Last week, Tribune caused a media flurry with our publication of David Miliband’s vision of the political future. Although wide-ranging in its sweep, the interest focused on Mr Miliband’s support for the idea of introducing primaries into the selection process for would-be MPs in a paradigm shift of the debate over how parties reconnect with the electorate. We moved in relation to present systems and practice from, it’s broke, to: let’s not bother fixing it, let’s invent something else instead.
Primaries represent a dumbing-down of the quality of democratic involvement in the political decision-making process and the death knell for political parties. Having systematically siphoned the democratic lifeblood out of the Labour Party, the leading agents of the “new” Labour project want to apply the coup de grace by rendering its processes massive, passive and pointless, a final solution to taking the politics out of politics. Why should anyone be motivated to give up their time to join a political party if they have no greater influence than a passer-by? It is not a question of widening democracy. Giving all 22 players a ball of their own might arguably constitute some form of spurious democratic advancement, but it misses the point and renders the game meaningless.
The strength of the British democratic systems lies in the health of its political parties, the thought, passion, zeal to persuade, the desire to win in order to implement agreed policies. As Harold Wilson famously put it: the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing. Which brings us joltingly back to the present rather than the diversionary future. Can the Labour Party now claim to be a crusade and, given its present paralysis, why would anybody want to join it?
National Executive Committee member Peter Kenyon has asked these questions and sets out an argument in this week’s issue for moving the party towards greater transparency and back into a crusading mode. He should be commended for his effort and he should not stand alone. The party leadership should take it as a positive help in their current stasis.
Yet, as we go to press, we hear that Mr Kenyon has been invited to a “briefing” with the party’s lawyers, presumably to clarify what the politburo do not wish him to say in public. It bodes ill for any hopes that the party will put up a credible fight at the next election. At the very time – the most critical time in terms of whether there will be anything left of the party after the next election – members are being sleepwalked into the imposition of a manifesto which is likely to ignore some of the basic policies that would mark out a Labour crusade.
Yes, the banks should be hit harder and MPs’ expenses reformed, but what the majority of people want are jobs, stability in finances, schools and health, a social housing programme with impact, post offices, the scrapping of Trident, greater equality and better public services.
This might be Labour’s last chance. Forget the leadership, the crusade needs to be fought at local level from within the heart of every member and supporter. There is nothing to gain by not trying and everything to lose.
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