by Peter Watt
There has been a lot of retrospective going on recently. Obviously the death of Baroness Thatcher has meant that we have all been reflecting on the politics of the 1970’s and 1980’s. And politics has changed a fait bit since then and Labour politics in particular; long gone are the days when Labour ripped itself apart with splits and division.
Beaten time after time by the Tories, Labour finally realised that it needed to change if it was to win. First Neil Kinnock, then John Smith and finally Tony Blair and Gordon Brown gradually enforced a degree of central control and discipline within the party. There was an understanding that controlling process meant controlling the party. Conferences, policy making and of course selections were all ruthlessly managed.
On the whole the party welcomed it, even if reluctantly at first. There was a significant minority who always complained of course, but most were prepared to overlook what they didn’t like as we kept winning.
Working for the party throughout this period, we were loyal to the Leadership and we worked hard to keep control. Centralisation was the name of the day. But the world moved on and the time for command and control was over.
But at the centre we were slow on the uptake and so the culture of control was hung onto longer than it should’ve been. As the rest of society was opening up and more open sources of information were becoming the norm in business, online and in the media, the Labour party stubbornly refused to change the way that it ran itself. Keeping control meant keeping order.
But then we lost a general election and rightly our new Leader demanded a new approach to our politics. There was talk of reaching out beyond our closed ranks: of allowing creativity and innovation and welcoming the possibilities that there may well be differences in tone and approach in different parts of the country.
As an old school control freak you would expect me to be sceptical. But no; I am hugely supportive of an approach that begins to break down the barriers to our politics. I can see just how remote and closed our politics actually is and how unattractive it is to most voters. I wholeheartedly agree with Ed when he says:
“It’s not just about winning elections… It’s about constructing a real political movement. It’s a change from machine politics to grassroots politics.”
So I welcome the opening up of the party; except that is not what is happening. The words are all well and good but the reality is that nothing has changed. Actually that isn’t true. If anything it is getting worse.
