Grassroots Alliance candidate Peter Kenyon, with whom I have parted political company in the past couple of years, is going down some strange roads in his bid to get on the NEC.
Uncharacteristically, he now seems to be differing from the agreed policy of Save The Labour Party, of which he is Chair.
His personal website both misrepresents and does not support the Calder Valley resolution which, bizarrely, Save The Labour Party is officiallly SUPPORTING. Take a look at the STLP newsletter on the website and you will note it is quite clear that support is reommended for it. All I can say is that STLP used to campaign to further democracy. Its chair clearly now prefers pointless pleas to the leadership to change tack. Please explain this anomaly....
Friday, 11 April 2008
ARE YOU SAVING THE LABOUR PARTY OR NOT?
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20 comments:
Susan, (I assume) like Peter Kenyon, I back your resolution in principle; I think this would be good for all wings of the party. However, I don't want to see a leadership challenge enabled before the next election.
Well, that's not going to happen . The resolution isn't about making that happen. It would be NEXT time there is a contest
Tom,
I usually find your politics closer to mine than Susan's "LRC is the only future" position, but she is totally right about this. Its not about a leadership challenge. Its about the rules. Walter and Christine tried to lower the threshold last year at the NEC but were told the rules were the rules. Actually that was a fair point made to them. Its right that we review it, it should have been done long before the last leadership election, but then you would have said "This is just about ousting Blair".
Susan,
can you clarify something? As I understand it, the threshold where there is not a vacancy is twenty per cent. Does your rule change alter that? All I've read is that when there is a vacancy its lowered from 12.5 to 7, and thats all.
Yes I think Tom and a few others have misunderstood this as being something that would make a challenge where there is no vacancy easier. I don't know if there have been any proposed rule changes of that sort (actually I would favour a reduction from 20% which more-or-less makes a challenge to a sitting leader impossible) but, as I understand it, this proposal is about when there's a vacancy. As such, I really don't understand ANYBODY'S objection to it!
Back in the M. Foot era you would only have needed 11 MPs to make up 7% of the PLP. Those were the days eh?
The resolution is about when there's a vacancy. It's moderate, ot would mean a contest would have happened last time. But let's be clear. The Party should have welcomed a challenge from Miliband, McDonnell, whoever. To oppose it is nonsense because it's about the "broad church" having a say.And the unions and affilates. Anyone who supports Party democracy should support it
Democracy and the Labour Party is an oxymoron, the fact that there was no leadership contest and particularly that John McDonnell was not allowed to stand against Brown was a disgrace. The LP is now in free fall
and it looks likely we will get another Tory party, that is after this neo-tory one goes.
"As such, I really don't understand ANYBODY'S objection to it!"
I object to it because the leadership election should be a contest between several people who actually stand a chance of becoming leader of the party.
Someone who can't get 12.5% of the PLP is highly unlikely to be able to mount a serious challenge for the job.
I think the sensible democratic option when only one candidate reaches that threshold would be to have a ballot between a candidate and re-open nominations.
There also needs to be other mechanisms for the mass membership of the Party and trade unions to express their view on the overall policy agenda but a leadership contest isn't the right vehicle for that if there isn't a sufficient % of the PLP who are interested.
Well with 12.5% you will never get a leadership election with 'several people'. Full stop.
I agree that there must be other ways for members to express a view on policy, but that's a seperate point.
The PLP MASSIVELY dominate the internal elections of our party. In the Liberal Democrats, party members play a role in their nomination process (though I wouldn't necessarily suggest their process as a model). Even the Tory process worked out as more democratic than ours last time, while our MPs preferred to force a Michael-Howard-style coronation onto us. I think this is a VERY modest proposal. It is taking a process that is massively dominated by the PLP and trying to at least allow for a little pluralism within that process. Nothing more.
If we were talking about 7% to initiate a challenge I would understand the objection. Otherwise it's simply a case of saying, 'the most powerful people in the electorate support candidate X so why have an election?' Surely we can think of some good reasons why we should have an election, even one where there's a clear favourite?
"Well with 12.5% you will never get a leadership election with 'several people'. Full stop."
Well, you could get up to eight people.
It's certainly more than possible to get two.
I agree that there's very little chance of a hard left candidate getting on the ballot at the 12.5% level anytime in the foreseeable future.
But a centre-left or Blairite Right candidate could have got enough votes to challenge Brown last year. It was the system that prevented it, it was that both groups lacked the inclination to force a contest and lose it.
The system made it unlikely (generally speaking the 'centre-left' and Blairite Right don't like to go out on a limb, and would have been more likely to join an existing contest than to initiate one). But I assume you would agree that the 'centre-left' is not stronger (numerically) than the 'hard left' (I don't really approve of these terms, but they'll do); you're basically concluding that the 'centre-left' could get 'hard-left' support but not vice versa (probably true, but hardly in the spirit of co-operation!) - why should the process force that to happen BEFORE the vote? The whole point of the preferential system is that I should be able to vote John McDonnell (or whoever a future left candidate might be) as my first preference, and somebody else as my second preference' and the system itself will decide which one picks up second preferences and advances. The PLP has such dominance in the system, and I can't understand why anybody should be especially attached to it maintaining this veto, at this level. I'm sorry to bang on about it, but in '76 Crosland got 17 votes (about 5% of the PLP) - should the system have prevented him from standing. I would suggest not; those 17 people were able to express their preference for his policies in the first round and switch to Callaghan in the second. The AV system allows essentially the same thing to happen on the grander scale of the electoral college. What's the problem with it? If somebody doesn't have sufficient support or isn't sufficiently 'credible' then they lose. It's the job of the election to determine that, not some cabal of parliamentarians.
I would just like to point out that Peter Kenyon has still not answered my question - either here or on Labour Home. Why?
He says on his own blog that he's not especially interested, instead focusing on annual nominations (which is reasonably interesting but is really dealing with a different point).
I fear the 'centre-left' view is probably that, were they ever to have a candidate, they could get 12.5% of the PLP to nominate them because the 'hard left' would swing behind once they'd failed to get their own candidate nominated. It's a complacent view, it misses the point, but I guess it represents a reality that, in a future leadership election, they'd rather not be fighting on two fronts.
The hard fact is that it says quite clearly on STLP website that support should be given to the Calder Valley resolution. You're right. The centre-left will not align with the left which is why Labour is pretty much at its lowest ebb for years. At least the Blairites are honest about their intentions.I'm sick and tired of the hand-wringing you get from the soft left.
David
"It was the system that prevented it [sic], it was that both groups lacked the inclination to force a contest and lose it."
Isn't that an argument for lowering the threshold? Because what you really meant to say was that the overwhelming careerism of Labour MPs prevented the contest. They preferred to support Brown, because they believed he was inevitable. It denied the membership a choice.
The fact that PLP starts the nominating process provides an inbuilt bias against a contest because of the motivations of members of parliament which are not necessarily in the best interests of the party but about advancing their careers.
"Isn't that an argument for lowering the threshold? Because what you really meant to say was that the overwhelming careerism of Labour MPs prevented the contest. They preferred to support Brown, because they believed he was inevitable. It denied the membership a choice."
I don't think the motivations of MPs really matter much either way.
They obviously did deny a membership a choice but the membership still wouldn't have had a meaningful choice if John McDonnell had been on the ballot if less than 12.5% were going to vote for him in the final vote.
In terms of numerical strength of the centre-left, I doubt there's a fixed group of more than five, let alone more the forty-five centre-left MPs who work together in an open organised way.
But I do think there are enough MPs who have voted against the Blair or Brown governments from the left at some point since 2001 but are not members of the Campaign Group to force a leadership election without any Campaign Group votes.
I can't really imagine a situation where that would happen but until there's that number willing to put their heads above the parapet a centre-left challenge would be as pointless as a hard-left one.
Oh well, we might as well not bother with elections at all; we could just ask around the PLP and give the job to whoever's flavour of the month.
The fact they won't put their heads above the parapet says it all. The soft left PLP wrings its hands at the moment and does nothing. Bloody pathetic.
I'm not really clear why putting loads of time and effort into a full leadership campaign that has absolutely no chance of success is of any more practical benefit to anyone that an ongoing, broad-based campaign about policy.
"Oh well, we might as well not bother with elections at all; we could just ask around the PLP and give the job to whoever's flavour of the month."
Well, in the unlikely even that someone was elected as leader with a massive majority of members and union votes and not many MPs votes, that would be pretty ridiculous situation in terms of their ability to lead the Party in parliament.
I'm no nearer to being convinced that someone who couldn't get the nominations of an eighth of the PLP could realistically hope to lead in successfully.
Well David, a leadership contest would have given us a real debate about policy that would have really hit home and included the whole party (multiply the deputy contest by a thousand or so, and you'd be close to the positive impact).
Well more MPs might come on side as a result of a contest. If you told all candidates for local or national elections that they had to be nominated by 12.5% of the electorate before they could stand because there wasn't much point them standing if they couldn't get them, nobody would ever bother standing against the sitting candidate in a safe seat. Would that be a victory for democracy?
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