To call John Prescott irrepressible is an understatement. At least I thought so until I consulted the thesaurus in search of something stronger in the wake of meeting him in the flesh. My book gives me the choice of ‘unmanageable’, ‘unruly’ and ‘disobedient’. Neither do these describe the impression left after our Portcullis House meeting about his bid to be treasurer of the Labour party. But the hurtling energy he leaves behind is infectious, and he’s certainly not going to obey previous orthodoxies about the treasurership.
Without any ado, the former deputy prime minister launches into a history lesson:
“I don’t call it a bauble, but over the years if you look at what has happened to the treasurer’s job from 1983 the unions took it as their appointment. What we found was that the left and the right fought it out between candidates and conference decided on the strength of the left and right”.
Despite the fact that not calling it a bauble suggests it was just that, he’s adamant that the job is there to be grasped and redefined, reiterating the goals he set himself in his bid for the deputy leadership: more campaigning, larger membership and fundraising in order to campaign. He is already raring to go and campaign for the May 2011 elections and the next general election.
But in the first instance the question of debt cannot fail to hang over any discussion of Labour’s future. While he doesn’t exactly brush aside the party’s plan to clear its debt by 2016, he prefers to come at the problem from a different angle, arguing that Labour must go all-out to raise funds both to pay off debts AND campaign:
“I do not accept that all our priority now must be reducing debt, and that’s why I challenged for this job. Ray Collins is doing a very good job and has hypothecated income, some to debts, some to campaigning. That’s a start. But unless we raise money we’ll have no money for campaigning… we’re talking about being debt-free in 2016 but we’ll almost be dead in terms of winning elections.”
Prescott’s focus on campaigning is welcome but it is unclear how far this refocusing of resources might go down within the party hierarchy already set on a debt reduction plan. The Prescott hallmark would no doubt reshape the role like never before. But would he as a lay treasurer (the general secretary is the legal treasurer), intent on upping campaigning, be ready and able to put the stoppers on leadership demands for greater campaign spend? Yes, says Prescott:
“As the treasurer I’d say: ‘You’re not having it!’ Ray Collins has just done it [in the 2010 election], to his credit. He said: ‘I’m not going to spend any money’… Ray Collins has put his foot down but it’s a hell of a responsibility.”
And this is the crux of Labour’s, and the next treasurer’s, problem. As Prescott himself admits “we spent less than we raised this time which is very good but it was about a third of the amount we spent in say 2005” and campaigning – winning – costs money.
When pressed on whether the Labour leadership overspent in the Blair-Brown years he is quick to turn fire on ‘Number 10′, by which he means: “Some of these acolytes around them [the PMs] who speak like Number 10 all the time”.
But he also reveals that the authority of the Number 10 machine to push for greater spending – rather than the party itself pulling on the pursestrings – also came from Blair and Brown. He illustrates with one example from 2005: “What I’d found then was that Gordon wanted more money for poster campaigns. We’d said ‘no more money’ and then Tony said ‘don’t worry, I can raise it in other areas’ so we spent the money and didn’t raise it.” He is even more critical of the ‘election that never was’, slamming the “one and a half million pounds spent on envelopes and getting the election ready, and that added to our debts, and we didn’t have the bloody election! We’re off – we’re on – and one and a half million gone.”
Not only will the relationship between the leadership and the party executive continue to be driven by personalities – even more so if the spirited Prescott gets in – but the institutional map of the party will have changed considerably if the new leader opts for an elected party chair, as seems likely. Will this mean too many chiefs?
“It may do”, he ponders, and then remembers: “But there’s only one man that’s come up with the elected chair that’s what’s his name… Dagenham what’s his name, Cruddas. He’s been prattling on about it I see.”
He quickly identifies some of the complexities – or headaches – that could arise with the emergence of the new post boosted by a combination of a mandate from conference, strong personalities and grassroots popularity:
“If a leader comes along and has to say certain difficult things and the chair’s been elected – he might well be thinking of his election next time – and say ‘I’ve got to give you the party view’… I don’t honestly see why you need an elected chair”.
As an analogy he recalls “One of my strengths I felt as a deputy leader was that if Tony ever wanted to be off with me then he could get rid of me. But he couldn’t get rid of me as deputy leader, and the authority that comes from conference if used properly is a proper authority”.
But away from institutional politics, where will the money come from? Prescott lauds all three main sources of income: membership, trade union funding and high-value individuals. Of the last he is quick to say: “I’m not knocking high-value contributors – they have done us well” while admitting also: “We’ve got to lift up our ambition to raise money. We can’t go rocking round any more on cocktail circuits hoping we’ll pick up a few bob”.
On membership and subs, he is clearly committed to boosting membership and shows himself open to new ideas, though none set in stone yet. One @ProgressOnline Twitter follower asked the former deputy prime minister to consider abolishing membership fees in favour of a donations-only system which would encourage both more members and more money. He admits he is “open to experiment” and launches into a recollection of other proposals:
“There’s the friends of Labour idea – not one I was particularly sympathetic to – but times are rapidly changing. They don’t necessarily want to vote but they do want to practically be involved and you perhaps don’t have to pay that full membership fee. But we have that big membership fee because we have less and less members.”
How will he reconcile cost with financial need? He’s conscious of current members’ fears of having new members with the same rights, but also that £38 may be too much for young members. “The question has always come”, he responds, “you can’t have them as members in for less and allow them to vote and I think there is a real question”. But one which remains unanswered for now. Instead, young people – if they join – must be retained through letting them do what they joined to do – campaign:
“Most young people are turned off Labour. Cor blimey, if you tell them to go to the GMC then you finish them off for life! Young people want to campaign… This LibCon government is going to anger young people, as well as many others”.
From this he segues back into his recurring theme of more campaigning, something which he sees MPs and CLPs as taking a greater responsibility for. “Campaigns don’t come out of the GMCs, we’ve got to have real weekly campaigning. Each constituency – and the MP has a major role in this – has got to show how much campaigning they’ve done in a year and what the voter ID is”. And he is characteristically New Labour in his preferred method: “We’ve had a great deal of targets in hospitals and schools – targets in constituencies have got to be a great deal more rigid. The party will like it, that’s direction we want”. Indeed, it is surprising that New Labour never applied a dose of its own medicine in this way. Perhaps for most of its time in power the urgency to campaign was absent. And perhaps a Prescott treasurership would change that again.
On trade union funding he is as boisterously unapologetic as he is on high-value individuals, acknowledging the unions’ key role in keeping Labour afloat:
“It’s a very important thing, trade union funding. You still have to see it as individual contributions put into a fund – it IS the Labour party… If it hadn’t been for the trade union money we’d have had difficulty supporting ourselves as a party”.
These are views on the political fund which are exactly those that most rile Tories and which they’ll no doubt like to challenge. He senses that how parties pay their way is going to change in the coming years. “Change is coming whether we like it or not on the finance front and we need strong people in that argument”. Trade unions will face even more challenges when state funding comes in, he says. But the debate about state funding is embryonic at best. Much of the public is unaware it is already with us. “I’m personally not against state financing – it is already with us… Short money is state financing. The Labour party is just about to get six million from Short money”. What pressure trade union funding will come under in an era of increased state funding is a challenge lurking in the dim future that the leadership of the Labour party will have to deal with. Prescott touches on this:
“More and more people might put their money into voluntary organisations because – “ah well, one gets it from the unions and the other get it from business”. I do think in the talk about this we should be open in saying it’s scandalous that trade unions have to be balloted on whether they can have a political fund while the shareholders of companies putting millions in have no accountability whatsoever. I don’t suppose the Tories are likely to find some equitable base on that but we’ve got to argue the case.”
Should funding come under the spotlight again, arguing from opposition for the reform of donations from companies – and defending the political fund – will be challenging at best in the current anti-politics environment. On the criticisms currently levelled at leadership candidates for accepting large donations he sees nothing out of the ordinary: “They are operating to the limits set by the party. I’m all for limits, if you want to reduce them then that’s fine but if you’ve set limits for fundraising”.
Should he become treasurer he will no doubt be visible as a face of the party in the forthcoming battles, but inside the party he is concerned to restore morale to the party faithful: “Our campaigners are our party people and they’re going out to the public. I think they’ve lost a lot of their heart. It may be because of the Iraq war and you can understand”. He is not convinced the leadership campaign is helping in this: “In this leadership election campaign – do they ever talk about what we achieved under a Labour government?!” His concerns are also directed at what he sees as the assembly of two historical groupings within the leadership line-up:
“Unfortunately our politics almost gave us two periods didn’t it? One was known as the Blair period, the other the Brown period. It was LABOUR. What I worry a bit about the leadership election is that it looks a bit like Blair and Brown camps”.
Prescott’s commitment to the party, whatever its composite stripes, and to renewed electoral success is unwavering and unabashed. Gone are the days of the Battlebus but this old bruiser is on the lookout for a new wagon to ride to take the fight to the country again. He has the backing of over 70 per cent of the CLPs who made a treasurer nomination, a range of socialist societies from LGBT Labour to the Socialist Health Association and Society of Labour Lawyers. Unity has backed him but many of the other trade unions are likely to fall in behind Diana Holland. If Prescott can break the convention that the treasurership is held by a union person that will in itself be quite a turnaround, for himself and for the party. The big tests will then begin: getting Labour fighting match-fit for the general election and the electoral tests in-between; rebuilding the party’s local and regional government strength; aiming to retake Holyrood and full control at Cardiff; and then the prize of London in 2012. But the iconoclastic streak will not fade in Prescott as he seeks to upset the applecart, and neither will his deep party loyalty, though he admits this could be his last big hurrah for the party:
“They said to me, I’ve never seen anyone fight for the definition of a job. Now I’m doing it for treasurer. We have to now make big changes and I think we need big people to do it… It’s not going to be any easy one but at least the debate is started. It took me three times before I became the deputy leader – I can’t really stick around another 13 years for that!”
Read our interview with Diana Holland