by Peter Watt
I have decided to write something about Labour party governance. Now wait; before you stop reading simply because you assume that any article about governance must be aimed at anoraks give me a moment as it really is an important issue.
The Labour party is governed by the National Executive Committee (NEC) who act in the same way as a board of directors or trustees do. In other words, they are responsible for ensuring that the party manages its finances well; delivers on its primary objective of securing elected Labour representation and other subsidiary objectives like better representation of women. And also for ensuring that the party complies with its legal responsibilities. They also oversee, but do not direct, day-to-day operations of the party. The day-to-day work is managed by the party’s chief executive the general secretary.
Traditionally the arrangement has not been a particularly good one in the Labour party with good governance being secondary to other political pressures. The result was that the party became horrifically in debt and no one on the NEC seemed to notice.
The reasons for this are twofold.
Firstly the NEC itself was much more interested in politics than governance. In other words they got elected or appointed by virtue of fighting for position or votes in internal elections on the back of taking positions politically.
They were experts in lots of things to do with politics, trade unions and so on. But that didn’t make them experts in governance, asking the right questions, finances and the like. Whilst other organisations could undertake a skills audit of their boards and appoint non-execs or other trustees to plug the skills gap – the NEC had elections to its various stakeholder sections.
And secondly the party management team saw it as their job to keep the NEC out of decision making. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt and anyway the NEC really weren’t that interested, or so the argument went.
It was just easier to set up NEC committees and structures that provided more confusion than transparency. Plus there was always a third source of power that party managers had to worry about – the leader’s office. The leader’s office always wanted to be in charge of everything but knew that the key to managing the weird and byzantine world of the NEC was the general secretary and their team.
