of Discontent. Saturday’s vote stands in marked contrast to these examples. Far from representing a retreat into a traditional face saving formula, the final measures go much further than those floated back in July last year.

Miliband’s original suggestions emphasised the need for trade unionists to make a conscious decision to opt in to affiliated membership and the requirement to introduce a new code of conduct and spending limits into internal campaigns within the party. Proposing new expenditure rules, he made only the briefest of references to the electoral college by which the party’s leader has been elected since 1981. There was no hint of anything else: the original suggestion was that current arrangements would remain. In abolishing the electoral college at the same time that ‘contracting in’ is formalised, the Collins review has been much more far reaching than originally envisaged.

One of the striking features of the debate at Saturday’s special conference was just how little opposition was deployed towards Miliband’s reforms. Granted some trade unionists spoke in support through gritted teeth but, out of around 25 participants in the debate, only four (two of whom were from Islington) called for the proposals to be rejected. Moreover, no speaker mobilised principled arguments in favour of the present arrangement by which affiliates must contract out; none argued in support of the electoral college as a meaningful democratic process. Instead they made pragmatic points about the financial impact of the reforms and the potential erosion of the link between the trade unions and the party. Only one opponent tried to marshal a case against contracting in, suggesting that collective decisions taken in the workplace should be binding on all individuals. Given the shift in Labour’s organisation and in affiliated membership over the last fifty years as well as the development of workplace relations in the United Kingdom it did not seem an especially persuasive point.

Back in St Brides last July, Ed Miliband placed considerable emphasis on individuals within the party: they should have a voice and they should be engaged contributors to its campaigns and activities. But such a focus on individual members meant that each should also make an explicit decision about signing up to Labour: a deliberate choice to pay the levy. Miliband was categoric:

‘In the twenty-first century, it just doesn’t make sense for anyone to be affiliated to a political party unless they have chosen to do so.’

The existing procedure of contracting out might have made sense in 1946 when it was legalised with the repeal of the 1927 Trades Disputes and Trade Union Act. In his classic text, Parliamentary Socialism, Ralph Miliband offers an interesting observation about the decision to facilitate contracting out, suggesting that the Labour government demanded (and received) quiescence from the trade unions over industrial action in exchange for the legislation.

In the 1940s, a large proportion of the workforce was unionised, around 90 of which were affiliated to Labour (there are around 15 today). Political identities were defined by corporate memberships and the basic terrain of political conflict in the UK between the parties was starkly defined as one between capital and labour. Miliband’s 2013 comments reflected the need to put more emphasis on individuality and personal choice in a world with multiple political identities, one fractured by a range of choices. En bloc group affiliations rarely delineate specific characteristics in a way they once did.

There was an implicit criticism of affiliated membership in all of this: Miliband noted that Labour’s affiliated membership of around two and half million were not connected locally to the party and they did not participate in its activities. As a result of ‘contracting out’, they did not make a conscious, deliberate decision to join the party. The implication of his argument was that the existence of a passive collective membership undermined a more active and politicised one in constituency parties.

Miliband’s suggestion is not new. Writing in 1930, in Portrait of the Labour Party, one of the first ever book length treatments of the party’s politics, Egon Wertheimer, the London correspondent of Vorwaets, the German social democrats’ newspaper, complained about such members as the ‘dead souls’ of trade unionism. In the early 1960s, Tom Nairn made the same point about inactive ‘dead souls’: they eroded the contributions of party activists. Perry Anderson described them as ‘merely tax-payers’ funding the party’s upkeep. Such criticism of affiliates became a standard feature of the New Left’s critique of Labour. By the early 1990s, Anderson protested brutally about the ‘Leviathan of dead souls’, used to crush dissent in the party.

It is noteworthy that such support for Ed Miliband’s initiative comes from the New Left, suggesting that it is not simply a reactionary initiative. Of course, whether the party can develop the kind of mass membership to which the Labour leader aspires remains another matter altogether.

Mark Wickham-Jones is Professor of Politics at the University of Bristol