Does the Labour Party face a crisis of democracy?
A Labour Party member in the North East is concerned that key decisions are being taken away from local parties
DEEP into Twitter there is a debate occurring which consumes people’s lives – it’s about the future of the Labour party.
Labour had a terrible election defeat in 2019 and the party is attempting to recover, but while the leader appears on TV talking about being “a responsible opposition”, there is something more sinister going on within the party. This won’t be an easy task, but in this article, I’m going to try to convince you that you really ought to care about the Labour Party and its crisis of democracy.
The new Labour leader was elected with a promise that he would protect the democracy of the party and the policies of the last election, but deliver a new competent leader to win elections for us.
However, competence can all too often lead to the suppression of dissenting voices and the streamlining of debate.
But why does this matter? Unlike the Conservative Party, Labour decides its policies through a conference where elected representatives from each constituency and the trade unions debate and come to a consensus.
This matters because these delegates are your next door neighbour, your postman, your train driver or your supermarket worker. Labour’s members are in every community and its trade unions in many workplaces. The Labour Party is rare in Europe both in terms of its mass membership, numbering many hundreds of thousands, but also in the power that Labour gives to those members.
But this is changing. The most recent event in the attack on Labour’s democracy was with the Labour mayoral election in Liverpool. The previous mayor, Joe Anderson, was arrested as part of a corruption inquiry and as a result had to stand down as mayor. This has led the party to having a candidate selection that has gone on for months.
There has been a clear front runner in the selection process yet the unelected Labour general secretary has intervened and removed all the three candidates in the running. These candidates, the lord mayor, the deputy mayor and acting mayor (all women incidentally), were all debarred from standing in the selection and deemed by the national party leadership not to be worthy candidates as Liverpool’s Labour mayor.
This isn’t the only event. Members have been suspended for even suggesting motions of no confidence in the general secretary or the leader. In Bristol, local members saw the running of their annual general meeting, managed by unelected regional officials where electronic voting systems crashed, none of the candidates were allowed to speak and the meeting was extended to last five hours (till 11.30pm!) Perhaps unsurprisingly those elected at this meeting ended up being politically aligned to those running the regional office.
But perhaps the most serious allegation regarding Labour’s democracy was around the Scottish Labour leader. Big party donors allegedly told the leadership of the party that they would withhold donations until the leader Richard Leonard was removed – and hey presto, he resigned the next day.
When the Labour party loses its democracy everyone suffers. It is the teacher in your kid’s classroom, the driver of your bus, the baker in your village and your friends who lose their rights to vote.
More importantly, the policy and candidates of the Labour party may increasingly be decided by wealthy big business interests and unelected officials rather than the working people of this country. And this is something that should concern us all.
■ The author is a Labour Party member in Durham.
“Members have been suspended for even suggesting motions of no confidence in the general secretary or the leader
LIZ Truss has been reported as telling the NFU conference: ‘Our farmers need access to new markets around the world, but we need to get rid of the barriers holding them back.’ The hypocrisy of this statement is astonishing!
The UK exports over twice as much food and drink to the EU as to non-EU countries but Boris Johnson’s dreadful deal with the EU has created enormous barriers of red tape. The Food and Drink Federation stated that food exports to the EU declined by between 50-60% in January this year. A recent survey of supply chain managers found that delays were worse in February than they were in January. These are not ‘teething problems’, they are structural problems.
Due to the customs border down the Irish Sea, something Boris Johnson said we would never have, health certificates are even needed to send sausages to Northern Ireland. Seemingly, as from July 1, exports of sausages to Northern Ireland will be banned all together unless another deal can be negotiated.
The deal is disastrous for Northern Ireland, disastrous for our fishing industry, and due to red tape, is proving to be disastrous for our farming and food industry. We know what Boris Johnson said about business: ‘ .... business’; it’s the same with food and farming: he just doesn’t give a sausage.