Peter Hain, appointed to the job by Labour leader Ed Miliband, has put out a document, “Refounding Labour”, which is to be the new basis for the review of party structure opened by the Labour conference in 2010.
Click here to download Peter Hain’s document and click here for the “consultation” website.
The document reads like a medical report on someone starving to death which occasionally mentions that the person gets nothing to eat but uses most of its space to wonder about whether smarter clothes, or more exercise, or free distribution of small snacks in the neighbourhood, would help.
There is no mystery about Labour’s decay. In the mid-1990s the party structure was hijacked by a crew of smart-suited careerists, heavily based in the “politosphere” of people who go straight from university to jobs in think-tanks or NGOs, or as “political advisers” or “researchers” around Westminster and Whitehall, without ever touching working-class ground.
Through a bunch of rule changes, that crew cut off almost all input to Labour Party decision-making from the working-class base of the party, in constituency organisations and in trade unions. It committed the Labour government to the service of (as Peter Mandelson put it) the “filthy rich”. When, by way of fluke, the Labour Party conference got to discuss policy, and voted for a different line, the Blair-Brown crew ostentatiously ignored it.
Labour Party membership plummeted, but the “New Labour” crew didn’t care. For them, politics was a game played between them and the media, with people who have lives outside the “politosphere” serving only as the raw material for focus groups and market research.
To fix this, the Labour Party has to start having democratic conferences, which debate motions coming from constituency Labour Parties and unions, and take decisions which are binding on the party leaders. Everything else can flow from that.
Hain seems to have noticed that the patient is starving for lack of democracy. He writes of:
● “tension between rank and file members, affiliated organisations, and elected representatives”;
● “trend towards open [sic] discussions with all views being summarised and forwarded [to the trash-bin] rather than voting on old-style resolutions”;
● “members… wonder[ing] what the point is of trying to influence policy-making…”
● “CLPs holding discussion meetings… without any tangible link to actual policy-making…”
● “command and control culture”;
● “party members [feeling] they had no influence on policy outcomes”.
But he proposes nothing to fix all that. His report instead offers wordy musings on many things, and especially three ideas:
● giving some sort of say in the Labour Party to a category of “supporters” who are not members, not even affiliated members through their trade unions. How will that be done when the actual members have “no influence on policy outcomes”? This only means giving the top ranks of the party yet another reserve-power: in case the members and the affiliated unions should find a way to put real pressure on the leaders, the leaders can head it off by appealing to an electorate of the uninvolved and more easily manipulated.
● loosening up local Labour Party structures from their alleged “bureaucratic template”. Here Hain is pushing only for an extension of the disease he has himself noted: what used to be decision-making meetings transformed into “consultation” sessions, which have a “general discussion” and then promise that “all points of view” will be forwarded… somewhere. He is also, slyly, pushing to exclude union delegates from local Labour Party decision-making. The “bureaucratic” thing is what he proposes, not the basic democratic procedures of delegate meetings and votes on motions.
● connecting with “community groups”. If local Labour Parties become democratic bodies which campaign against the cuts – including cuts by Labour councils – then they will make links with community groups. If they continue the culture of “consultation”, “question and answer sessions”, and so on, then they won’t.
Activists should contrast Hain’s document with Labour Party Democracy Task Force report, and make submissions to the consultation accordingly.
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