To win Labour must address the selection process of parliamentary candidates

In the first three emails from the Leadership candidates the word “change” featured no less than 8 times. For all the talk of change, from both Leadership and Deputy Leadership candidates, it’s alarming how none of it has been linked to a vital ingredient within any political party: finding the right candidates.

For years, regardless of who was in charge at the time, the Labour Party’s process for selecting parliamentary candidates has been a seismic failure. So seismic that I believe the party, with a prevailing preference for spads, lecturers and lawyers, has become too narrow on life experiences, professional backgrounds and, alarmingly for the party of equality, ethnicities too for it to reasonably claim it can even adequately represent the British people.

Sadly this depressing reality has not come about accidentally but rather been engineered by dominant overbearing forces mainly from within. Such influences have left Labour’s selection process looking less like a fair democratic evolution and more a synthetic farm where inbreeding is rife. And as a result Labour’s parliamentary party now displays some significant profile deformities when compared to the wider party – not to mention the British public as a whole.

Over the years underhand selection tactics have caused serious damage to my party. Entrism, leaked selection interview questions, and unopposed favouritism within selection panels have all contributed to the weeding out exciting talent and the thinning out broader fields of knowledge from Labour’s upper echelons.

The Future Candidates Programme was a gesture in the right direction, but was revealed to be just that, a gesture. It provided little practical help in enabling talent from diverse backgrounds to overcome the barriers (often financial and institutional) in becoming candidates. Someone I know, who attended this programme, told me how a current serving MP, who was previously a barrister, told a room of social workers, nurses and charity workers how she forked out £6k of savings and quit work for six months to become an MP. These are means beyond many people, so is it any wonder why we’re struggling to bring broader expertise into parliament?

This narrow field of professional backgrounds, life experiences and ethnicities at the parliamentary level is hurting Labour. It’s struggled to find meaningful and innovative ways (in words but especially in actions) to connect with the public. This was illustrated beautifully by the knee-jerk reaction after the GE result from a number of senior party members who insisted we must look back to Blair to gain power going forward. Britain has changed an awful lot since 1997 and will change an awful lot more in just the next 5 years – thinking about an intensifying housing crisis, deep austerity and growing community segregation.

As someone who professionally runs a communications agency, it is astonishing to me how the party has failed to grasp possibly the most basic of promotional concepts when it comes to selecting parliamentary candidates. That being: you must always match the right products to the right buyers, or converted crudely: the right candidates to the right voters. Not doing so in any other sector of activity is just plain suicide. Purely in profile, by looking, sounding and behaving too differently from the people it needed to attract, Labour had devastated its chances even before the 2015 General Election campaign had began.

If the party and indeed the Leadership or Deputy Leadership candidates are sincere about changing Labour and improving its prospects at the polls, they cannot ignore the dysfunctional selection process that is crippling it in so many ways. Failure to do so will only sustain the party’s decline.

Robin Mulholland is a member of Exeter Constituency Labour Party. He’s been an activist in the Labour Party for over 10 years  and runs an ethical communications and fundraising agency for not-for-profit organisations.