This plan to rebuild the Welsh Labour Party has popped up on Wales Online. Just when I was thinking it was time to rebuild from the smallest electoral unit, namely the branch. Otherwise I just don't know how we develop and sustain a local political narrative linked to Labour values. Might suit party bureaucrats, but will it help rebuild the core vote?
Today's YouGov poll published in the Daily Telegraph shows Conservatives - 47%, Labour - 23%, Liberal Democrat - 18%. Political Betting has links to two Westminster Parliament seat projection calculators. For seats that would change hands I have used Martin Baxter's Electoral Calculus - click here for the result.
Further evidence that the Labour Party's revival is not going to be led from the centre?
Leading Labour First activist, Luke Akehurst has a list of suggestions for our Leader following publication of the latest YouGov poll putting the Labour Party more points than I care to mention behind the Tories.
It is good to be able to say I agree with the main thrust of these remarks. But what stands out is this:
Re-build the Party starting at the grassroots. We can't hope to sell a 4th Labour term to the public if we don't have members and activists out their selling it.
He should join Save the Labour Party. We need the broadest possible consensus about what incentives to offer members to 'sell' a 4th Labour term. Members having a say, for starters?
Reports from the Scottish Labour Party conference suggest a growing recognition on the part of the new Labour Leadership that we need to work together better. I wondered if I was missing something. So I have been back on the Labour Party Membersnet to check Partnership in Power. I found this newsletter, and a questionnaire.
I wonder how many branch secretaries could put their hands up and honestly say they were aware of this new publication? Ditto CLP secretaries? Ditto NPF members? Ditto NEC members? Ditto Cabinet members?
Then there is the questionnaire....With elections on in many parts of the country....dialogue is unlikely to resume until after 1 May. The challenge will be to get the logistics in place to give members a real say, not a token - Albanian style - ballot on a Manifesto when it is too late to change anything.
Last week's Labour Party National Executive Committee considered the next stage of policy-making. Since the launch of Partnership in Power in 1997, the internal processes have developed what astrophysicists refer to as "black hole" characteristics. A spirited attempt is being made by Election Manifesto supremo Ed Miliband MP to defy gravity and show that policy ideas don't get sucked into the vortex that is the Labour Party controlled by No. 10 Downing Street never to be seen or heard of again. Over the next six weeks, when not campaigning for Ken, I and others will be testing the strengths and weaknesses of the forces that have shredded members' confidence in Labour Party policy making, reduced membership by more than 50%, halved Labour representation in local government and left the Party languishing in the opinion polls (not to mention its finances).
How many Labour-controlled local authorities have adopted a living wage policy? Certainly none in London, except the Greater London Authority itself. I was discussing this with a local government policy advisor at a Party fund-raiser last night. He gave me a technical explanation about the difficulties of enforcing a living wage in contracted-out services. Yea, yea, I thought. But what about the politics? We agreed that as the Labour Party we need to be pushing this as a campaigning issue of direct relevance to the majority of people we seek to represent. A twin-track campaign with the Fair Pay Network highlighting greed and inequality would do wonders for Labour Party morale. It might even improve Labour's electoral standing and help reverse our dismal showing in the opinion polls underlined again by the latest ICM/Guardian poll in today's Guardian.
Having proved beyond doubt the economic viability of a national minimum wage, now is the time to assert the right of all to a living wage, and challenge the obsenity of financial sector bosses pay as we, the taxpayers, have to bail out the......financial sector for their incompetence and failures.
No doubt, this will be another political opportunity missed at this week's Labour Party National Executive Committee meeting. (It doesn't do policy!) Time to get a grip.
Peter Kenyon is a CLGA candidate for the National Executive Committee constituency section. The ballot takes place in June 2008.
On the eve of the launch of the London Mayoral campaign this might not be seen by the powers that be as the most appropriate time for a spot of navel gazing. Having blogged vigorously for a general secretary majoring in financial planning skills and an eye on rebuilding membership, there is no better moment than now to highlight the harsh realities. After all if it took ten years from 1987 to 1997 to put on between 125,000 and 150,000 members; how long is it going to take just to put on the 200,000 plus we have lost since regaining power?
Furthermore, in defence of forward planning, I cite the following all reported in the last 2 days:
A ten-year rebuilding programme is needed starting at branch level - with a quality assured service to encourage membership, fundraising and active local engagement. The issue that has flared in Easington - whole CLP suspended for failing to deliver centrally imposed quotas for women candidates for forthcoming council elections - is probably symptomatic of a lack of support from the centre and the North regional office to encourage women to join the party. Candidates are being selected all over the country from diminishing ranks of members. Is this really the time to be berating each other for failure to achieve local gender quotas for elected office, when we know we will probably have less women MPs in Westminster after the next General Election than in 1997? Coventry North East is a case of sitting councillor reportedly being deselected by the LGC for defying the whip, against the wishes of the local branch party. I am researching the story, but I have seen these LGC strong arm tactics elsewhere resulting in active branch members sitting on their hands, tearing up their party cards or joining an opposition party. (When Hilary Armstrong MP as chief whip circulated the rebellious voting record of Diane Abbott MP for Hackney North during her last 're-selection', we complained that Diane had not voted against the government often enough.)
This is no way to run a mainstream political party aspiring to mass membership. Inclusivity, encouragement, tolerance, open debate and decision-making are essential if real discipline is to be achieved, while at the same time recruiting and retaining more members.
This leads on the timeliness, detail and relevance of management information available to the Party's National Executive Committee. In particular, membership and financial information is essential if NEC members are to play an appropriate role guiding their Party officers, and staff. I was told at Spring Conference that membership has stabilised. I don't believe it. I fear it is back on a downward track as it has been for the last 11 years. That's me speaking as a CLP membership secretary. In my own branch I have received notice of two resignations, the first for a year - both over policy differences with the new leadership failing to return to Labour values.
No apologies for banging on about governance, or navel gazing. If the Leadership was better in tune with the members we wouldn't be facing that dismal dip in the polls, which however inaccurate does little to help lift morale. A membership/supporter focussed communique following the next NEC meeting might help.
At 10 am next Saturday morning, I hope to be in Birmingham to hear Gordon Brown set out further his vision for Labour in government at the Party's Spring Conference. My hope, although I'm not holding my breath, is that he will take the opportunity to praise active members - the people on whose support many elected representatives depend.
Wouldn't it be marvellous if he talked up the importance of members in the modern Labour Party having a say? It will involve ensuring transparent policy making (just like the total transparency now sought for MPs allowances and expenses). The final round of key policy proposals for any election to be fought by Labour candidates needs to go to an all-member ballot with clear political choices. That approach would offer the prospect of genuine unity ahead of the next British General Election, and pave the way for winning back voters now.
Political cynics would be stunned. Opposition parties would flounder. Labour Party morale would enjoy a big boost.
As a forward-thinking Leader, he will have done his sums. To give members a say means enabling an OMOV ballot for National Policy Forum representatives at the next available opportunity in 2009. As Leader of the Party he is uniquely placed to enable that to happen. It requires a Rule change to be agreed at the 2008 Annual Conference. Only the NEC has the power to table Rule changes at such short notice.
Brown may not be aware. But there is a growing consensus about this reform among members. last Saturday it was debated at the AGM of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD). A resolution proposing that all national constituency representatives to the Party's National Policy Forum should be elected by a One-Member-One-Vote ballot was passed unanimously.
STLP has been actively campaigning about this for nearly five years. It is one of the recommendations of the LabOUR Commission, chaired by Angela Eagle MP, now a Treasury minister, that published its interim report last May.
We had hoped that early discussions with the NEC would have led to a consultation in time for Rule changes to be proposed to the 2008 Annual Conference in Manchester next September. Then the next round of NPF elections in 2009 could have conducted in accordance with members' wishes, which I and others hope would mean ALL members. That path was blocked by Mike Griffiths, now a candidate for the post of General Secretary, who to the best of my knowledge as Clerk to the Commission never even replied to Angela's letter setting out the scope for further evidenced based work to enable members to have a say. If Brown and the NEC, of which he is a very important member, continue to sit on their hands members, will have to wait until 2011 at the earliest to have say.
Having inherited a £20 million debt mountain from his predecessors, Brown needs to lead a renaissance of Labour as a mass-membership party representing the many not the few to consolidate his position as Leader and PM. Rebuilding the party will take a generation or more to achieve. But with key electoral tests in London, and English and Welsh local government on 1 May, what better opportunity to start the process than Spring in the centre of England?
In a momentary lull in the festivites, I have just read Gordon Brown's New Year message on the Labour Party website here. Hoping for encouragement, I did a word search for 'member' - result - 0. So I logged on and posted the following comment:
Dear Gordon Brown
The diminishing band of us who are members of the Labour Party work voluntarily to get Labour candidates elected.
Without wishing to sound churlish, shouldn't you have acknowledged that contribution in your New Year message published on the Labour Party website?
Wouldn't it be a good idea to make sure that you have someone on your staff or at Labour Party HQ focussed on rebuilding the Party?
You promised in your paper: "Extending and renewing party democracy" to rebuild the Labour Party.
A group of reasonably respected Labour Party members, who formed the LabOUR Commission spent two years putting together constructive ideas to rebuild Labour as a mass membership force in British politics.
Why not make it a New Year resolution to learn more about those proposals, and task the new General Secretary with implementation?
Peter Kenyon
Save the Labour Party
Last night I went to the launch of a new publication: Participation Nation - Reconnecting Citizens to the Public Realm, a joint venture between Involve, and IIPS. A keynote speaker was Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. One line in her script, which I have heard so many times before, I despair:
"If you join the Labour Party, you sign your life away."
What sort of encouragement is that to rebuild a mass-membership party?
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