This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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By crushing party democracy, Labour may sign its own death warrant
By: []
Date: 2021-09
Imagine the scene.
Britain is emerging from a long, painful pandemic, which has revealed quite how hard our public services have been kicked over the past decade.
Brexit is a domino of disasters, independence movements are gaining momentum, and the deep corruption of Boris Johnson’s regime is becoming clear.
A global climate conference is coming to the UK in a couple of months, as concern about environmental breakdown burns more intensely than ever.
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Black Lives Matter protests have shifted public attitudes and a new generation is deeply sceptical about the political and economic system it has grown up into.
Even Joe Biden, the Mr Establishment who finally made it to the White House, has recognised a shift in public mood and has broken ranks with neoliberal orthodoxy. He is confronting the data giants and has withdrawn troops from Afghanistan.
At the same time, authoritarians rule over billions of people. President Xi is pouring cement into the foundations of his growing global megalopolis. Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Modi and Putin are trying to make the world stand to their attention. Trump may have been defeated, but the shadow of authoritarian capitalism still darkens the planet.
And in response, a flourishing of democratic imagination has brought ideas that were once seen as radical into the centre of political debates everywhere.
But somehow, Labour cannot catch the Tories in the polls.
Then, a Labour staffer in a meeting somewhere in the party’s HQ pops a finger up and says: “Let’s get rid of the ‘one member, one vote’ system for electing our party leader.”
The thing that’s surprising isn’t that someone suggested the move, since the right wing of the party no doubt sees it as a way to prevent a left-winger like Jeremy Corbyn from ever being elected leader again. What’s astonishing, if media reports are to be believed, is the suggestion that Keir Starmer has given it his backing.
Unintended effects
The one member, one vote (OMOV) system for Labour leadership elections was adopted in 2015 after a campaign to do so – ironically enough – by the Right of the party. The aim was to curtail trade union influence.
Under the previous electoral college system, three parallel elections were held: among MPs, among members, and among unions and other affiliated groups. Each election was allocated a third of the overall vote. This meant that a couple of hundred Labour MPs had as much say between them as tens of thousands of party members. It also meant that if, say, you were an MP, a party member, a trade union member and a member of an affiliated group all at once, you would get a total of four votes.
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