Corbyn team ponders rule changes
I wrote on Wednesday about the first draft of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech and his autocue training. Now I hear some in the leadership team are determined that reform of party voting mechanisms should be floated at the conference in Brighton next week, possibly in the leader’s speech.
Out-numbered 10 to one in the Commons, Jeremy Corbyn wants to marshal the grassroots forces that backed him in such huge numbers to entrench changes in policy. The best way to do that is get the new radical membership to weigh in on the policy debate.
But votes at conference are divided 50/50 between the membership and trade unions and unions will be resistant to seeing that diluted. They want to retain a say where their views may diverge from the grassroots, as on Trident, where some of the unions find themselves going against their ideological instincts to dump the deterrent because of the need to represent defence industry workforces.
So what to do?
One plan that has been talked about in the leader’s circle is the idea of consultative online ballots of the membership on policy areas that come up between conferences like, say, the government’s bill on welfare reform.
The unions would retain some sort of filter on the decision to call a specific membership plebiscite because it would have to go through the NEC. They could potentially stop a plebiscite which they thought went against their interests. There could be an understanding that these are not constant push-button polls but limited to say a couple a year.
The status of the plebiscite might technically be “consultative”, testing the mood of the movement, but those who are backing this move would intend it to be decisive, putting pressure on MPs to back the membership line and drop their resistance to policy shifts.
For years the Blairites thought widening the consultation on policy or personnel in Labour served their purposes. They backed the nod towards primaries which the £3 sign-ups for the leadership selectorate involved. They talked of dissolving the union presence at conference.
The argument ran that the further you got away from fanatical activists who run meetings and devolve to the masses, the greater the chance you tap into a reservoir of middle-ground opinion. Some old hands on the right always warned against that. Now they may get another taste of what they, perhaps recklessly, wished for.
Jeremy Corbyn and his critics are working out how to out-manoeuvre each other. The right talks of giving him time and space to fail, suggesting it won’t be hard to see their fingers crossed behind their backs as they go through the motions of campaigning for Labour next May across the UK. Their interests now lie in defeat in Scotland, Wales, London and the council elections.
The left talks of cementing in policy changes and rule changes that capitalise on the more left-wing grassroots that have emerged. Neither side knows for sure how fast they need to work.
But Jeremy Corbyn has the support of the unions, the NEC and the membership (I’m told centrists on the NEC feel opposing the leader is the ultimate deterrent and not to be used lightly, giving Mr Corbyn a majority on the committee). The call he has to make is how much he risks making his talk of consensus look like no more than “talk” if he pushes hard to get policy change quickly through new routes like calling a special one-off rules conference, for instance.
Against that is the judgement call on how quickly you need to move before the centre right gets its act together and comes after you. The May elections get talked about as the moment of test. Some Corbyn critics say they’d have to let Jeremy Corbyn have two autumn conferences before they could move against him.
But with Progress, the Blairite pressure group, declaring the death of New Labour you’re reminded just how fluid things are both for the new dissidents as well as the new power in the land.
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