As someone who has yet to be fully won over by the idea of primaries to choose Labour candidates, I was very interested in Marcus Roberts’ article in the latest edition of Progress magazine on how a primary for our London mayoral candidate might work.
I have two main worries about primaries within the Labour party. The first is what you hear from some members: ‘We pay our membership – why shouldn’t we have the choice?’ This is a statement that I have a lot of sympathy with, and have said myself. However, the more I think about it, why shouldn’t more people get to choose who their politicians are? Why should it be the preserve of the politically active?
Selections can be a lot of fun, whether that be working on a campaign team, or being taken for coffee by candidates wanting my vote – but then, I am an active member of the Labour party. What do those members who aren’t fully active think when they have emails filling their inbox from hopeful candidates? What does the 14-year-old new member think when there are candidates knocking on their door, peering through the living room window, when they are bombarded with messages asking for a chat when they return from school?
Then I think that the power itself is fun – living in a ‘safe seat’ like Greenwich and Woolwich, the more than 900 members of the Labour party get to pick who is going to be the next MP to represent nearly 67,000 people. However, the democrat in me that this cannot be right: How can a small group of people choose someone to represent a community that has so many people from so many different backgrounds?
So what is the answer? Primaries? They work in other parts of the world, so why shouldn’t the Labour party give them a go? Perhaps the London mayoral selection is the right place to try this out.
Yes, there are potential problems: primaries look and sound very expensive and could take a large amount of time, and I say this as someone who would like the party to spend its time and money winning elections. I am also concerned that someone voting in a Labour primary must have Labour values; I don’t want a Tories signing up to lump us with a candidate that no Labour members want.
I also worry about the inclusion of the Labour party’s youngest members and young people generally. I welcome Marcus Roberts’ call to allow all those eligible to vote by the time of the London mayoral election to be able to vote in the Labour mayoral primary, and I am pleased that this is something that Stephen Twigg in his new shadow role has endorsed. This would show that Labour is serious about its commitment to votes at 16 as Ed Miliband affirmed in his conference speech. The move would also prove to young people that Labour wants to hear their voices, and I hope it would make those standing speak to young people more, about all issues, not just those things they think young people want to talk about. This being said we need to remember that we also have members aged 14 and 15 in the Labour party, and we cannot be in a place where these members get shut out of any selection processes.
I may be slowly being won over by primaries and I look forward to seeing what the Labour party finally decides to do. There are still answers needed to some of the problems that primaries will bring, and Marcus Roberts is right that members need to have a big say in how the process works, and about where and when the Labour party chooses its candidates. But I now don’t see why we shouldn’t give it a go.
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Simon Darvill is chair of Young Labour. He tweets @simondarvill
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“More than 900 members of the Labour party get to pick who is going to be the next MP to represent nearly 67,000 people. … How can a small group of people choose someone to represent a community that has so many people from so many different backgrounds?” The answer of course is that they do not. Whomsoever they pick is the person to act as Labour candidate, but it is the electorate who make their choice from between those the parties select. It’s a big distinction. Nobody, even in the supposedly safest seat in the country, is assured of election.
We pick our candidates to be democratic socialists or variants thereof and a wholly open primary would not necessarily do that. So whilst I support fully the right of all members to take part in the selection process, that’s as far as it should go.
As it is, in our selection of a PPC in Brent Central, each branch nomination result gets onto Facebook within seconds and our process could scarcely be more transparent (or leaky, depending on how you see it). I doubt the selection – or not – of Lembit Opik as the next Sarah Teather will be quite so public, not least as I cannot see the Liberal Democrats acquiring a field of over 35 possible nominees.
I think one has to ask how much will it cost to operate a Mayoral candidate primary on top of the actual election campaign itself. The Labour Party does not ooze money, so far as I am aware. Do we really want to have a campaign in which Labour Party hopefuls slug it out amongst each other, pointing out subtly or not-so-subtly the inadequacies of one another, when you can be sure the selection of the Tory opponent will be a Rolls-Royce by comparison, so quiet you cannot hear the dashboard clock tick.
I think Progress’s support of primaries will last as long as they continue to get the candidates they want selected – their thinking tends to be along the lines of “the wider you make the franchise, the less chance there is of a left candidate being elected”. Ken Livingstone would have won a primary hands down for the Mayor of London when elected – similarly Rhodri Morgan in Wales. Would Progress supporters be quite so supportive in these circumstances ? My fear is that they will concentrate on the other end of the scale – the placing of candidates on ballot papers, and seek to have their placemen (and women) win by ensuring there is no effective opposition.