I'm opposed to primaries - and irked that LabourList and Progress are pushing them without consultation

Paul Afshar: I set out my objections to primaries here - http://www.progressonline.org.uk/Magazine/article.asp?a=4812

Jessica Asato - We obviously want the same thing, but just have slightly different ideas as to how to get there. I am prepared to give primaries a trial - I do not pretend to have all the answers and accept that I could be wrong here. At least you (and Alex) have helped dispel my fears about being railroaded into this, and I thank you for that.

But as to my assertion that a change of voting leads to a change in campaign methods leads to greater involvement in the party; clearly recruitment and participation are more likely if there is seen to be an active Labour Party in your area. Part of what we do when we canvass and leaflet is attract interested people - impossible if we are not visiting an area.

I still struggle to see primaries as viable in some areas, and wonder what the tax-payer will think of footing the bill for what could be seen as a vanity exercise.

Hi Julian - glad to see you shifting slightly!

I don't think that either LabourList or Progress ever suggested that it was a done deal! As I said in an earlier post - it's still hard to see how the NEC (and the unions) would accept the idea of primaries because they would take so much power away from the centre. It's just not what centralised organisations do!

And I don't think I will be able to convince you that primaries will increase membership unless we have a few pilots - would you at least let us campaign for that? And then if they are an abject failure we could go back to the drawing board? My support for them, however, is not on the basis of increasing membership, but going back to the central argument that we need to increase the democratic engagement of the public over the candidates who seek office in their name. When the average turnout in Labour Party selections is 40, and constituencies average 70,000 electors, this equals a democratic deficit which we need to overcome. Even if 2,000 local Labour supporters were involved in a primary, that would be better than the current situation.

On electoral reform - as I said before, you can't just assert that it will 'help reverse the exodus from our ranks'- where is your evidence? What it will do is ensure that people's democratic preferences are better represented on the green benches, and you are right that it will help to make every seat a contested seat, rather than a handful of marginals. But we still had first past the post when we had over a million members in the 50s, so I'm not really sure that it's the voting system which is the problem here in that respect. The Labor Party in Israel exists under a very proportional system and their membership is decimated partly because of their electoral fortunes.

Only by reaching out directly to the public and inviting them in to participate will we start the climb back to understanding their hopes and fears. Primaries is one way, among many others, which might help.

Julian,

Apologies if I've missed this but what is your objection to primaries themselves. Your objection seems to be based on them being used for calculated political purposes, but what is the ACTUAL objection to the mechanism itself?

Agree with your sentiment - we do need, and are having, a debate.

Paul

I do not have a complete closed mind on primaries, and am prepared to debate the various points. I am still inclined against them but am not so opposed as to make a big fuss. What I was irked about was the language coming out suggested that it was a done deal for Labour that we were going down this route.

Convince me that primaries will increase membership and I will campaign for them as well. As it is, I still hold that altering our voting system will alter how we campaign. Targetting was an excellent strategy for winning three elections, but it did give us, as an unfortunate by-product, reasons to ignore huge swathes of the electorate. Electoral reform will, I am sure, help reverse the exodus from our ranks.

I accept that electoral reform and primaries are not mutually exclusive.

Hi Julian, as you and I have discussed before - being a supporter of primaries does in no way preclude you from being a supporter of electoral reform. As you know, Progress has been one of the partners of Vote for a Change, and we have been pushing primaries, along with Citizens' Convention, elected mayors and greater powers for select committees etc. It's part of a package of measures we think could help to reinvigorate our democratic process. But primaries are in the news at the moment because of expenses, not because Labour is trying to follow the Tories. The Tories have been holding primaries for over two years now.

But one thing electoral reform is not likely to do is increase Labour Party membership. There is absolutely no evidence for that. Just because we will do more pavement politics, doesn't mean that more people will join the party. The point David Lammy was trying to make was that people do not join membership organisations unless they feel really engaged with it. You can't create that engagement simply by having a conversation on the doorstep. There has to be something more tangible. Which is why a vote in a primary is more compelling from my perspective. It may not work either - the experience of PASOK suggests it might - but just because it hasn't been proven, doesn't mean we shouldn't try it.

I think that we've had enough conversation about how you cover the costs, so can we start from the basis that you put caps on individual spend and the actual costs are ideally funded by the taxpayer?

Finally - it's right that in the end many people will vote for the party rather than the person, but voters also want to know the person who is representing them. Primaries can help to get people to know the character and values of candidates long before the election - surely this is a good thing? This doesn't have to turn into a beauty pageant.

Hi Richard Blogger,

I don't know very much about the Bedford Mayoral by-election - can you tell me more about why you think it failed? But just to be clear primaries cover a range of selection processes - so in the US many primaries are indeed caucuses, where supporters of the Democrats or Republicans get together in a room and debate for hours about who they want their candidate to be.

No, the public don't get to choose who their candidate will be in an election - they get to choose which party they will support. Only if we introduced STV, would this start to become the case, but even then the five who made the ballot would still have had to undergo a shortlisting process.

And Totnes looks like it's going to be more typical of the Tories' technique - they are now using it for Gosport. Of course this is partly cynical - the two MPs involved are the most outrageous examples of Tories with expenses. But if you were to fund all-postal ballots through taxation then you'd be able to hold primaries for all parties on the same day without one having an advantage over the other.

And the reason why I think primaries will raise membership is because under our system, members will still get to choose the shortlist. For safe seats under our current system you will be whittling down an average of 40 candidates to around five or six. This still counts as an important part of ensuring that the candidates who go to the public in the primary are Labour through and through. I expect you'll get the left and the right of the party trying to ensure they have a candidate on the shortlist so they can campaign for them in the primary, and candidates who try and garner different support from different parts of the party as well. This could help to increase the diversity of people ending up on the final shortlist. Those people who have registered as Labour supporters may eventually feel that they would like to have a say in this part of the contest as well. But it would also give us a base of people who we know support us and who we can encourage to join. Essentially, the further we reach out to people, the more we're likely to find new members.

I'm glad this article has gone up - I'm totally undecided on primaries myself and have to admit I was annoyed at the headline on the LunchtimeList email for the David Lammy article saying 'We agree on the need for primaries' or something to that extent.

We have to be careful from thinking any debate online or in small groups in Compass or Progress or whoever reflects wider opinion in the party or the public.

I read a Toynbee article the other week that said 'like most other Labour supporters, Umunna supports primaries...' and read out a list of things, about one or two I agreed with and the rest I either didn't or hadn't made up my mind on.

Good on Alex for posting this too! :)

I have a number of issues with primaries, but do see that it is not all bad.

When the Tories first promoted the idea it struck me immediately that this was a ploy to avoid the trickier for them issue of electoral reform. I am a member of the ERS and LCER and need no persuading that our democracy needs an overhaul. Primaries strike me as Tory diversionary tactics on this.

As an activist and a holder of a number of branch, CLP, county and regional posts I need no reminding that our party is suffering as regards to dwindling membership and engagement. One of the reasons I think electoral reform is good for Labour is that because it will alter how we campaign and it will once again become a party that does the pavement politics and talks to all parts of Britain, not just those targeted because they live in a marginal.

I am very much an issues person. I am hoping that people will vote for me in Castle Point because I am Labour, not because I am Julian Ware-Lane. I do not like the beauty pageant that our politics is becoming. I see primaries as adding to the tabloid tendency.

Of course, there is the cost involved as well.

But why JOIN the party when you can vote for the candidate in any case? Primaries exist where party models are deliberately weak and party membership either small or not important in any sense other than a way of mobilising at election times.

I think its a way of trying to increase political participation without genuinely doing so. It is financially wasteful and open to abuse

The Bedford mayoral byelection is the one that comes to mind. I know this is being described now as a caucus to try and keep the primary "brand" clean, but if it was not a primary then why call it one initially? The public have their own chance to choose their candidate - it is the election. A primary changes very little. The Tories are trumpeting Totnes, but Totnes is not typical of their primaries, their primaries will be A-list contests. (Shaun Bailey was selected in a primary, but he was the preferred candidate anyway.)

I don't see how you can say that primaries will raise membership. After all, supporters (rather than members) will be selecting the candidate so it means that there'll be one less reason to become a member.

On a positive note, open primaries keep Iain Dale out of Westminster.

Hi Mike, there's nothing about a British system of primaries which would necessarily move us closer to an American system. And to be honest, I don't know about you, but when the only questions we ask on the doorstep are 'do you vote Labour' that seems to be only geared towards winning elections. I think we're there already.

Second, I didn't join the Labour Party to vote for a candidate or for the Leader. I didn't know that you had such a right! I joined because I supported Labour's values and direction. I'm not sure that giving the final say on a shortlist chosen by party members is going to stop people from joining the party.

I agree on the lack of decision-making power and would support a reform of the party's policy-making process.

Finally, most of us who support primaries also firmly support the party model. In fact we think that primaries could help to save the party because it could attract more people to join because they will see that there's a point to getting involved in politics. If the local party still gets to choose the shortlist I don't think that politics will be reduced to 'local niceties' as you say. I expect there will still be hard questions asked about people's commitment to equality, social justice and the Party.

Alan, I agree with your concerns about crooks and posers. But they are a perennial problem. I don't see that primaries can solve them.

Personally I see that the selection process should be stricter and the selections should be better monitored.

- Candidates should be *local*: they should live in the locality and should demonstrate that they have genuinely lived there for a specified period (say, five years). Parachuting-in pisses off local people.
- Successful candidates should *represent*. It pisses off people when their 'representative' does not represent them. There should be recall rules based on a lack of attendance of debates and a poor voting record.

"I am sure they would not make a change like this without some sense that the grassroots wanted it".

Sorry Jessica, I wish I could believe that about the NEC.

Hi Richard Blogger, I'm not sure what you mean by primaries 'failing'? Presumably if the HQ candidate isn't selected this isn't a failure, it's just democracy?

And no, there's nothing about the debate around primaries which is a 'done deal'! There would certainly have to be a change in the NEC's position on selections, and given that there are CLP elected places on the NEC, I am sure they would not make a change like this without some sense that the grassroots wanted it. So no, the likeliest outcome for this debate in the Labour Party is that nothing will happen because change of any form is difficult.

I think that primaries are an imaginative approach to the difficult issue of raising grassroots membership. Once people have made the step of registering as a Labour supporter, the next step to join the party is much less hard. That's what PASOK did in Spain to increase their membership.

Julian,

I appreciate fully your position. It took a lot of reading and persuading for me to be supportive of this form of change. I was and am questioning motives all the way...
The success or failure of the idea depends completely on the detail. I would be very interested to see how the most ruthless and ambitious politicians can continue their stranglehold on safe seats may attempt to manipulate the proposal and twist it to favour them.

Let's be realistic here they are not famous for self-sacrifice are they? Obviously they willin the case of the Labour Party via the NEC ensure their futures and money are secure.

I would trust a younger, more diverse (occupationally at least) Labour Party Leadership to bring this in, I would not trust the motives of our current leadership.
It's too much constitutional power for them to manage responsibly. I don't think they can cope with it. I don't think the Tories could too.

I am however in favour of the idea in principle if brought in by people with a track record of behaving responsibly and increasing democratic representation and involvement.

The problem with primaries is that it moves us ever closer to an American style system where parties are nothing but election winning machines.

Already there is precious little point in being a member of a party given the lack of decision making power.

If you can't even select the candidates to stand for the party, why bother at all?

And no parties means a politics-free politics based on irrelevant local niceties and no real choice on the major issues. Its bad enough already and this will make it worse.

This juggernaut does seem to be treated as a "done deal" doesn't it?

I'm concerned that this seems to be the case too, especially when there are so many cases primaries failing.

In my opinion, they are a lazy approach to the more difficult (and perhaps impossible) issue of raising grassroots membership.

Hi Julian,

Just thought I’d try and respond to a couple of points since you gave us a bit of name check there!

1) Progress isn’t a democratic organisation, but we have always championed debate around constitutional reform, democratic engagement and party reform (well at least the 10 years I’ve been a member). Not all our members agree with everything we have supported, not least PR (good to see we agree on that!) but I think in general they know the direction we are likely to come from as an organisation. So from that perspective, I don’t think that starting a campaign for primaries was particularly a bold from the blue. Not least because we have been running the Obama Roadshow since the beginning of the year which has seen a number of those involved with the trip to Ohio last year to campaign for Obama travel to CLPs to talk about new ways of engaging the public.

2) We did show, I think, that there was growing support for primaries in the Labour Party, before we launched our campaign. David Lammy endorsed them a while back, so did Tessa Jowell and we brought forward our campaign launch when David Miliband came out in favour in a piece for Tribune magazine. We had support from a number of activists across the party as you can see here: http://www.progressonline.org.uk/consultations/primetime/ and since then Peter Mandelson, Ed Miliband and Andrew Adonis have said they should be looked at. Gordon Brown in his answers to the Speakers Conference said that there was a case for thinking about primaries. We didn’t decide one day to become ‘an organ’ for primaries, as you put it, it was a decision that we came to after looking at ways in which we might be able to do politics differently after the horror story of expenses.

3) Finally, a consensus has to be built! There have to be people who argue for and against and people who are persuaded (or not!) to support one side or the other – or put forward their own case for doing something completely different. What we, and I think LabourList, are doing is having an open debate. I make no bones about being in favour of primaries (on a specific British model mind you, not fully open primaries!) but I’m happy to be persuaded that this is all a big fad which won’t do anything to improve politics for anyone. So far though, I haven’t seen arguments which persuade me. I am sorry not to have responded to your primaries article which we published in the spirit of debate on our website: http://progressonline.org.uk/Magazine/article.asp?a=4812 I think many of the points you raise are dealt with by designing the system properly. I will try and take each of your points in turn when I find some time.

Jonathan - I think this is exactly the right question. The answer, in my view, is a version of primaries that are suitably to our own political institutions. I thought David Lammy did a great job earlier this week in laying out how we could impose expenditure caps and keep the overall cost of running primaries down to a minimum. We should also retain the ability of the party membership to select the shortlist.

There is also, I think, a third objective, which is to increase the number of active volunteers and party supporters. Since membership decline is common across most parties in western Europe, I think we need to move away from the subscription system we have at the moment and institute a more open system of party affiliation. This could go hand in hand with primaries.

It seems to me that there are two objectives here. Firstly to strengthen the process by which Party candidates are selected and secondly to increase the likelihood of members of the public voting for them. These are both laudable but is there not a 3rd way between the status quo and adapted American system which allows too much scope for manipulation by money in the context of our system. Also the idea that we can get voters to pay for a say in selecting candidates when we can barely ge them to vote seems a bit absurd!?

My own view is that if primaries weeded out of the selection process some of the crooks and posers we have already had inflicted on us, then they would be a good thing.

I listened to the arrogant self-righteous bluster of Tony McNulty on The World At One today, trying to paint his fraud, passed off as "small mistakes" by claiming for his parents home: though he "fully accepted" the report, and made some half-hearted "apology", he couldn't resist adding, in that high-handed way of his that it was "time to move on".

Indeed it is, McNulty. In your case to the JobCentre. As an MP you are a disgrace.

Worth mentioning that the recent primary for the Bedford mayoral byelection went wrong for the Tories. Their candidate lost, and that was after Cameron visited the Borough twice. The primary was conducted without postal votes so it was more like a caucus and there were allegations that the meeting was packed. At the Count, there wasn't a single conservative councillor present to support their candidate, and the local party is still split.

"The thing is, I cannot see how we can have got consensus because I do not recall being consulted."

*cough*EU*cough*

Hi Julian,

Thanks for writing this. No doubt many other people feel the same way and the more debate we have on this issue, the better.

Regarding LabourList, it is my view that primaries are very imortant as a method of expanding, not shutting off, our party democracy, as you know.

However, a few points on your post, if I may:

"I am neither old Labour nor new, and am in no faction".
I've written before that this is not about factionalism. Ken Livingstone, Chuka Umunna and other Compass members support primaries, while no doubt many members of Progress are opposed. Neither myself nor LabourList as an organisation are factional - on the contrary, we try to promote many different aspects of the Labour movement equally.
http://www.labourlist.org/the_debate_over_primaries_not_factionalism_instant_culture

Secondly, you rightly say that LabourList is not democratic, and imply it would be better if it was. It is impossible for LabourList to be democratic, as such, but it is pluralistic. So we have had articles arguing against primaries, too:
http://www.labourlist.org/primarily_missing_point_debate_primaries_distraction

Finally, and related to the last point, just because I say something, doesn't make that the specific LabourList editorial line - although I appreciate that it often looks that way. This is a space for all debate, hence publishing your views against the case for primaries.

A

Hi Labourlist

The call for primaries started with the torys and then taken up with labour MPS , I think ( so will pproberly be wrong) that its to do with local people and not just putting another career politicion into safe seats , In the end all parties will find a way rounfd them when it suits them .

I am in favour of open primeries , The tory selection was a local Dr ( i think) , Proberly more experianced than a former advisor .


ricki