Some thoughts on Labour* (And why I'd like Corbyn to remain for at least three more days.)

[andrewducker]

Labour MPs have to be approved by a quite centralised process, which essentially led to lots of career politicians being MPs at the expense of ordinary people. This has led to a narrowing of the kind of people who make up the parliamentary Labour Party, with an awful lot of them being on the New Labour/Blairite wing of the party, even when they technically represent areas made up largely of people further left than that.

This reached a head when at the last Labour leadership election when a membership who felt largely alienated from the people who represent them voted in an old-school Labour MP, horrifying the majority of the MPs who would now be responsible to them.

A lot of the people who voted for Corbyn would then quite like to see the selection process changed, and the righter-wing Labour MPs replaced with ones who they feel represented by.

There is then a clear conflict between representing the left-wing members of Labour, and keeping enough voters onside to actually get elected. This is made far, far worse by our election system, which basically means that the only people that count are in swing seats, and thus you need to reach out to these middle-of the road voters. The route to doing that is to hold that middle ground, and assume that the people further from the centre will continue to vote for you.

The actual best solution is actually to move to some kind of list-voting system (AV or STV) or proportional system (AMS), which would allow Labour to split into two separate parties, and people to vote for the one they actually wanted without letting in the Conservatives (the same is also true of the Conservatives and UKIP, of course).

Anyone, the current Labour meltdown is caused by the membership supporting one person, the MPs supporting anyone _but_ that person, and is made most urgent by the fact that the Chilcot report into the Iraq War coming out on Wednesday, which will almost certainly tell people that Tony Blair lied to take Britain into war. Corbyn has already said that he is entirely in favour of Tony Blair being held responsible for any war crimes he might have committed. One can only imagine how this is going to go down with the MPs on the Blairite wing of the party.

Particularly as there's now a move to impeach Tony Blair. I am looking forward to this quite a lot.

*I want to make sure I understand this, so if I'm getting the facts wrong please let me know.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I think you mean "preferential" not "list" for AV or STV.

[matgb]

Labour MPs have to be approved by a quite centralised process, which essentially led to lots of career politicians being MPs at the expense of ordinary people.

Sort of.

Labour constituency parties vote to select a candidate, but that candidate then needs to be endorsed by the ruling NEC in London, there's no pre-approval process. There have been cases when left-wing candidates have been rejected by the NEC (my local Labour party got their 2010 candidate rejected, they ended up getting a different local Cllr as their candidate, Cherie Blair's stepmother, who was terrible).

In contrast, the other party I know the system well for has a system of pre-approval, if you want to get selected by the LibDems you first have to get yourself on the approved candidates list which is organised regionally—miss_s_b is on the Yorkshire candidates approval committee for example. The process is designed to ensure a) all potential candidates agree with the basic principles of the party and b) that as few useless and/or dangerous candidates get through as possible, it's definitely not an idealogical purity test, one of her favourite questions is what policies do you disagree with, and you lose points for saying none (because, seriously, who agrees with everything the party votes for as policy, I sure as hell don't). When local parties decide to run selection, they have to send publicity to all approved candidates within a reasonable radius, and seats that have a reasonable chance of being won have even more strict rules about advertising widely.

I find the Labour system mindboggling, to run through the expense of a candidate selection campaign only to have the selectee rejected and the system rerun is just weird.

Having said that, it's designed to stop entryists, from the Militant days, not that it actually worked very well.

PArt of the impetus for the current coup attempt is becuase NEC elections are coming up and the PLP fears Corbyn's faction is going to dominate that completely. IIRC sitting MPs don't need central re-approval, but local parties can be dominated by some fairly committed Momentum types now.

And as Adam said, AV/STV are both preferential, not list based, AMS is list based and both it and STV can be proportional depending on size of constituency.

[emceeaich]

The notion that anyone might be held responsible for the Iraq War is stunning, considering the idea that we might interrupt George Bush's painting hobby to ask a few questions about his role in the deception is unpalatable for either party to consider.

[miss_s_b]

Just to add to this: defectors etc have to go through the approval process too - Ed McM-S had to, for example.

In my HO the approval process needs to be dramatically tightened up; we "fail" about 15% of applicants, and 90-odd% of those are "apply again once you've had more training" fails, not permafails; also a bare pass counts the same as a flying colours pass.

I would love for it to be more granular, so that when a local party runs a selection they KNOW whether they are running a bare pass candidate against a flying colours candidate, and can factor that into their decision-making.

But OfC reformulating the candidate approval procedure is a long and complicated task, best suited to a time when we're not in horrific turmoil, which as far as I can see will be never.