Labour’s current leadership simply don’t respect or value members, argues Dave Levy.

I feel powerless in the Party. The domination of representative democracy over delegate democracy is all-powerful, with a Parliamentary Labour Party that represents the leadership to its membership and not vice-versa, or at least not visibly. We’ve been here before: as Blair sought to impose his politics on the Party, he made a number of reforms but one not completed at the time came from a report by David Evans, Labour’s regional director in the north-west at the time, now the current General Secretary. The idea was reported at the time in the Independent and more recently in Labour Outlook.

The Independent article focused on the proposal to move from General Committees to all-members meetings with a focus on policy. It was based on a fantasy that the committees were occupied by unrepresentative activists. While there would seem to be a need for an activist layer to deliver leaflets and knock on doors, the leadership then and now don’t want elected decision-making bodies proposing policy, which is reserved for the smart electoral strategy planners who seem to think that winning and fighting elections comes from Michael Laver’s Playing Politics.

Labour Outlook says that Evans recommends abolishing membership fees and turning members into supporters. While saving on the annual fee, members would lose their rights of determining policy and the political direction of the party.

Another disappointment from these reforms is the seeming inability of the Labour Party, including its membership, to work collaboratively using IT. The apparatus launched a blog and blog aggregator and then closed it because it might be embarrassingly off-message. It then launched the policy portal, which was designed to act as a source for ideas for the National Policy Forum (NPF). It’s safe to say that this doesn’t really work and the level of engagement is minuscule. Is this because of the adversarial nature of the labour movement’s ‘resolutionary socialism’ which polarises positions into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. It is difficult to nurture sites for conversation as Facebook and twitter/X and even Quora show.

The Blair reforms were designed to isolate the membership from policymaking. The creation of the NPF and the contemporary motion threshold for Conference made member-led policy formulation difficult. The restriction of the number of debates and the preference given to first-time delegates also made the development of policy, unless on the inside track, remote. This leadership have reintroduced the ‘contemporary’ criteria for motions and prohibit motions that reverse the NPF report. They have also abolished the right to ‘refer back’ parts of the NPF report.

The Evans report is also alleged to have proposed to take away CLPs’ – and hence members’- rights to discuss politics and to delegate these powers to local policy forums. The leadership would seem to have lost 200,000 members (net) but I suppose they just don’t care if they don’t knock on doors or donate to Party election funds.

It almost amuses me that the 1999 report focused on moving to all-member meetings, as this became an important tool for parts of the Corbyn-led left. Now the rules permitting the change to be decided by the constituency have been revoked. In a similar irony, the concept of registered supporters, designed to dilute the influence of activists, but which also helped Jeremy Corbyn win the leadership, has, basically in an act of revenge, been reversed. The current leadership simply don’t respect or value the membership.

I originally started this as a piece of digital filing and I would truly like to find the original Evans proposals to show how little the Labour right’s thinking has changed.  But later in the day, Labour List advertised that Labour are going to merge the Director of Policy and Director of Communications (again) into a £105,000 post. I commented that this is just more of the subordination of policy – which should be about making the country and even the world better – to other goals. It’s job description proves this to be so.

Personally, it’s not that I want to be a candidate for public office, but I do want a say on what the policy is and I want our public officials to feel accountable to it.

Dave Levy is a member of Lewisham North and standing for election to the NPF in London, supported by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Momentum.

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