by Peter Watt
If I was sat in Labour party HQ in Victoria Street right now, staring down the barrel of further financial strife, then I would be tempted to do everything I could to minimise unnecessary expenditure. And I would be right to do so. If the reports are true that the party overspent last year by £1.7 million then it is quite a big gun after all!
But if it really is financial strife that has apparently lead to a proposal to ban sitting MPs from standing for election to directly elected mayors or police and crime commissioners later this year, then that is a terrible error.
It is however an error that merely highlights a serious malaise at the heart of our politics, and to be fair, the politics of all of the major parties.
On the face of it, the argument for the decision to ban ambitious MP’s from standing is persuasive. Each by-election will cost £70 – £100,000 or so. We might lose to another (popular) candidate. Why take the risk?
But these reasons are all predicated on an out-of-date thought process.
The assumption is that the only way to win is for the party to impose the “right” candidate. That the campaign must be run using the central party machine which imposes the will of the “experts” on the locals. And finally that the campaign must then spend on staff, hotels, travel, campaign HQ and lots of flash literature. All spending money that the party doesn’t actually have.
To be fair, for many years this model served the party pretty well. As I know well because I have worked on, planned, set budgets for and managed selections (read into that what you will) for more by-elections than I care to remember. But it is a model that is simply no longer fit for purpose.
