Why the National Policy Forum matters

Labour’s National Policy Forum (NPF) meets this weekend.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz … I hear the reaction from all but the most obsessive students of the Party’s internal processes.

But this meeting is actually important. Aside from Annual Conference in September it is probably Labour’s one big set piece chance to seize the initiative and capture control of the political agenda. If we are going to move from our current small (or occasionally non-existent) poll leads into a more comfortable position, this event represents one of the few opportunities for us to affect that rather than it be driven by events or trends we have no control of.

The summer before the General Election has been of significance ever since Blair introduced the Partnership in Power constitutional reforms in the 1990s. It’s where the policies documents from which the General Election Manifesto will theoretically be drawn are agreed, with a final sign off in the autumn at Annual Conference.

The location is important: Milton Keynes this time, rather than “Warwick” which became eponymous with this event when we were in government and it was held at Warwick University. Milton Keynes is an iconic New Town, one of whose marginal parliamentary seats is essential to Labour forming a majority.

The event will have a dual purpose, leading it to suffer from something of the confusion of function that afflicted Labour’s Annual Conference for decades when it was both the showcase for the party to the electorate and the bear pit for resolution of internal debates and struggles.

The showcase element will be that there will be a set piece speech by Ed Miliband that the cameras will be let in for. This is Ed’s big opportunity to restate in a more comprehensive package some of the excellent barrage of individual policies that has emerged in the last six months (and that need restating as some of them got lost in the brouhaha about UKIP and never permeated the public consciousness). It is also a vital moment for Ed to set out his vision of what an Ed Miliband-led Labour Government will look like and how it will change the country. At Annual Conference 2013 Ed successfully argued that “Britain can do better than this” – now he needs to show what that better Britain would look like and set out a vision that will inspire both the party and voters.

The nitty-gritty politics is done behind closed doors but there will be no shortage of people trying to spin what is going on.

Before 2010 the NPF was pretty much a binary body. There was a block of trade union votes with a set of industrial policy demands around workplace rights, pensions, manufacturing policy that they really wanted to see in the manifesto as they were core business of the unions, and a set of wider policy demands that they didn’t care about so much and were usually used as bargaining chips to secure the industrial policies. Facing off against them was a leadership-supporting block of votes including elected representatives such as MPs and in those days every one of the CLP representatives from each region except London, which elected a more mixed ticket (as I discovered to my cost when I lost a London NPF election in 2008). A late night series of negotiations between the union political officers and the leader’s office would usually cook up a series of line-by-line compromises that would be voted through rapid fire on the Sunday of the event.

The decision by Annual Conference in 2008 to move to One Member One Vote (OMOV) for CLP delegates to the NPF has thrown that old balance up in the air. The old system was election by delegates to Annual Conference, the majority of whom backed the pro-leadership slate. The new system where every member has a vote has led to a more eclectic set of results, ranging from a clean sweep for the right in one region to some clean sweeps for the leftwing Grassroots Alliance, with every possible permutation in between. The last time these elections were held in 2012 was a long time out from the General Election so name recognition may have had more impact than any considered choice about what the delegates members were electing would do and say about the manifesto two years later.

The new dynamic is a lot more fluid and unpredictable. There remains the big block of union votes, with the usual agenda and cultural willingness to negotiate. There is a block of CLP delegates elected on a Grassroots Alliance ticket with a clear leftwing agenda. Then there are the other CLP delegates and the various other franchises e.g. MPs, MEPs, socialist societies, Shadow Cabinet, NEC members, most but not all of whom are nearer to the leadership’s world view.

Overlaying this is a newer debate between people who favour a bold strategic and policy approach to the General Election, and a more cautious safety first group who are either pessimistic or complacent depending on which way you want to look at it, and want to bank the vote we have in the polls and not take any huge risks. This debate doesn’t fit neatly into an old fashioned left vs right paradigm.

There are three practical policy areas where I understand a big debate and a significant decision will be taken:

• The integration of the NHS and social care – how deeply it will happen and at what level.
• Whether to give local authorities capital expenditure borrowing powers so they can drive social house-building.
• Rail – whether to reiterate the 2010 pledge of a public sector bid being allowed for rail franchises, or simply to bring each franchise back into public ownership as the existing contract expires.

It is to the credit of Angela Eagle and Jon Cruddas in their roles overseeing this process that they have allowed, and will be facilitating, genuine debate about these issues. The contrast with the managed and controlled nature of previous NPF rounds is telling, and members have been able to have genuine input (you could track all their submissions on a public website rather than them disappearing into an HQ filing cabinet).

If I had a vote at the NPF – I don’t unfortunately – I would be going for the bolder option on each of these three questions.

I hope the NPF can see beyond some of the narrow deal-brokering and positioning inevitable in politics and deliver us a policy platform that will excite and motivate the electorate and reinvigorate politics as we head towards the General Election.