Democracy: now dry out the damp squib!

Submitted by AWL on 3 October, 2018 - 10:41 Author: Martin Thomas

Sadly, Luke Akehurst, honcho of the right-wing in the Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs), is right about what happened at Labour Party conference on the Democracy Review.

“The Democracy Review was a total damp squib... All the key decisions around youth, student structures and local government have been postponed for a year”.

Some positive changes were made by the shreds which got to conference floor from the Democracy Review or by rule-changes submitted by CLPs. But, three years on from the Corbyn shock, none of the basic structural changes made by Blair's coup in 1994-7 have been reversed and replaced by democracy.

This is not just a matter of how Labour conference works. It is a matter of what sort of movement the Labour Party is on the ground.

Blair not only changed rules, but changed the relationship between the Labour Party and the working-class electorate into one mediated much more through the “spin-doctors'” dealings with the media than through an active membership in dialogue with people around us in workplaces and communities.

The big rise in Labour membership since 2015 has changed that to some degree, but left a long way to go.

The average age of Labour members is still old — 53, only a bit below the Tories’ average of 57. More Labour members (29%) are over 65 than are under 44 (28%). Only 4% of Labour members are under 24 — a lower figure even than the Tories' 5%.

Of those who are members on paper, 41% said they had had no face-to-face (rather than electronic) contact with other Labour Party members — although the survey was done straight after the 2017 general election — and only 28% said they had “frequent” face-to-face communication.

Asked how they'd come to join, only 4% said they had joined because approached by someone from their local Labour Party — a much smaller percentage than for the Tories (15%) or Lib-Dems (10%). 93% had approached the Labour Party (i.e., presumably, electronically) on their own initiative.

The most positive changes voted through at the 22-24 September conference were, paradoxically, those which drew most criticism from the left for their inadequacy.

Constituencies will be able to have a selection for their parliamentary candidates (rather than a current MP continuing automatically) if either one-third of ward branches, or one-third of trade-union and other affiliates, demand it. The left wanted “open selection” (as for council candidates, people in trade-union posts, etc.), but the new rule lowers the bar for selections a lot.

Candidates for Labour Party leader will need nominations from 10% of MPs and either 5% of CLPs or 5% of unions to get on the ballot paper. The Democracy Review had proposed that the bar should be 5% of MPs and either 10% of CLPs or 10% of unions.

There will be rules for Young Labour conference (at present Labour HQ makes them up each year as it wishes), and conferences (with rights to submit motions to the main conference) will be set up for black and minority-ethnic and for disabled members. (At present black and minority-ethnic representation in the Labour Party is through a “BAME Labour” “socialist society” which is tiny and dominated by right-winger Keith Vaz).

Labour will “develop systems to allow Young Labour Groups and Youth officers to communicate with Young Labour members” (they can’t at present!)

Conference will debate 10 subjects chosen by CLPs, and 10 by unions, each year, rather than four plus four. The requirement that motions be “contemporary” (refer to something after early August) has been dropped. (87 CLP motions were ruled out this year for not being “contemporary” enough; it's been a lot more in previous years).

There was a vote to repeal the “one year rule” which says that rule changes from CLPs can be debated only the year after they're submitted.

A lot of the other things passed were mostly tidying-up, or vague promises for future change. On many issues the NEC has been authorised to draft and implement the rule change. The NEC was authorised to delegate its powers to suspend members and so on to anyone it wants.

The Democracy Review report is 103 pages, with a lot of useful stuff on at least some issues (8 pages on Young Labour, for example). Very little of that made it to conference.

For 90-odd years the Labour Party was a broad-church organisation. The membership never had real control over the parliamentary leadership, but it could debate, make its views known, and concertedly challenge the parliamentary leadership.

Blair stopped that by drastically shrinking the space for debate at Labour Party conference (and Gordon Brown temporarily “improved” on Blair by banning motions to conference altogether in 2007-9). Blair insisted that when Labour conference voted against its wishes (which it still did), that was of no consequence. Not by rule-change, but by fiat, policy-making was shifted from conference to the “Leader's Office”. The elected National Executive, which had to some extent been the custodian of conference decisions between conferences, was deprived of its political role.

That was shifted to an opaque, highly-bureaucratic, and rarely-meeting National Policy Forum. Setup under Blair’s predecessor Kinnock, (This year's Democracy Review proposed to restore a NEC “policy committee”, and to reform the NPF, but those proposals were stalled).

All those Blair changes tended to deprive local Labour Parties of life — their votes on policy really could go nowhere — and the Blairites encouraged the trend by saying that motions and votes and debates should be eschewed as “boring”.

Procedures were changed to deprive local Labour Parties of any control of Labour in local government.

Since 2015 — actually, since 2009-10 — some life has been regained by adjustments within the Blair-type structures. But unless we use the Corbyn moment to restore real democratic structures, that life can be snuffed out quite fast post-Corbyn.

The conference also failed to reverse some regressions new since 2015. Although Blair was famously and rightly reviled for “control freakery”, his regime expelled nowhere near as many left-wingers as have been excluded without precise charges, and without a hearing, let alone an appeal, since 2015.

Labour HQ has systematically exploited a vague rule saying that support for any political group other than an official Labour one (CND? Greenpeace?) can be grounds for instant expulsion. As Dave Levy reports, a rule-change to fix that abuse was defeated.

“It proposed qualifying the type of organisation that might lead to expulsion as one that conflicted with Labour’s aims and values and placed the process by which such exclusion would be undertaken under auspices of the disciplinary process...
The current rule allows a secret decision and no appeal...”

The Conference Arrangements Committee got away with mistitling the rule-change ”membership of other parties”, which, as Dave Levy points out, “isn’t what the rule is about; its current words make ‘support for organisations other than official Labour organisations’ an act that renders one liable for exclusion”. (And “support”, too, can be interpreted as broadly or tightly as the apparatchik wishes). The Corbyn Labour leadership is not changing the Blairite structures (as distinct from modifying them, nudging things within their limits, etc.)

We need a rank-and-file campaign to democratise Labour:

• Making conference really the supreme policy-making body
• Restoring the political role of the NEC as the custodian between conferences of conference decisions. Scrapping the NPF
• Ending administrative expulsions, introducing due process, re-establishing Labour as a “broad church”, open to all socialist currents as long as they back Labour in elections
• Enabling Young Labour to develop by allowing it to have a constitution of its own
• Democratising Labour students.

• Full Democracy Review report:
Detailed account from conference
Documentation from conference

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