Partnership in Power promised much. For the first time party and government would keep in step by extending dialogue beyond the activists to the wider membership and, through them, to the voters. Local forums and constituencies would feed views up to the National Policy Forum and thence to Conference, where the final documents would form the basis of the next manifesto. In addition, policy commissions, including ministers and members of the Forum and the National Executive Committee, would respond to letters and resolutions throughout the year, replacing annual Conference showdowns with continuous conversation. But has it delivered?
In measuring success, it is obvious that the process cannot be separated from the results. If government policies attract broad support, most people will not worry about how they emerged. Conversely, if members trust the system, they will accept its outcomes even where they do not like them. The danger arises when undemocratic methods produce the wrong conclusions.
This is now a real concern. Party membership is falling. Resignation letters cite growing inequality, creeping privatisation, illiberal social attitudes, the National Missile Defence, student poverty and attacks on comprehensive education. The government appears wilfully to mar its own proudest achievements: the Low Pay Commission, where unions and business reach consensus, has three times recommended that 21 year-olds should be paid the adult national minimum wage, and three times been denied. Their view that the youth rate should be raised to £3.60, and eventually be phased out in favour of a training rate, has been ignored. Endorsement of the European Social Chapter deserves whole-hearted welcome, but too often its directives are implemented meanly and under threat of legal challenge. So where is the system going astray?
I believe that forum-style policy discussion is here to stay. Local forums are more inclusive and more fun than standard party meetings, they enable complex ideas to be explored in depth, and they need not conflict with delegate-based general committees for formal decisions. More resources, to mail members at their home addresses and train facilitators, would be useful, but the key issue is growing scepticism about whether anyone listens. The real problems are higher up the chain.
Most basically, reporting back to forum participants is the exception rather than the rule, and policy commissions often do not acknowledge contributions. The same applies to correspondence from branches and constituencies. As a constituency representative on the National Policy Forum I am charged with reflecting members’ views, but in two years I have not received a single resolution or flipchart summary through the party machinery. The policy commissions are shrouded in mystery, though there are hints that they rarely meet and do not read members’ submissions either.
At the next level the National Policy Forum sessions which prepare Conference papers have much in common with old-style compositing, but with fewer people given partial and fragmented information and talking behind closed doors. On the plus side, freedom to vary wording allows genuine agreement to be incorporated. More negatively, there is immense pressure to conform with ministerial desires and to avoid substantive debate at Conference, regardless of the strength of party feeling. In 1999 only sixteen of us supported discussion of the pensions/earnings link. Party managers fixed the Forum, but then found they could not fix the voters, leading directly to the 75p fiasco and the revolt at Conference 2000. This is precisely the scenario that the system was supposed to prevent.
And, at the last stage, how far does the current manifesto reflect the National Policy Forum papers endorsed by Conference in 1999 and 2000? The original documents have been withdrawn from the party website so most members cannot look for themselves. Even for anoraks it is arduous work, but worth doing because there is good stuff there, and perhaps some ways out of present difficulties.
The links are clearest in employment-related areas where government and unions hammered out deals in a forum within the Forum: on training, family-friendly practices, reviewing Fairness at Work laws, investigating the problems of two-tier workforces where privatised staff are protected but new recruits can be hired at the legal minimum. Regrettably, this was served up with lashings of spin during the campaign. No-one understands what Tony Blair means by his claimed mandate for radical public service reform, but workers at the sharp end fear longer hours, lower pay, worse conditions, and carrying the can for government mistakes.
Other manifesto statements are also capable of multiple interpretations. Does reform of housing benefit mean tackling profiteering landlords, or slashing benefits for tenants? On foxhunting there is again a commitment to a free vote, but not to parliamentary time or confronting the Lords. Four more years of wrangling will satisfy no-one and there is no Third Way here: we must ban it or forget it. Similarly, there is no clear pledge to abolish Clause 28, and the ambiguity will please neither bigots nor civil libertarians.
Commitments hard-won in the National Policy Forum have been watered down. Student hardship is rising fast as a doorstep issue, with the end of maintenance grants saddling the most disadvantaged 21-year-olds with debts of £12,000. Forum and Conference policy on higher education states: ‘It is important that we closely monitor progress to ensure that we are in fact moving towards our goal of widening access to previously under-represented groups, and that the student support system is responsive to different modes of learning . . . Scotland has chosen a different system of student support. What matters is what works. In monitoring the new arrangements we should ensure that experience of other student support arrangements, both international and in the UK, is examined.’
While English universities close departments and sink into deficit, students queue up to enrol in Scotland where repayment is deferred and bursaries help with living costs. Implementing party policy through a graduate tax could enable Labour to reach its avowed goal of 50 percent participation.
While Conference agreed to promote comprehensive education, the manifesto omits the very word because mentioning comprehensives would require also talking about grammar schools, and that can of worms was best not opened. Unfortunately, the worms are still there, gnawing at Labour’s foundations. And while specialist schools were discussed in the National Policy Forum, the emphasis on religious schools and ‘faith-based institutions’ has arrived out of the blue. Members are already unhappy about extending selection. They are even more worried by the social consequences of religious segregation, exemplified in Northern Ireland, and of indirect racial segregation as white middle-class parents fake Christianity and as other faiths collude in religious apartheid.
Security for those who cannot work has become an empty slogan unless you are disabled, a pensioner or a parent, because benefits pegged to prices leave the undeserving poor ever further adrift. And on defence, the Forum and Conference position is that: ‘we will continue to encourage the parties to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to ensure its continuation. We value the strategic stability that the Treaty provides.’
Until this policy changes, Labour must surely reject the use of Fylingdales for ‘Son of Star Wars’ which would undermine the Treaty, alienate both Russia and China and set off a new arms race.
In the environmental arena the Forum supported incentives for manufacturers and retailers to reduce packaging and agreed that Labour will expect local authorities and waste disposal authorities to have demonstrated that they have met the minimum statutory recycling target of 25 percent before bringing into use any new waste incinerators, which should be small-scale plants.
Neither is mentioned in the manifesto. And key democracy issues are absent: the right to stand for public office at eighteen, keeping the number of quangos to a minimum, and above all, a programme of citizenship education in schools. With election turnout hitting record lows, especially among young people, rebuilding faith in political systems should surely be at the top of the agenda. Hopefully the promises on the environment and citizenship can be retrieved and taken forward in the second term.
Few want to go back to the former system. But often people say: ‘In the old days ordinary members had no real influence, but we could see where our views, in the form of Conference resolutions, got lost. Under the new regime ordinary members still have no real influence, but we do not even know what happens to our input.’ Members had higher expectations of Partnership in Power, and their disappointment will be correspondingly greater. So the task now is not to ditch the Forum, but to make it perform as specified.
At a local level this means guaranteeing feedback to forum participants and including ‘current affairs’ slots alongside the rolling programme, so the government has advance warning of trouble. Feedback, together with resolutions from branches and constituencies, should always go to National Policy Forum representatives where it is submitted in electronic form. The policy commissions have failed. They block rather than facilitate communication between Forum and grassroots, and so Forum representatives must connect directly with members, and take responsibility for following up their concerns.
To encourage wider involvement, constituency representatives on the Forum should be elected by one member, one vote within regions, not by a handful of Conference delegates from fewer than half the constituencies in a region. Conducted alongside the NEC ballot the extra costs would be minimal. National Policy Forum representatives should be invited to all regionally-organised forums. Dialogue could be widened by posting Forum documents on the website along with submissions and resolutions and inviting individual members to discuss them on-line.
National Policy Forum meetings should take members’ views seriously. Where there is strong support from party correspondence, alternative positions should go forward for decision to Conference, rather than be crushed by ministerial fiat. The links between Forum and Conference decisions and the manifesto should be made explicit. The credibility of the entire process is at stake.
Behind all this is a very simple choice. If we want to empower members by listening to them and, where reasonable, reflecting their concerns in party policy, we can go on to discuss the technical, logistical and financial details. But if the Forum system is used to suppress diversity and forge ahead regardless, we will merely be rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The icebergs are looming and we do not have much time.