Читать книгу Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party - Lewis Goodall - Страница 27

The accidental punch had led Ed Miliband to create an accidental system that would create an accidental leader. And all of it devised, created and implemented with about as much thought as the average Deliveroo order. Perhaps a bit less.

Why so little scrutiny or forethought? Simple: Ed Miliband was going to be leader. As one MP put it to me: ‘None of them, not one of them, even gave it a moment’s thought. It was pathetic. He just thought he was going to be prime minister and no one would be even using the rules for a decade. He’s got a lot to fucking answer for.’

Angela Eagle was more diplomatic but no less angry at her former leader’s actions: ‘It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the French had done with their primary for the presidential candidate – it’s not the same as leader of the party. One candidate for one election is not the same as electing the leader of the party and to lead the PLP. I wasn’t asked about the changes to voting – my opinion wasn’t sought. The removal of the electoral college was a panic over Falkirk which no one remembers now so shouldn’t have been done in that way … You have to get the balance right between reaching out, and allowing people who don’t have your best interests at heart to manipulate a result. No one had any sort of inkling that the influx of people would outweigh the membership and be more important than the membership.’

Another senior shadow cabinet minister at the time the changes were made put the blame specifically on the fact that there was not even a freeze date:

‘I think the fundamental error was not to have a freeze date because throughout the whole history of the party we have always had a freeze date on selection and elections for obvious reasons, because if you announce it’s coming they can recruit a lot of people. But in effect we said to people, come and pay your fee and get yourself a vote and lots of people did that for a particular candidate … it was done for the right reasons. The introduction of the original scheme was about trying to broaden the base of the party, which is a good thing. Now, we are a voluntary organisation, professional but also a voluntary organisation, and I can’t tell you why a view wasn’t taken to have a freeze date so that lots of people could get themselves a vote knowing who the candidates were. But once Jeremy was on the ballot paper and once there wasn’t a freeze date and the numbers of new members were announced then it was very clear who was going to win.’

Today Miliband’s allies find all this rum stuff. They (rightly) point out that many of the same people protesting now were neither to be seen nor heard at the time. Indeed, internally the changes went through largely on the nod. At the special conference convened at the ExCel Centre in late 2014, the reforms were passed by a doughty 86 per cent to 14 per cent margin. At the same time, the party had other problems. At the same point in 2014 the Scottish independence referendum was raging. The future of the kingdom was in jeopardy. These were the leadership rules for a contest most hoped was a long way off – it seemed a bit like a couple drawing up custody rules before they’d even walked down the aisle.

Moreover, in a truly catastrophic misjudgement, the Blairites and right of the party supported the changes. In an ironic twist that would make even Alanis Morissette blush, it was the left who were most sceptical.

At the time, it was generally perceived to be an attack on the power of the trade unions. Tony Blair – yes – Tony Blair welcomed the changes: ‘I think this is a defining moment. It’s bold and it’s strong. It’s real leadership, this. I think it’s important not only in its own terms, because he’s carrying through a process of reform in the Labour Party that is long overdue and, frankly, probably I should have done it when I was leader.’ This was partially drawn from a subtle distinction. Blair and his tribe had always been extremely suspicious of the organised element of the Labour Party, constituency Labour parties, their chairmen and chairwomen and the ‘activists’. The word activist made them shudder. It conjured images of long, late-night sittings of constituency meetings, debating subsection 3 of composite 1 of the CLP motion condemning the situation in the Wallis and Futuna Islands. They thought that CLP meetings attracted a certain type of person, the unrepresentative crank. By contrast, they had had enormous faith in the ‘member’. Perhaps the husband and wife who had paid their dues for years, might turn out for the Christmas raffle, hadn’t had much truck with the preoccupations and vicissitudes of the far left, and, indeed, would vote against them: in other words, the internal Labour Party version of the ‘real people’ about whom Blair was so fond of talking during his time in government. The Blairites and the right assumed that the ‘members’ would always guard them against the incursions of the left (as they largely were in the 1980s), rather than be the footsoldiers of their enemy. It was an astonishing miscalculation.

The Blairites and Milibandites can, however, find common cause in blaming the PLP. Today they both argue that the membership question would not have arisen had MPs understood their role as gatekeepers to the system and not nominated someone with whom they could not live as their leader in Parliament. This has truth. MPs simply did not understand the new rules properly. They had not quite clocked that they no longer had a third of the votes under the electoral college on their side.

Curiously they overvalued their importance and yet undervalued it at the same time. They weren’t just wine tasters, setting out a series of options. If MPs could not live with one of the candidates winning and leading them in Parliament, then they ought not to put them forward. MPs who dislike Jeremy Corbyn but nominated him have, therefore, only themselves to blame.

If we’re looking to answer the questions: ‘Why Corbyn? Why now? Why has this never happened before?’ then part of the answer has to be the system that elected him. Miliband had put all of the party’s chips with the members in a party where, for all the talk, members had almost never had much influence. I said before that the leadership of the party had for most of the party’s existence been the preserve of the party’s MPs. It’s more profound than that. Remember, for most of its history the Labour Party had been a federation of constituent organisations. For a long period in the party’s early days it wasn’t even possible to be an individual Labour Party member; you could only become one by joining one of its member bodies. One of the many phantoms that should be laid to rest about the way that the party has ‘returned to its roots’ under Corbyn is that it is once again a mass-membership organisation. Yes, membership numbers were greater in the party’s heyday (much greater than they are today), but it was not something that much preoccupied Ramsay MacDonald or Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson. Search through their speeches for references to the mass party membership and its importance and you will do so in vain. Most of those million or so members of the Labour Party of old were members not of the party itself, but through a union or affiliated organisation. They therefore expected little say in the party’s affairs. They took part in campaigning but not in party management or directly in policy. The party was top down, almost unashamedly hierarchical. That was the basis of many of the battles of the 1980s, with the left arguing that the party structures were moribund, atrophying and hierarchical, and in need of change. The merits and demerits of all this are beside the point. Rather, at a stroke, Miliband transformed the party. He changed the balance of power, accidentally but fundamentally. It would have been unrecognisable to any Labour leader from the twentieth century. Jeremy Corbyn was the first leader of his kind in the party’s history. So was the system that elected him. Those facts are not unconnected.

But it’s not the whole story. Nowhere close. Because Corbyn didn’t just win among the new members. He won among the old too. That means there was something more profound going on in Labour politics than just entryism. We cannot account for the rise of Corbyn in the party’s rule book alone. The political tectonic plates were shifting, in no small part thanks to another legacy of Mr Miliband, the general election result of 2015.

After the herculean task of getting on to the ballot paper, the bookies made him a 20/1 outsider. Unbelievably, Liz Kendall on that day was at 5/2 only just behind Andy Burnham. The bookies and MPs had failed to understand just how painful 2015 was and what had happened to the Labour Party.

One supporter, elated that finally a left-wing candidate had made it on to the ballot paper, tweeted her new hero this: