Labour has nothing to lose but its bureaucracy
—One of my local members has been out to Germany to help the Social Democrats with the general election. His reports back make sobering reading. But it is not just Germany where there are problems. In the last month the Norwegian Labour party has been swept from power, and, yet again, the Australian Labour party has been thrown out of office following spectacular infighting.
One characteristic ties the three parties together: their inability to move into modern forms of organising and communicating. Each losing party bases its systems on today’s equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, where the party talks to itself much more than it listens to the outside world.
The German Social Democratic party still has 472,000 members – music to Ed Miliband’s ears, but this masks a fall in numbers and, more crucially, an inability to develop structures to engage and enthuse its members. The SPD is not a participatory model of political organisation. The Australian Labour party has only 35,000 members and has just experienced its worst result since 1934. Its caucus-driven model has come to signify a party whose internalised structures are the antithesis of mass membership. The Norwegian Labour party has 55,000 members, having declined by three-quarters from its postwar high. Again, the party is organised around tight internalised structures, as opposed to engaging with its actual and potential voters.
All three parties are relying on outdated structures that once served them very well but are less effective in the modern communications era. All three base their organisations around small meetings of the card-carrying faithful, and all three have a whole lexicon of internal language and behaviour – a bit like what we have with the British Labour party. The message from each of these three electoral defeats is that Labour has nothing to lose but its bureaucracy. Are we to be held back from community organising because the minutes are not yet agreed, the meeting observers not selected by secret ballot, or the report back from the observer to the county party not yet activated?
Are we to remain a labyrinth of meaningless structures, set up as the telephone was invented, the car first driven or the BBC established – because this is what we have; branches where three former councillors ask questions of three current councillors, all of whom believe that FaceTime is what you do with a razor and shaving cream.
Miliband wants to welcome in hundreds of thousands of trade unionists, but he needs to ensure that those of us who want a mass party have the authority to ensure that their welcome is not to a dismal branch meeting, where they are pressured into becoming a delegate to another irrelevant meeting, and invited to discuss why nobody ever comes to meetings.
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John Mann is MP for Bassetlaw
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Many thanks for this John; it needed saying and will need repeating. Let’s hope we have the courage to really change the way we do things and not just tweek things as we have done in the past. Perhaps the people with the ideas have got fed up of smoke in their eyes and are living their political lives elsewhere leaving behind the unimaginative clinging onto the old ways like a life raft; lets find them and their ideas.
The Party under Tony Blair has become a party where no-one has any say. Even MPs seem helpless as our leader and a clique of advisors determine our Party policy. Policy Forums and conferences are a sham of involvement. The Party wants flag wavers for the few at the top. People who knock on doors to sell the message determined by the leadership. Tony Blair emptied out the Party by closing off any meaningful participation. Now the trade unions represent the last bastion of organisation able to challenge the leadership clique’s unfettered control over policy making. Half the MPs don’t even care what the policies are, as long as they get paid. Many are professional politicians whose principles are moulded to fit whatever is necessary to get on. They have never lived in the real world of a £20k job and struggling to get by. We have heard it all before about creating a Party of mass participation. Well it will never happen in the way it has in the past – although organisations like 38 Degrees can pick up hundreds of thousands of supporters. What will happen is more activists will be disenfranchised of any say in the Party – diluted into a pool of registered supporters – who simply support, never influence. Most union members trust their union to fight for their interests – but they don’t do a lot of participating unless there is a crisis. Ending this collective involvement will be the final cut between Labour and the organised working class. If you think you can do that and the unions will still fund the Party – like they do the Democrats in the USA – you are going to be disappointed.