Harry Potter and the question of party reform

As is often the case with leftwingers, JK Rowling did a better job of finding the enemy than the answer.

She was right to say last week that the brilliant Hermione Granger – the real hero of the Harry Potter books, as any fool knows – was cruelly ill-suited to Ron Weasley; a perpetual sidekick who would have resented the hell out of being tethered to the best witch of her age. It wasn’t the worst literary relationship since Othello and Iago, but it wasn’t far off.

It was in her choice of alternative, though, that Rowling goofed. Harry Potter was so emotionally damaged by the end of the series that he wouldn’t let his wife name any of their children and undermined Hermione when she was battling to emancipate the enslaved house elves. If Hermione had to marry at all, why not wait for the right person instead of settling for a childhood fling?

All too often, Labour settles for the childhood sweetheart, and, like Ron and Hermione, is left trying to explain a relationship that should never have started in the first place. The party’s internal structures are one such example: they’ve been to several relationship counsellors and looked wistfully elsewhere, but they’re all about explaining away the party founders’ historic error in building a relationship with trade unions and not trade unionists.

Labour’s electoral college might be better than the block vote or a franchise restricted to the parliamentary party, but it is still an abhorrence. It’s an insult to me as a party member and a trade unionist that my vote counts for about as much as Alistair Darling’s left eyebrow in the leadership election. It’s even worse that my union has no obligation to ask me if I’m happy for my money – which I am not exactly rolling in – to go to the Labour party. Say what you like about the gilded few who donate to the Conservative party – and there is certainly a lot to say – but they are at least making a conscious choice to do so.

So it’s democratic, and right, that Ed Miliband is changing the way our party elects its leader, so my vote will finally count for something, and introducing an opt-in system so the money that the party receives will be given in good faith. But it also presents Labour with a huge challenge.

As much as we might hope it were otherwise, many – perhaps most – of the trade unionists who are giving money to the Labour party do not want to. The evidence from the GMB’s pilot scheme is that the majority of their members do not want to give money to the Labour party; and it’s hard to argue that Conservative-supporting trade unionists are so committed to electoral fair play that they don’t mind slipping the Labour party a couple of quid now and again.

But that means that Labour will have to raise more money from fewer people, and that requires a cultural change as well as a systemic one. Is Labour ready to raise the money it needs to fight the Tories without an opt-out funding system? A cursory glance at my inbox – two emails from CLPs I am no longer a member of, and a poll that I can only pick one of the options in that takes me to a form full of information that the party already has – suggests that we are not quite there yet. That’s the transformation that Labour must effect in the five years after 1 March.