I urge all members to take part in the full survey, there is a short 5 or 6 question version which ever you choose give details and ideas. It is for us to make these changes and really give power back to the grass roots. We can do this. So take 30 mins and login to membersnet today.

Thanks for the comments. Just to be clear, Nick and I aren’t suggesting that these changes without a policy agenda would be sufficient to get Labour back into power. Of course not. These ideas are a step further back than that and are meant to give the party the best chance of getting the right people and policies to once again be given the opportunity to govern Britain.

And a few specific replies:

Paul B – thanks for the clarification

Paul H – As per my point above, if you think Labour has lost touch, don’t you think it’s important that reforms are made that make the party more responsive to local communities up and down the country?

Robin – there’s nothing inconsistent about wanting as big a membership group as possible and then giving them a greater role. Why shouldn’t we widen membership to our supporters? How can the Labour party meet the concerns of the public (and many people on this thread) if its membership is just a small fraction of the electorate?

Mike – If we adopt primaries we should do it with very clear spending caps to prevent the kind of corruption that takes place in the US.

Iain – Fine. But how do you do that? I think primaries are a route to doing everything you write about. If you have other, more radical ideas I’d love to hear them.

Reduce the size of government or introduce direct democracy. Liberal democracy was designed for governments that didn't involve themselves in every aspect of a person's life and now everyone feels powerless because the government now takes away people's liberty whenever negative statistic is released.

No government should have as much power as modern governments have now created for themselves. It's time to give it back to the people.

'as with the like and dislike buttons on Facebook'

There's no 'dislike' button on Facebook. Surely the authors ought to be aware of this? A bit jaw-dropping really, especially if you want to be taken seriously when commenting on communications.

Dear all,

Further to Will’s comment, I wanted to add some additional thoughts in response to them. However, before I do that I want to preface them by noting that we offer a far more complete argument on this in our 2009 pamphlet The Change We Need published by the Fabian Society, especially the concluding chapter. In this, we ground our institutional recommendations in a broader analysis of the evolving social and institutional environment.

So in response to comments -

Paul Hilyard: I completely agree that parties are not representing people’s concerns, and hence they are reaching out to single issue and pressure groups (and there is a lot of empirical evidence to suggest this is true). But I would argue that is not down to a moral failing on the part of traditional parties, but rather down to the more complex and multifaceted identities the average citizen has today. As a result, single issue politics is a more attractive vehicle for participation. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a single monolithic “old-style” party will ever be able to speak to a broad cross-section of society as they once did. The challenge for parties then is to become broader umbrella groups, able to integrate a range of sub-groups and networks (and the contradictions this creates) into their model.

Sean and Tacklinful: Needless to say, I disagree with this point. Here would be my argument in response to you: your position is essentially top down. You would like a party that “decided” to do the right thing in a variety of policy areas. Maybe I am too cynical, but I have less faith in a limited number of political authority figures to make the “right” decision. And even if you trust today’s leader, how do you know what the next one, or the one after that will be like?

Instead, we need institutions that devolve power down to a broad group of supporters in wider society, and through that process we can develop policies (and this last point is especially important). For that reason, I think this is an important discussion that does impact policy, and is certainly not distinct from it.

Robin Ramsey: This is a very important point, and I am glad you made it. It can seem like a contradiction, but I would strongly contest it is not. We flesh out the full argument why in the pamphlet, but let me just give a brief synopsis of it here. We are arguing both in favour of broadening and deepening relationships with the community, because we believe they are intrinsically related in the history of the Labour Party. In terms of broadening, it is clear that successful parties are grounded in the social relationships that exist in wider society (in the past, we have termed parties as secondary institutions, built around other primary associations i.e. family, community, social network, trade union, church etc). At the moment, all major British parties fail this test. An important part of the reason for this is that they offer very narrow modes of participation i.e. be a member, come to branch meetings at a specific time etc. That simply does not fit with the way most people conduct their (in the broadest sense of the term, so including politics) social life.

Our second point - about deepening relationships, and crucially devolving power from the leadership - is related to this point, and a piece of historical analysis. The centralisation of power that took place under New Labour was a response to the difficult politics of the 1980s. The problems of that period were caused by the “ungrounding of the Labour Party” - in other words, it lost its connection with the community that had created it, which in turn meant it became prey to entryism and a form of ideological (as opposed to identity and social) politics which did not exist in the 1950s, for example. The rational response from the party leadership was to take power back to the centre, and we saw that during the 1990s.

However, by making participation easier and broadening the support base, it becomes possible to devolve power again, without experiencing the problems of the 1980s.Therefore broadening and deepening are inherently related, not antithetical.

Mike Cobley: An excellent point, and one that certainly needs some thoughts. Before that though, I think it is important to admit there are some very good things about the US primary system: it undermines incumbency; it generates huge amounts of citizen involvement; and it creates far broader parties. And certainly, the original “progressive impulse” at the turn of the 20th century (and then again in the mid-70s, when primaries became even more popular) was a good one - namely to take power away from political elites and hand it down to regular citizens as a check on power. The simple introduction of uncertainty into the political system is a very powerful institutional device. It is also a matter of perspective how much you think the US primary system is controlled by vested interests (whether you think Obama’s campaign represented a break form the past or whether you think Kuchinich is squeezed out by the power brokers, for example).

But, with reference to a British example, it is clear the two countries have radically different histories of campaign finance regulation - the UK tends to use spending caps as the primary regulatory instrument, while the US tends to use donation caps (and indeed has to, as spending caps have been ruled unconstitutional).

Iain Burnshill: I would ask you a simple question - how would you go about cleansing the PLP of those who are in it for themselves (indeed, how would you even define it?). It strikes me that this would require an institutional change of some kind and primaries would seem like a very potent way of doing it, wouldn’t they?

Barney: You can actually add a dislike button to Facebook with various browser plugins.

*their revolution.

Swimming and typing ain't easy.

Ignore the frightened Tory and Lib Dem supporters that skulk around here and get on and do it Labour, the time for talking is over.

I agree a lot with the views expressed by UniteJon (first post). Be the peoples champion as well as all the other stuff, we need you to show our anger and the poor, disabled, chronically sick, the young and elderly are being lied to and bullied by this God forsaken arrogant Tory led government, we need to see that Ed and Labour "gets it".
I also think that we could be making a tactical mistake, the next election is a lot closer than people think, the indicators are now "red hot". The government is panicking over three issues that could each bring it down individually, combined it is a certainty. 1) The Coulson affair is far from done, much to come out there and it goes all the way to the heart of this government. 2)Poor Showing in the May elections and no matter which way the referendum goes it spells trouble for the coalition 3)The NHS. Rarely have I witnessed such widespread anger over one issue and the polls seem oblivious to the depth of feeling, just like they were in 1997.
We should be ready to go at a moment's notice.

Four idears that will save the Party
1 Socialism
2 socialism
3 Socialism
4 Socialism
Clear red water between us and the ConDems

What Labout needs to become is not the Party of the Centre, but the People's Champion. There's too much time, effort and money trying to keep everyone happy. Take an ethical stand and look after the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable first. Once they've been taken care of, then go on to the small businesses. Ignore the screams from the billionaires, the banks and the multinationals until you've sorted out the needs of the first 2 groups.

The Labour party was founded as the Peaople's Champion and needs to stop the gap between rich and poor getting bigger every year. Take on the tax dodgers. Be honest. Earn the respect of the electorate. Forget spin - we've no time for pretty words. We want you to share our anger.

" Membership bounce of 50,000."
No, that was 50,000 joining, Labour Membership rose by 30,000 over 2010 to about 180,000.
Its falling again now.

The reason why people are joining extra parliamentary groups like Uncut is because the traditional parties don't represent their views or champion their concerns.

Its got nothing to do with campaigning or money. Labour have completely lost touch.

If Labour did all those it wouldn't make anything more than a marginal difference. Until the party remembers what and who it's for, all the organisational tinkering is just guff. If we spent as much time fighting for and developing policies for ordinary folk as we do talking about voter ID and open primaries there wouldn't be a problem. One last thing, why are former ministers like Hain spending time on the minutiae of campaigning? Get on and do some bloody politics for a change!

"The party has to remove the straightjacket of its 90-year old rulebook and wake up to the modern world."
'woke up', isn't it?
Apologies for suffering from a pedant!
But it is the torries that need to wake up, since Caneron/Osborne is still stuck in their eighteenth century history lessons from a Harrow classroom and other places.

It is no use talking about a living wage unless you define it!
[Living wage where, for whom, gambler or gardener? Smoker or drinker,dog owner or not].
Next forget about the---Rich Capitalists. Assuming they pay hi rate tax, then there are only 12% of them. So 88% are not, so millions of low wage earners must vote tory.

Yea... but first the retrospective inquisition and the establishment of the truth leading to punishmnet for neglecting their duty to the British people... !

Gentleman, if these are the only "big ideas" you have, with a PHD and a Fulbright scholarship between you, then the future of the Labour party really is bleak.

Now I already knew that the old guard were hopelessly out of touch, bereft of any notion of how to take the country forward, other than to berate the "tory scum", which worked so well in the 90s.

But now it seems the coming generation of Labour bigwigs are little better.

The last thing this country needs is to adopt the style of politics we find in America.

Obama is undoubtedly a slick campaigner, but you may have noticed his presidency isn't going too well, remarkably it wouldn't be too much of an upset now if he failed to get reelected in 2012.

Instead of thinking up new tricks to get yourselves elected, maybe you should concentrate on what to do once you're actually in government.

We've had enough of perception is reality politics for one generation, how about some substance?

Make enemies of the markets

stop talking to Murdoch

re mutualise

build houses

ask forgivenes of uk uncut
and the greenparty
and 38 degrees
and cnd

and the working class

So there really is no in depth look on how to get back into power via policy and good ideas? Just appropriating the means of activists and marketers in order to get back into power. Vacuous.