GORDON BROWN has called for the trust of the labour movement in moving forwards to a new era of policy-making. At face value, that’s what the trade unions have agreed to do this week and, consequently, what the Labour Party conference can be expected to do when it convenes in Bournemouth. Like it or leave it – and for very good reason many won’t like it – that, barring a cataclysmic event, is what will happen this coming week.
The trust lies in the hope that Mr Brown really means what he says, as he outlines on pages 8-9, when he argues that the proposed reform of conference and policy-making within Labour is a genuine widening and strengthening of democracy within the party. Passing over the last vestige of conference sovereignty to a leadership-controlled party machine is a historic step for a party which has a proud tradition of forging nationally reforming policies from the ground upwards.
While the leadership may have kept its foot on the trapdoor by largely ignoring conference decisions, the healthy work below carried on an the incessant banging on the door did effect some change eventually. Imagine the delight of former leaderships and their right-wing cohorts would have had if they could have shifted the balance of power so close to their own clutches. The passing of the People’s Parliament, as conference has been so romantically known as in the past, is no mere twitch of a party constitutionalist’s revisionist pen.
The main concern is that without conference as the pinnacle of the decision-making process the incentive to become engaged and thereby to influence policy will be lost. Mr Brown’s case is that this amounts to the politics of the past and that his proposals are more democratic, engage more members effecting greater influence and abolish the “annual yes-no battle over policy†dependent “on a show of hands during a week at the seaside†with a “continuous policy discussion involving the whole partyâ€. Through one-member-one-vote lies the route, he declares, to “the mass party we aspire to beâ€.
Well, the same was said by successive predecessors of Mr Brown’s and the promised results, in which, presumably, the labour movement were asked to place their trust, never materialised. The National Policy Forum is widely, if not universally, discredited as a means for democratic debate and influence, let alone a mechanism for widening engagement in any democratic process. And during the process of emasculation which conference has endured in the past decade or so, the Labour Party’s membership has dwindled to an official 180,000, a figure artificially inflated by including those in arrears.
So when Mr Brown links his one-member-one-vote reforms to the aspiration of “mass party†status he conspicuously lacks empirical evidence.
Backing the reforms – with the compensatory prize of a review in 2009 – is a heavy gamble for the unions. They are, as usual, between a rock and a hard place. One being the leadership and the other being the electorate which, conventional wisdom says, turns off the Labour Party if the unions are seen to be too powerful. Once again, the unions are behaving responsibly in the interests of returning another Labour Government. For that they deserve more respect, recognition and reward from Mr Brown and the Government; in terms of public sector pay and employment rights and by ensuring that the trust is not broken.
To his credit, and unlike Tony Blair, Mr Brown has not sought to exalt in the humiliation for public consumption of conference and the unions, preferring a dialogue which has been fraught – not least among the unions themselves at times – but honestly engaged. His rhetoric has a seductive logic if true widening of democratic influence is to replace the century-old stalemate between Labour and the party in government. Yet a pointer to political reality was evident in the way the party machine attempted to keep important issues such as fair tax for private equity partners, in a move by the Community union, as well as others, off the conference agenda.
The unions’ decisions were not borne out of weakness in the face of the realities of political power and electoral fear. They came from a collective desire to embrace change in order to gain greater influence in the implementation of progressive policies through a Labour Government.
If the reforms are to succeed, Mr Brown has to return the favour and place his trust in the labour movement.
