Can The Labour Party Select Winners?

I recently heard a recording of Denis Healey saying that he thought that politicians who were only interested in politics made bad politicians. He pitied people who had no life outside politics and said that his real life had always been in the arts. There is a story that I have heard that in Norway they select their local politicians in the same way as we select people for jury service. I don't know if this is just another, 'I heard it from a man in the pub' story, but, in my experience, there is certainly something to be said for this idea. The serious but largely mundane business of government is something that is far too important to be left to people who think they want to do it. Far better, perhaps, to pick a random selection of ordinary people who would much rather be elsewhere doing something else, present them with the facts and get them to make a decision, the only proviso being that it had to satisfy the 'Welfare of the People above all' test.

The Labour Party prides itself on being far more diverse and reflective of the communities it represents than the Tory Party. A cursory glance at the 53 councillors that make up Lewisham Council's Labour Group would confirm that we have a good mix of women, people from ethnic minorities and people from the LGTB community. However, there are very few people under 35, who have children of school age, or work in the private sector, for example. Ben Judah, in his recently published book on London, makes the point that 55% of Londoners are not white British, nearly 40% were born abroad and 5% are living here illegally. I think in Lewisham, and, I suspect, everywhere else, Labour is far less representative of the community it serves than it thinks. Can we really be confident that we are governing in the best interests of the people when our life experience are so different from theirs?

This state of affairs wouldn't be quite so bad if we were doing something about it. Sadly, we seem to be making matters worse. Rather than encouraging Councillors and Labour members to be active in their communities, we are making more and more demands on their time. I have noticed this in the 20 years that I have been a Labour Party member. When I was approached to be a candidate in the local elections, the fact that I wouldn't have to do too much if I didn't want to if successful, was put to me as a selling point. Since then everything has become more corporate and professional. And a good thing too in many ways. However, I think things have gone too far.

The Labour Party is now on a constant war footing. We are continually campaigning and canvassing throughout the year. No sooner had we finished campaigning for our own local elections in 2014, then it seems that we were gearing up for the General Election in 2015. This was swiftly followed by the campaign to elect the new leader and deputy leader of the party, then the campaign to select the Labour candidate for the London Mayoral Elections and now the London Mayoral campaign itself. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that you could spend every night of the week and every weekend at some kind of Labour Party meeting, or out campaigning, or at a Labour Party Fundraiser of some description. And the sad fact is that if you don't, you have little chance of advancing up the greasy pole. The sheer effort, time and commitment required to become a Labour candidate in some election or other, with the exception of Council elections in some cases, is now so great, that if you were a normal person with a normal life outside politics when you started, you won't be by the time you have become successful. Labour politics is not something that can be pursued alongside other interests, not to mention family commitments. Perhaps it was ever thus. Clearly, Denis Healey thought and acted otherwise.

Labour recognises that it is on a quest for relevance in the eyes of ordinary people. It seeks the holy grail of our age, Authenticity, as it tries to come up with a plan to win in 2020. Jeremy Corbyn's massive victory in the leadership election and the huge increase in Party membership that accompanied it, are seen by many as evidence of Labour's reconnection with the people. Labour's subsequent steady decline in the opinion polls tells another story. My fear is that if Labour does manage to find leaders with the common touch, people who can convince voters in constituencies that we need to win in order to form a Government, to vote Labour, this will have to be by luck rather than design.

What Is The Moderate Labour Message?

John Harris' article in last Saturday's Guardian asked, 'When are Labour 'moderates' going to do more than moan?' It was a call for Blair-Brown pragmatic centrists to set out some concrete, forward-thinking policies rather than analysing the reasons for Labour's 2015 General Election defeat, pontificating on the Party's current predicament and speculating on who might be a post Corbyn era electable leader. I would add that it might help if supposed mainstream moderates would stop prioritising their Pavlovian rebuttal of any criticism of the last Labour administration's record in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing is more certain of getting a response, and a sharp one at that, from a 'moderate', than an expression of anything less than fulsome support for the Iraq War, especially if it's from another perceived sound moderate who is held to be someone who 'should know better'. I don't want to get into a debate on whether these military interventions were right or wrong. I simply express surprise that those who call for the party to concentrate on the centre ground and what really matters to ordinary people rather than obsessing about the ideological preoccupations of the radical few, appear to be the first to ignore this advice when it comes to the Afghan and Iraq Wars. I think it's fair to say that the majority of British people think that, at worse, the wars were a mistake and, at best they would rather forget all about what they feel was and continues to be a very sorry business. In such circumstances, you would think that the true political professionals on the centre right in the Labour Party who are serious about the acquisition of power would be seeking to close down the debate on this issue and move the discussion on.

It's now popular to say that Ed Miliband was a terrible leader of the party and never had a hope of becoming Prime Minister, but this is exactly what he tried to do. Speaking at his first Party Conference as leader in 2010 he said:

I criticise nobody faced with making the toughest of decisions and I honour our troops who fought and died there. But I do believe that we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war and we need to be honest about that. 

Again, whatever one thinks about the War, this can be seen as a genuine attempt to draw a line under the issue as an unwelcome distraction in order to enable the Party to move on to more politically fertile ground where it could finally breathe some fresh air. Surely this course of action would have been the wise advice of any impartial, objective campaign manager who saw it as their job to win elections. To his credit, Miliband the Younger then did try and move the debate on and tried to raise the issue of growing inequality of income and wealth. His characterisation of the 'squeezed middle' may have initially attracted ridicule but it has now become a mainstream concern with that pillar of fiscal rectitude the IMF, no less, citing it as a drag on global economic growth.

There are plenty of things that Labour moderates can raise to engage voters and Harris points to Tristam Hunt talking about inequality and Chuka Umunna talking about electoral reform. I noticed this good article by former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and Lewisham girl, Rachel Reeves, on the dangers of rising private debt and the need to reform the tax system to deal with the inequality that exists in tax reliefs applied to savings that favour the well off. The arguments for dealing with inequality that are most likely to gain the most traction with the electorate are the economic ones rather than those about fairness. Pointing out that inequality keeps us all poorer is harder to rebut than seeking to appeal to our notions of right and wrong. The call to reduce inequality in order to increase economic growth and address what's been described as secular stagnation gives Labour a chance to park its tanks on the Tories' lawn. 

It is a shame, given these opportunities, that the moderates seem to have devoted more energy to defending Blair's record in Iraq than defending his record on the economy and management of the public finances. Consequently, the battle against self-defeating Austerity has, bizarrely, been left to the Corbynistas. The recent floods, whilst terrible for those suffering their indiscriminate effects, have been an absolute gift for any pragmatic centrist who wanted to appeal to all sections of the Party and the country by arguing for the need for an interventionist state and increased levels of public spending to 'fix the roof' when the low interest rate environment 'is shining'. (see here, here and here for example)

Rather than complain that Corbyn is a disaster and speculate on which 'moderate' from the PLP should succeed him when the time comes, perhaps all of us pragmatic centrists should concentrate on saying something that might have a chance of engaging the interest of people who didn't vote Labour last year.

PS It was nice to get such a good response when out yesterday telling commuters about Sadiq Khan's pledge to freeze bus and train fares if he is elected the next Mayor of London.