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August 29, 2024 - 7:00am
Over the past half-century, both main UK political parties have introduced changes to “democratise” the selection of party leaders, shrinking the role of MPs and giving more power to party members and even non-members. Recent reports have suggested that Keir Starmer would like to reverse this process and return leadership selection to MPs. Though some on the Left of the party reportedly think this would be “anti-democratic”, he would be right to do so.
Labour’s first contested leadership contest took place in 1922 when the party became the Official Opposition. For the next 60 years, all its leaders were elected in a similar format. When a vacancy occurred, candidates were nominated by a proposer and seconder. MPs would then vote in successive ballots until one candidate had the support of the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
For most of Labour’s history, the system of electing the leader by PLP ballot was broadly accepted. However, at a special conference in Wembley in 1981, largely due to the incompetence of trade union leaders, the system was changed. Attendees voted to reduce the influence of MPs to just 30% of the final outcome, with union and constituency Labour Party delegates making up the remaining 40% and 30% respectively. Since then, Labour has experimented with several configurations for electing its leader. None has been satisfactory.
Under the current system, 20% of MPs nominate a candidate and then have no further role. The leadership choice is thrown open to all party members, members of affiliated trade unions, and members of the public who pay a nominal fee and promise that they support the Labour Party.
Of course, there is inherent instability in giving the ballot to party members. Both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn became leaders without the support of most of their MPs or even a majority of the Shadow Cabinet. Just 12 MPs admitted to voting for Corbyn in 2015.
The following year, Corbyn’s leadership was challenged in a “vote of no confidence” by his own MPs, with 21 members of the Shadow Cabinet resigning. This was in spite of the measure having no constitutional standing within party rules. Though only 18% of Labour MPs proclaimed confidence in their leader, he remained in the role because 62% of members and “registered supporters” wanted him to stay.
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SubscribeHow about the members choose the party leader based on an individuals manifesto – and the MPs later represent their members properly by ensuring it is implemented ? The utter failure of the Conservative Party to take this approach has moved it to “near extinction”.
The problem with that is members represent a v small fraction of the electorate. Why would you give them total control of the manifesto and stop the leader listening to others too? They have to represent the Country if they win a GE, not just a tiny unrepresentative minority.
But they don’t have to win a GE.
The problem is when Parliamentary candidates are not chosen locally, within each constituency, especially when they are chosen centrally, in HQ. It means the constituency members lose interest: ConHome has had plenty of complaints from party activists that walk the streets delivering leaflets that they are ignored when it comes to policy. The same has happened to Labour.
It’s HQ that has the resources and expertise to eliminate those candidates with a very dubious past, to protect the party, but when that power is used to remove those with fresh ideas, that are contrary to past party thinking, we end up with unrepresentitive democracy, and infiltration.
And thinking your duty is to vote at GEs, with a choice of at least two suitable candidates is a pipe dream. You need to ensure you have a candidate you are happy to support.
To a degree the point has something in it. But it’s not unreasonable for a Party to ensure a candidate that’s going to represent them buys into the key beliefs and policies. Furthermore Parties have to protect their reputation and increasingly need to vet potential candidates. Look how many ex far Right/BNP types Reform ended up with. Even Farage said they just didn’t have the time to check.
The current government represents a ‘small fraction of the electorate’. The last thing we need is yet more concentration of power in the hands of unrepresentative elites – and especially in the hands of a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his utter contempt not just for the wishes of the electorate as a whole, but most especially for those of his party’s own traditional voters.
Eliminating members from the leadership selection doesn’t increase listening, it eliminates it all together. The selectorate will be reduced from thousands of members to half a dozen faceless oligarchs with tentacles in all the major parties.
Who are all elected and thus will get turfed out if they make the wrong decisions. The accountability just applied at a different point.
We have a representative democracy not a direct democracy – fundamental part of UK political tradition. Churchill wasn’t elected by members. What other really good leader was?
If members chose both the MPs and the Leader, you might then get a coherent party organisation.
Point of the article is that hasn’t been clearly demonstrated by either Party.
Come on. Own up. What you really want is a dictatorship presided over by Tony Blair.
Now there’s a thought HB.
It would have the benefit of making your Blair-fixation illness seem more valid.
No one really cares … 2TK is a traitor and an abomination. He will destroy Britain. No way will he last a full term if he implements everything they are talking about AND floods the country with third world economic migrants. Then puts up taxes again and again to pay for them … imprisons more old ladies for years for FB posts proving that politicians and judiciary are NOT separate anymore which is very dangerous. The UK looks like it’s going to go through a very hard time shortly. Many I know people have left already.
There is no guarantee that members preferences or MPs preferences will deliver the ‘best’ party democracy.
But allowing the members to choose then MPs rejecting the outcome a few weeks later (cf Liz Truss) is not a good look democratically, any more than elevating a leader by acclaim.
It wasn’t a good look that a tiny, unrepresentative minority of Tory members were able to put someone as obviously poor as Mad Liz into Number 10. You’d be more consistent if you said at that point a GE should have been called so public could decide on whether the person the Tory members had selected should also be their PM.
Liz was ambushed by the Bank of England, and then the Media was let loose. Look up LDIs and the part played by the BoE. Even the BoE has admitted it.
Did the leadership contest, that resulted in Liz Truss being chosen, go on for months to entrenched the status quo? It looked similar to the muddle at the beginning of the Referendum Campaign. And, in both cases, the winners had a dog’s dinner to sort out, and no time to think.
Many are airing what Truss has said: Blair outsourced much decision making, breaking the Crown in Parliament, and Cameron continued with that. But then, he would, wouldn’t he, the leader famous for his CCHQ controlled A Lists.
Nonsense.
Firstly she decided to go with plan not checked by OBR and with an obvious black hole. Blaming the markets for then being spooked ridiculous, esp from a Govt favouring ‘markets’. She then compounded by performing terribly under questions from the public with her infamous set of interviews during the Party Conference. She destroyed her own credibility. Then she threw her Chancellor under a Bus to save herself demonstrating zero integrity.
Somehow though it’s all Blair’s fault. The gymnastic contortions some have to pull to avoid the truth – you went with a pup – comical.
I actually think that there is a compelling argument that a turnover of PM should result in an election within say 6 months. Gordon Brown was put in a position where he was at once told he was too frightened to hold an election and that he was an unelected PM. I’m surprised more isn’t made of elections after PM turnover. Liz Truss is the prime example of someone who should have called an election.
On Truss et al, it is hard to avoid that we have had a succession of underperforming party leaders across the spectrum. IDS, Corbyn, Swinson, Clegg, Yousaf, arguably Ed M. Indeed Cameron and Johnson, selected by the Conservative membership did in fact go on to win national elections, so I don’t think you can entirely say their membership is out of touch.
This is not a Conservative Party problem – it’s just been sharper for them because they’ve been in power.
The problem I would suggest is not per se the idea of party member leader elections. The problem rather is that political parties are simply not broad-based enough to be a filter adequate for the job being asked of them. The political parties should in the ideal world be great engines of civil society. They should be very broad based, have a vision of mass participation and be (for want of a better term) diverse. What we have are shrivelled non-entities. The leaders we have seen are not a problem, rather they are symptoms of the problem which is that our political parties aren’t what they should be.
What we need is a far stronger civil society, with political parties taking their place in that civil society. Easy to say of course.
Agree with good bit of that.
The challenge is how to make parties more broad-based. Not easy. One thing I would do is strengthen local democracy but giving more power to Local Authorities, including more revenue raising levers. That’d potentially get more interested and one can hark back to the days when municipal pride and local politics was the engine-room of the UK. We’ve stripped Local Govt of powers and had Central Govt sneakily ‘outsource’ blame for local problems. So we can change this as a start.
In Canada, party members select MPs and party leader. In addition to this, a non-confidence vote by MPs automatically triggers an election so it is rarely used.
In Canada, party members vote in the party leader. They don’t select candidates for MP, the party leader and advisors do that.
Party leaders traditionally resign if the membership loses confidence in them, except that’s just a tradition. They don’t have to. Trudeau has pretty well lost the confidence of the whole country – and apparently a lot of his party members – but isn’t stepping down. He isn’t holding a leadership review, and his members don’t have the power to call one; only he does. Once he was voted in as Liberal leader, he became pretty well an unmovable object. (Though not an irresistible force, and that’s a good thing.)
Makes sense.
Activists have too much power and are usually unrepresentative. Leading requires qualities that those closer better placed to judge. One symptom of too much power in activists hands is too many half baked promises and slogans lacking real substance because it’s all about what activists demand to hear. Running competent Govt and generating effective legislation requires skills beyond sloganeering. Don’t we just know it!
Activists always do that!
The problem is when they congregate in HQ, and choose the candidates. The choosing should be done locally, (not Globally).
This thing about local selection has become a bit of an article of faith of late (and I can certainly see why some selections would rankle). But I do wonder if part of the problem we have seen recently is the tendency for MPs to see their role as some sort of a cross between a social worker and CAB, just with detailed expenses.
This has had the effect that some people at the drop of a hat take any and all problems to their MP, undermining all the local steps that local issues should follow.
MPs should be national figures. This is not of course to say that local figures can not fulfil that role. But in my mind at least MPs should not just be there as a troubleshooter of first resort.
We should of course reduce the number of MPs by at least 50%, but that’s for another day.
Think I’ve mentioned it elsewhere but some of the local issues ought to be going to the Councillors and their ward constituencies. The trouble is they’ve been stripped of much power so local issues tend to come to the MP, who as I think your rightly contend, ought to have more focus on the national things. We’ve messed up the balance by dragging ever more power to the centre.
The Internet makes representative democracy (which, most of the time, isn’t democracy at all) completely unworkable. A new, more genuinely pluralistic model must be found.
And given your brilliance and US graduate elite experience, your proposal?
We may be in the last week of August, but it is still the silly season, so here comes the old question of who should elect Conservative and Labour Party Leaders.
It was Conservative MPs who chose John Major, William Hague, Michael Howard, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak, while the party members presented a grateful nation with Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Take your pick.
It was considered that Howard, May and Sunak were self-evidently the only candidates, meaning that May and Sunak were appointed directly to the Premiership without a vote’s having been cast even among MPs, with any doubters dismissed as obvious lunatics.
Labour pulled the same trick with Gordon Brown, although at that time he would also have won a members’ ballot. But in 2020, the Parliamentary Labour Party had been all ready to secede, and to litigate for the party’s assets, if the plebs in the rank and file had not given it who it wanted, as they duly did
The 100-year blackout of the Left had been reimposed, so the only noises off that anyone would admit to being able to hear were from sniffy old Blairites. Those can hardly complain today, though. Beyond their wildest dreams is the means testing of Brown’s winter fuel payment, a key measure in cementing the enormous popularity that he enjoyed for many years, long after most voters had recognised that the Blairites’ own hero was a war criminal surrounded by crooks.
Well, now we have another Prime Minister who is a war criminal surrounded by crooks, and when he is not starving children, then he is freezing pensioners. The MPs and the party members both chose him, although at the present rate the MPs will soon be the only remaining members of the Labour Party. So again, and even before considering that Labour’s rules had been changed under Keir Starmer to make a contested Leadership Election effectively impossible, when it came to who should choose the Leader, then take your pick.
Absolutely brilliant analysis of the mother of all democracies in action…
Thank you.
Out of interest do you know who chose Churchill, or Atlee, or Thatcher (arguably our 3 best post-war PMs) ?
Starmer a war criminal? your point started off well but did unfortunately slide into hyperbole reducing it’s overall credibility, but anyway sometimes happens and we get carried away
No, encouraging a war crime is itself a war crime, and he encouraged the starvation of Gaza.
My comments are disappearing again.
Then they come back after a while – meanwhile the conversation has moved on.
Indeed.
You could say the same about the Tories, although the history is a bit different.
This problem arises because we don’t have a republic. At the moment the PM acts as a PM and as a figurehead. If we keep the monarchy, which we will, the problem of electing a PM will always be there.
Although Jeremy Corbyn would have been an excellent PM and Keir Starmer will not, party leaders should be chosen by their MPs. They represent the public not just party members, which makes their selection of party leader more in keeping with the views of the public and therefore more democratic.