The Labour Party is in the midst of an existential crisis. A government elected little more than a year ago with a huge majority – based almost entirely on the fact that they are called Labour and not Conservative – is both digging its own grave and using the rubble to pave the way for a Reform/Tory government under a Nigel Farage premiership. Tanking in the polls, losing thousands of members every day, with an economy that refuses to grow – despite growth being the only lodestar the government has – and with vibrant alternatives springing up to its left, the prognosis looks bleak.
So you would have thought that the opportunity afforded by a deputy leadership election would be something to grasp fully. Here was a golden chance to open the doors to fresh winds of new thinking and new directions. It is not the deputy prime minister the party is voting for – it is someone to build a bridge to the party and the wider labour movement, reflecting their hopes, dreams and ideas.
But of course, that is not what we are getting. Another opportunity for a reset is being squandered. What we are getting is a Ponzi-scheme stitch-up, in which one cynical, anti-democratic move is piled on another until what you end up with is a narrow, twisted, contorted, insular group gripping the party bureaucracy and playing it for their own ends.
It works like this. In the midst of the Corbyn wave, you set up and secure funding for a seemingly benign group called Labour Together – you claim it is to unite the party around a radical but professional set of policies in tune with the ideas and thinking of the vast majority of the party. You then find a candidate who fits this bill – one who is devoid of ideas willingly, or, even worse, unknowingly goes along with the secret plan.
Having won office fraudulently by pretending to give the members what they wanted, you then lock the doors to every aspect of the party. You use and abuse the power and patronage of the leader to gain control of the party administration and the NEC. You then use that to actively expel anyone in the party who is not part of your cynical old right-Labour tendency, trawling people’s social media history on an industrial scale to find any pretext to throw them out. This has the double benefit of forcing everyone else to self-censor and cower.
In parallel, you adopt policy positions that you know will force out people with a moral code. Next, you use your control of parliamentary selections to rigidly gatekeep who stands at the election and who does not. Your faction on the NEC then awards themselves plum parliamentary seats with no votes from local parties. And then you change the party’s rules for nominations of candidates for leader and deputy leader to an eye-watering 20 per cent support from MPs, while offering non-jobs to backbenchers to place them on the loyalist-payroll vote. This really is a PLP you have vetted to an inch of its life.
Finally, to add the belt to the braces, you create a timetable for the deputy leadership election in which there is absolutely no time to debate the nature and purpose of the job – there is only time for you to back a candidate who is made to look mildly critical of the government position, but who you know is entirely in your pocket.
And it could work – at least in the sense that those who control the machine so rigidly and dogmatically will continue to exert their domination. At least for a bit longer.
But of course, what it will not do is allow real debate and real discussion. It will not encourage different MPs from different places to come forward, to test their thinking and ask some of the fundamental questions about why Labour’s position is existential and what we should do about it. It will not make party members feel positive about the party or their role in it. It will not stop them leaving, or the plummet in the polls. And the weaker they get, the more they will try to control.
This is a stitch-up when the party needs to step up. When Labour should be fighting for its life, the people in charge are the same ones willing to switch the life support off.
The narrower the party becomes, the more brittle it is. The less it hears the voices of its members, the less it will hear the anguish in the country. This is why people from right across Labour have come together to form Mainstream – a unique and historic grouping from the radical left to the centre right of the party. Its mission is to save Labour and the country from falling into the clutches of Reform. The majority of the party are being held hostage, coerced into positions, votes and silence that stand in direct contrast to the deep traditions and values of Labour. It is time to set the party free.
Neal Lawson is the Director of Compass, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, and a founder of Mainstream Labour
[See also: Who will be the next deputy leader of Labour?]
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