Keep up fight for Labour democracy!

Submitted by Matthew on 20 May, 2015 - 9:26 Author: Jon Lansman

We don’t have a left candidate for Labour leader, and we are unlikely to get one. The reason is the legacy of the exclusion and marginalisation of the left under Blair. That’s not to say that we should ignore the election: we have got to stop Progress winning. It is very important that we do not go back to Blair.

If we don’t have a leftwing candidate, we may have to settle for someone who is the best of a not-so-good bunch.

I’m very concerned about people becoming overly and prematurely attached, too soon, to candidates who they see the best of a bad bunch. I think that it is worrying that Ian Lavery, when he announced that he would not stand for the leadership, said at the same time that he was going to back Andy Burnham.

Even if the left chooses to back Andy Burnham, there is no reason for doing so now. Other candidates might emerge. Committing yourself to a candidate who is not really a left candidate makes it harder for better candidates to emerge.

And it makes it easier for Burnham to shift to the right in order to seek to win people who might have voted for Chuka Umunna. That is why he has made the statements he has, saying he is in favour of business, and saying the last Labour government ran too big a deficit. In many ways I think those statements put him to the right of Yvette Cooper. The left should not give away what leverage we have got.

And we should not concentrate exclusively on the leadership elections. We must continue the battle for party democracy, and focus on the other internal elections, such as Conference Arrangements Committee and NPF elections, and on more proposals for democratising the party.

And we have to focus on ensuring that the leverage that we have at conference is used to its best effect. That means ensuring that the unions’ 50% of votes at conference are used to best effect.

The unions have until 12 August to sign up people as Labour affiliated members so they get a vote. I know some of the unions are getting on with that. They are using phone banks, which is one tool: but we need to do it in workplaces, by email, all the methods at our disposal.

It would have been better if the sign-up had been done a box to tick on the ballot paper. But you could argue that this is a rather more explicit consent from members than they would have given had they merely ticked a box on a ballot paper.

Judging from reports from left members of the Executive, the suspension of Christine Shawcroft seems to be for something that the election commissioner said about her in his judgement, almost in passing, and which is not true. As a result of substantial opposition on the NEC, the Party’s General Secretary agreed to undertake the investigation as quickly as possible, and that if there is no evidence that Christine did campaign for Lutfur Rahman, that that will be the end of the matter. That it looks like it may not be as bad as we at first thought.

It was obviously in the unions’ interest that there should be a longer campaign for the leadership, and the NEC wanted to ballot for all the other internal elections at the same time, for cost reasons. But now the officials have extended the nominations deadlines for CAC and NPF – but not for the London Mayor. There was no discussion of those deadline changes at the NEC, although there was an agreement that the ballots would happen at the same time.

It was helpful for the right to have a longer nominations period for CAC and NPF because they had not got their act together, whereas the left had got its requests for support out to GCs months ago. On the other hand for the mayoral nomination, the conventional wisdom is that keeping the deadline short is to the advantage of Sadiq Khan, the establishment figure, and Tessa Jowell.

I am sympathetic to the idea that the Unite union should have some kind of Scottish policy conference. I am sympathetic to the idea that members of Unite in Scotland should be able to discuss their response and their policies within Scotland.

I am concerned that this should not be allowed to result in a break between Unite at the UK level and the Labour Party. I understand that there is a lot of pressure on affiliated unions from members in Scotland who supported independence, and who voted SNP, or just didn’t vote Labour. But I don’t see the SNP as being to the left of the Labour Party in any real sense, and in the UK we should still be looking to a Labour government.

I don’t think that the Scottish Labour Party could recover with Murphy as leader. So it is good that he is going; but he wants, before he resigns, to put a package of reform proposals regarding to the structure of the party in Scotland and the method of electing a leader. That could be very dangerous. We have got to make sure that the effect of these changes is not to break the link between the Scottish Labour Party and the trade unions.

The reasons why the Scottish Labour Party was wiped out are complex, but the fact that the Scottish Labour Party, much more than the Welsh Labour Party, followed a Blairite line meant that the party was seen by working-class voters as having abandoned the working class.

The unions in Scotland are part of the answer, not part of the problem, as the Blairites think. The trade unions have one hell of a better reputation in Scotland than the Scottish Labour Party.

Labour leadeship: draft a left candidate!

Left Labour MP John McDonnell has launched a website, “to host a debate on the issues the Labour leadership candidates have to address” and thus to “transform this leadership election into a real debate”.

Much better, though, would be to have a left candidate who will challenge the other candidates, all more or less on Labour’s right, directly.

Without that, and especially if one of the not-quite-so-right-wing candidates is given credit early on as the lesser evil which the left must support, we really have no leverage. The selected not-quite-so-right-wing candidate can feel that he or she has the left and union votes in the bag, and tilt right to scoop other support.

He or she may even tilt so far as to run their campaign on a line to the right of some of the “greater-evil” candidates.

Soon after Ed Miliband resigned, some Labour activists launched a campaign to “draft” Ian Lavery, a Labour MP and former president of the National Union of Mineworkers. Lavery declined and, unfortunately, said he was backing Andy Burnham.

Now a campaign is under way, on Facebook at least to draft McDonnell.

As we understand it, McDonnell and other left MPs say this is a hopeless effort because leadership candidates need to get nominations from 35 MPs (15% of the total).

But the left should demand that the Labour hierarchy either waive that rule, or circumvent it by arranging for enough MPs to give nominations just to allow a contest. That’s not far-fetched: in 2010 the hierarchy did exactly that because it wanted to be seen to allow a contest.

We campaigned to “draft” a left candidate before, in 1992, trying to push either Tony Benn or Jeremy Corbyn to stand. We ended up with the non-choice of Smith vs Gould; but the “draft” campaign was important if only to give some profile to the left.

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