Though Cowards Flinch

A little bit later than planned, because the kids are ill, we move to step 3 of the five point organisational action plan for the Labour left. 

Step 1 was all about taking over local party infrastructures and how manageable that is.   Step 2 was all about avoid the pitfalls that the Labour left fell into in the 1980s, keeping focused on engagement with the working class and using that to draw in a new and revitalised membership.

 But there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s time to confront it.

 As Dave neatly pointed out here in a separate but complementary post (see comment no.2), the name of the Labour party is ‘besmirched’.

There’s no point in seeking to deny that for many young people with leftwing inclinations, in particular, the idea that the Labour party offers a viable way forward is simply ridiculous. 

By way of recent example,  while Salman,  – a committed young activist, I’m sure – is good enough to pat me, an my ‘old Labourite’ head and say he admires what I’m trying to do, he’s not prepared to engage in any serious discussion/analysis about the difference between the national leadership and the Labour grassroots.

Similarly, when I was giving a talk about local politics a few years ago at the local university, not long after the initial Iraq war, a first year student – so I guess about 18 0r 19 years old – asked me quite simply ‘How can you live with yourself?’ with reference to my party membership.

The message is that, as Labour members, we’re all implicated together.  I could talk till I’m blue in the face about the opportunities the left now has to take over a valid (and reasonably financed) infrastructure; my impeccable logic (though not fully evidenced-based yet) will not be believed because I am seen as an accessory both to murder overseas and the ransacking of civil liberties in the UK.

 This is not something to be bitter about, because such a reaction is what drives people even further from the Labour party, but it is something to acknowledge openly.

Then, just for good measure in the challenge the Labour left faces, there’s the other elephant in the room. 

This is again the elephantinely obvious point that just gaining control of the local infrastructure isn’t the big prize that people on the left really want;  they want more say not just on local issues, but on how the national Labour party conducts its affairs, and the policies this and future Labour governments will implement. 

That’s not rocket science to work out, because it’s what people who’ve stayed in the party want as well.

Talk to most Labour party activists for any length of time at all and before very long you’ll get to the key reason why many people have ‘had it up to here’ with the party. 

If you explore a bit further, it usually gets around to the decision, taken by the Labour party conference in 1997, to adopt Partnership in Power (PiP), and thereby to abandon once and for all any pretension that ordinary members and branches might have any real influence over national party and thereby government policy (see also here and here for  reviews).

Further, it comes to round to the total lack of respect that the Parliamentary Labour Party has for anything ‘beneath’ it, to the extent that they will now quite happily ignores party rule that the PLP accepted in 1997.  This is set out usefully by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (and Peter Hain) in the following terms at the time of the 2005 review of the PiP process:

 The review is, in large part, a recognition that PiP is facing a crisis of credibility.  In his latest pamphlet, The Future Party, Peter Hain admits that members have a perception that devolving ‘most responsibility for policy-making to the NPF has been used as a means of denying them a say over contentious current policy issues’. 

 Hain accepts that many members ‘feel marginalised and the PiP framework is losing credibility.  I believe that we will struggle to establish ourselves as a true party of government unless we can end the relationship of perpetual distrust between party members and the leadership’.  This distrust is fuelled when, in clear breach of undertakings made in 1997, Ministers announce they will ignore Alternative Positions from the NPF (such as rail re-nationalisation and the fourth option for council tenants) that were carried by Annual Conference, the Party’s sovereign body.  And the distrust is further fuelled when major controversial policies, such as foundation hospitals and top-up fees, aren’t taken through the PiP process at all, but are simply steam rollered through Parliament by leadership diktat.  This lack of credibility and distrust helps explain why Party membership has slumped by at least 50% since 1997.

 The core problem here is one of apparent irreversibility. 

In signing up to the PiP process in the first place, the broader membership handed over all power.  Now it does not have the legitimate decision-making power set out in the rules by which to demand back that power. 

 Checkmate, it would seem, to the PLP and an acquiescent National Executive Committee – acquiescent by means of the design of its membership structure (see the briefing paper links above).

 So how, then, faced with these two elephants – of poor reputation and little quasi-judicial power – can the Labour left go forward?

 The answer is to change the rules of the chess game unilaterally, and to announce loud and clear, even as steps 1 and 2 get underway, that the rules are going to be changed.

 What I would like to see happen is the Labour Representation Committee, and any other Labour left organization that’s listening (such as Compass?) announce loud and clear the following policy direction:

1.  To campaign for the total disaffiliation of all affiliated trade unions currently affiliated to the national Labour party;

 2.  To campaign concurrently for a re-affiliation by these same trade unions TO CLPs (or branches) with a commitment to the same or more financial contribution;

3.  To campaign for the re-affiliation to CLPs of trade unions which have already disaffiliated from the national Labour party;

 4.  Other Labour party should be invited to follow suit and to devolve their contributions to local Labour level.

Pretty simple really, as a rallying call,  but it’s a campaign which would, if successful, have huge impacts upon the way the Labour party both operates, and just as importantly in view of its besmirched reputation, how it is regarded by people on the left outside the labour party, and especially by young people who have never thought it right to go anywhere near the Labour party (see also Step 5 on other measures that need to be taken.

 The key impact, obviously, is that the flow of financial resources would be reversed.  Unions and ordinary members would start to get a say both on how affairs are run locally, and how their MP (if there is one) represents them, because they hold the purse strings.  More critically, the national leadership would lose its de facto power and would need to approach CLPs and, let’s say, regional conference, with a ‘business plan’ to be agreed if it is to get its fund to operate.

 Of  course, it’s never going to be simple to arrange this, and much will depend on the extent to which union members and their branches can exert the required influence over their own leaderships, either by winning votes against leadership advice or by toppling the leaderships..  I won’t cover that in detail here, as I’m not qualified to do so (not having been active in a union for a while) but much will depend upon who is correct about ‘where the unions are at’.

 In Luke Akehurst’s view, on the right of the party:

 Most active trade unionists do not sit on the left of the Labour Party. They tend because of the nature of trade union activity – representing ordinary working people and negotiating deals with employers – to be pragmatic and moderate.

This, is, just as with who actually constitutes the remaining membership party, a matter to be tested empirically, but as with my experience of Labour party membership, I have a decent hunch that Luke is thinking wishfully here; that when offered a real chance to seize real power over ‘their’ party via a radical move in union policy, we may find a lot of grassroots support at a time when anything that smacks of MP involvement/power bases is something to be distrusted and fought against.

Regular readers of this blog will see that, in this step 3 proposal (but a step to be ‘talked up even as we get to step 1) there is a link to the other proposals for the ‘reverse of financial flows’ to political parties that I have set out most recently here. 

Where I think the strength of this step 3 version lies, over and above the ‘legislative/all party version, is that while the latter would need to be accepted and implemented solely on the basis of its appeal to the ‘democratic reform’ spirit of the existing institutional powers, the former is about a real challenge to those powers based on mass membership and its financial clout. 

That is, the legislative liberal reform option won’t be accepted, because people in power don’t tend to give up power like that.  The one based on the recognition of what power and resources actually are, and where relative strengths lie, might.

Of course, having seized greater control over  what a labour government must do if its party infrastructure is to be financed, we may at some point be able to force through accompanying legislation which reverses the financial flows of cash over which the unions and the grassroots has no current control, but that’s beyond Step 5, so I’ll leave it there.

 This is the logic for Step 3, but it’s not all about logic.  What we also need to do in the Labour party is to change the culture of deference that has emerged in the last 20 years.  MPs (and as I said in Step 2, councillors) should be regarded not as higher beings, but as our representatives – there to do our bidding, to be commended if they do it well, to be replaced if they do not. 

Such a change in mood in the party – the willingness to take matters into our own hands backed by a workable plan to do so – will be more effective than any policy paper urging us all, yet a-bloody-gain, to enter a competition about electoral reform.