by Tom Watson
One of the most difficult meetings I have taken part in was when I defied Gordon Brown at a sub-committee of the NEC. He had been convinced of the need to impose a candidate in Nottingham East by outgoing general secretary of the Labour party, Ray Collins. The general election had been called and there was little time to organise a last minute selection of members.
Collins was worried about the amount of time that would be diverted from campaigning in key seats. On balance, he was probably right, but I felt very strongly that members should ultimately decide who their Parliamentary candidate should be, even if it was at a quickly convened meeting. The vote was won by one, after Dianne Hayter, in a last minute shift and out of deference to Gordon, conceded on her avowed opposition to impositions. I voted against him. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.
Up until the Nottingham decision the last candidate to be imposed by the leadership of the party was a general secretary of a powerful trade union, Alan Johnson. I thought of that moment today when I read Alan’s comments in the Times newspaper. Alan wants to introduce full one-member-one-vote rules for electing our leader like the ones we have for selecting our MPs.
“It can be one member four votes and that’s wrong”, says Alan. He may be right about that. The current system of an electoral college allows multiple votes in different sections all having an unequal value, with a trade union levy payer vote having the least value and an MPs vote having the most value. One MPs vote was worth hundreds of trade unionist votes in the leadership election. Many people think that unfair.
But that’s not really what people like Alan are saying. When they say “one member one vote” they really mean “one Labour party member one vote”. They want to abolish the system that elected Tony Blair back in 1994 when Alan was a trade union general secretary. And they want to abolish the trade union section all together. This would remove hundreds of thousands of people from participating in the election of a Labour leader. Many would think that a regressive and illogical position to take, but there you go.
I can see a case for making people choose which vote they wish to use, if only for simplicity of explanation. Ed Balls will not be happy to hear that I practised what I preached in the leadership election by using only a single one of my many votes. Obviously I used my MPs vote – the one that was worth hundreds of times that of the votes of ordinary party members and trade union levy payers.
There is a simple truth for all of us that worry about increasing participation in Labour democracy. If we want the simplest, fairest and widest possible ballot to elect a leader we should abolish the electoral college all together and let the votes in all sections of the party have equal weight. Had we done this in May and everyone voted the same way, Ed Miliband would have got the job and won the contest by a country mile. He’d have won by 28, 299 votes.
Lets be honest about politics though.I have personally talked to at least a dozen MPs who said they voted for Ed’s older brother because they thought he was going to win. They thought he was going to win because David picked up a large number of early nominations from very organised group of MPs – whose dominant votes in the electoral college put him in a very strong position from the start.
I can’t help thinking that had we had fair votes of equal proportions, the race would have been more open and Ed Balls and Andy Burnham would have had more chance to develop their arguments. But with Alan and me wielding such a disproportionate vote there was only room for two horses in the race from day one.
So, I’m glad that Alan and colleagues like Margaret Hodge have put party reform on the agenda again. My God we need it.
I think about campaigning a lot; always have done. The party has to rebuild our grass roots campaigning base. And we need to enter the digital age. I’d have online branches with delegates at conference for example.
I’d also re-write the rules of the policy forum so we don’t have the sham that allows members a say when the leadership wants it but cuts them off at the knees when they don’t. To not let the Labour party take a position on the Iraq war is shameful for a political organisation that calls itself democratic, for example. Alan and Margaret and me all participated in that conspiracy by the way, as did the General Secretaries who wield the block votes. I won’t be doing it again though. Never again.
And if we get real reform that builds strong transmission belts between communities and political elites, it might be that the traditional mechanism for reflecting those views through the trade unions could be reformed. But there’s a long way to go before that day.
I managed two joyous whoops on election night. The first was for Gisela Stewart in Edgbaston. She smashed Ashcroft to smithereens that night but she won the election at every street corner on every weekend over the previous four years. Gisela is the finest example of a community campaigning MP I have ever met. She, and her team, deserve our admiration.
The other whoop was for Margaret Hodge who had fought off a brutal and bigoted assault from the far right. She symbolically crushed Griffin and all that he stands for that night. She too, has my respect. But let’s also be honest. The reason she was in a mess in the first place was because she had spent too much time, to quote the Times, at “the Islington dinner table” talking about party reform and not enough time building her base. I don’t know how her campaign was won but I suspect it was because she had the support of the best electioneers like Margaret McDonagh and funding from the institutions she now wants to cut the “umbilical cord” to, the unions.
Her victory had a price. Important resources were diverted from other seats we might have won.
I want reform and I want to win the election. And I’m on the backbenches. I’m going to tell it like it is: if our leading lights want to make “new labour” about “party reform” and “party reform” about “breaking the link” then we’re engaging the wrong enemy, at the wrong time with the wrong message and we will lose.
If party reform means entering the digital age, rebuilding our base and opening up the party to genuine participation in policy making then we might just win. My advice to Ed is to ignore the old people and build his new generation.
Tags: Alan Johnson, one member one vote, Ray Collins, reform, the Labour party, Tom Watson, Tony Blair
Dear Tom
Well said. Astonishing how short some people’s memories are.
Excellent article Tom, I couldn’t agree more. The thought of the Labour party truly becoming a soulless party akin to the US Democrats, fills me with dread. The party would be, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Byers, just like a taxi for hire. Not something that would entice me to vote for it. Quite the opposite in fact.
Ed Miliband’ would have won by a country mile’?The MPs voted against him,so did the membership,so that is a legitimate coronation?Until we realise that giving ‘votes’ to the leaders of public sector unions , whose methods derive from southern Italy,no UK voter will regard the Labour leader as legitimate.Remind me,who actually voted for the leader that led us to losing 100 seats or so?The fact is the outside world will see Ed Miliband as no more legitimate than Gordon Brown.
@william
For such a high earning, intellectual (Cantab first in economics, apparently) you don’t half spend a lot of time writing uninformed nonsense on the internet.
“Ed Miliband’ would have won by a country mile’?”
Yes, he did. 175,000 votes to 145,000. If DM had got the support of 3 more MP/MEPs he would have won, would that have been legitimate?
“Until we realise that giving ‘votes’ to the leaders of public sector unions , whose methods derive from southern Italy,no UK voter will regard the Labour leader as legitimate.”
What utter bollocks, union leaders don’t have ‘votes’ they have *one* vote. Each member of each affiliated union who pays the political levy has one vote, which they cast in a secret ballot. Your peddling lies and mis-information.
“Remind me,who actually voted for the leader that led us to losing 100 seats or so?”
Sorry, you’ve lost me. Do you have to have come top of your class at a top UK business school to understand that drivel?
“The fact is the outside world will see Ed Miliband as no more legitimate than Gordon Brown.”
LOL, bullshit, the outside world don’t know or care very much how he was elected. The only people who want to make an issue of it are right wing muck spreaders.
Calm down,Chris.The fact is that neither the membership nor MPs gave EM a majority.Giving votes to unions is utterly bizarre to a large proportion of the electorate.You do not have to go business school to realise that Gordon Brown was not elected leader of the Labour party,and under his hegemony the party lost 98 seats.The outside world, as you call it,are the savvy British voter, who rejected the tories for 13 years.Think about it.
@william
Your talking nonsense, its moronic to claim Ed win isn’t legitimate, he won under the rules and received 30,000 more votes than DM. Would it have been legitimate for DM to have won when he got 30,000 less votes than Ed.
“The fact is that neither the membership nor MPs gave EM a majority”
So? He got 45%ish in each of those sections of the electoral college and won the affiliated section by 60%. Those were the rules of the game, don’t start blaming the ref because your man didn’t win.
“Giving votes to unions is utterly bizarre to a large proportion of the electorate.”
Please, have you ever spoken to a voter?
“You do not have to go business school to realise that Gordon Brown was not elected leader of the Labour party”
That was the decision of the PLP at the time. The no contest wasn’t an issue for the anybody except right wing propaganda pedallers.
“and under his hegemony the party lost 98 seats.”
Had nothing to do with how he became leader.
“The outside world, as you call it,are the savvy British voter, who rejected the tories for 13 years.Think about it.”
I have thought about it, your thinking seems to be Labour lost because they weren’t right wing enough which is bollocks imo.
@william
“Until we realise that giving ‘votes’ to the leaders of public sector unions , whose methods derive from southern Italy,no UK voter will regard the Labour leader as legitimate”
Remind me, William – who created the Labour Party? Where did we come from?
“that Gordon Brown was not elected leader of the Labour party”
And by your logic, Blair was, was he? I seem to rememeber that Blair won the support of your fearsome union leaders in 1994, and I also seem to recall Brown getting the support of 313 Mps…
It’s not often I agree with Tom Watson, but on this he is calling it right. I will paste a comment I just put on Dave Osler’s blog which sums it up for me.
The problem the party has is that, not for the first time, the PLP is so out of line with the rest of the party. The post Attlee years under Gaitskill were probably most notable for this misrepresentation by the PLP.
Now we see the David Miliband supporters, the majority in the PLP, flexing their muscles to make the parliamentary party ungovernable by Ed Miliband and those moving back towards the centre. This is in spite of his making so many concessions to the Blairites, starting with not appointing Balls as shadow chancellor.
Although there was probably a majority vote for the right in the CLPs the proportion was far closer to half than the three-quarters plus we see in the PLP. This did not come about by democratic means. During the Blair and Brown years the PLP was stacked by the leadership using the NEC to control candidate selection lists and even to parachute in their own people. This accounts for the present makeup of the PLP.
The answer is for the party as a whole to stand firm and not accept blackmail for this party within a party. People like Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Harriet Harman must say ‘enough is enough, no more concessions’. Those not happy like Darling, Johnson and David Miliband should follow the example of their spiritual ancestors David Owens and Shirley Williams and leave to form a new party. Even if that left us with only a quarter of the PLP MPs it would put us in a far stronger position for the next election not having these millstones around our necks.
@LesAbbey
LOL, yeh and Ed should exhume Michael Foot to be his shadow chancellor…seriously do you want the Labour party to be destroyed?
http://unisonactive.blogspot.com/2010/11/political-rights-of-union-members-under.html
Good article Tom, I like what you’re saying and I like the way you’re saying it. The one good point you raise that I’m surprised hasn’t been more discussed is the effect that a lot of MPs going early for David M had on how other MPs then gave their vote – given that an MP’s vote is worth such a lot it’s not unimaginable that MPs gave their votes based on a reasonable assumption of who they thought was going to win. This strikes me as more damaging to the democratic process than union endorsements – once MPs had pledged votes the media had their indications of who was likely win and, like you say, this disproportionate influence stifled the other candidate’s campaigns before they’d even really begun.
unfinished thought after “a reasonable assumption of who they thought was going to win…” is “rather than the candidate they would have gone for with the freedom of an MP’s vote only being worth as much as a party member or party-supporting union member”.
@Chris
LOL, yeh and Ed should exhume Michael Foot to be his shadow chancellor…seriously do you want the Labour party to be destroyed?
And yet wasn’t it the same bunch that are now complaining that gave us the biggest loss of seats since Foot, or was it worse? Now who is destroying the Party? Could it be Mandelson and friends?