Once again, on the electoral college

Over the weekend the Mail on Sunday reported that the Labour leadership was planning to bring rule changes to Labour conference to ‘strip rank-and-file party members of their key role in picking the next Labour leader in favour of more power for MPs’, ie to reintroduce an electoral college for the election of leader. ‘Critics also claim that key aide Morgan McSweeney, campaign manager for the general election, is masterminding the leadership rule change,’ the MoS reported.

Keir Starmer’s office sought to abolish one-person-one-vote in 2021, proposing an electoral college instead, but pulled back at the last minute.

Noises about a plan to change the way the leader of the Labour Party is elected have been around since before Labour won the general election. The Guardian reported in June that there are:

‘strong rumours in party circles that the next conference – likely the first with Labour in government – will be a moment of maximum strength to deliver some even more dramatic and controversial rule changes. A key ambition of some is to give MPs the sole power to choose the next Labour leader if the change takes place while the party is in government.’

Given the revived reports of an attempt to push through a rule change, I have republished below an argument originally written in 2021 in response to the first effort by the leadership to reduce the power of Labour members via the reintroduction of the electoral college. It first appeared on Medium in September 2021. Although some of the specifics date from that time, the main arguments remain relevant.

“The electoral college should be left in the past”

Simon Fletcher || 21 September 2021

Any attempt to turn the clock back to an electoral college would be a totally unacceptable diminution of the rights of Labour Party members. For those who do not understand what it means, it involves handing a golden vote to each Labour MP, worth thousands more votes than those of ordinary members and affiliated supporters. However it is dressed up, its effect would be to favour a parliamentary elite above the rest of the party.

Labour needs to stop talking about itself and its rules, end the internal war and focus on inspiring the electorate. But this latest row ensures that Labour goes into its conference doing the opposite. It is a tedious and uninspiring inward turn when we should be facing outward to the public.

Most disgracefully the plans for the electoral college revival have only emerged in the final few days before Labour party conference, reducing down to almost zero any opportunity for meaningful discussion. When there was an attempt to abolish the post of deputy leader on the eve of the 2019 conference one of the strongest arguments against that plan was the lack of real discussion and consultation. The same can be said for this timetable too.

In the past, each of the major changes to how Labour elects its leader involved genuine consultation across the party over many months. Ed Miliband, for example, announced his plan to review how its trade union link worked in July 2013. The subsequent Collins Review took until a special conference in March the following year, during which time all parts of the party were able to set out their case. From that process came the present system of one person, one vote, in which the duplication of voters was removed and where every vote was finally made equal.

The electoral college is an idea that really ought to have had its day. It is an earlier response to a much older problem. When it was introduced at the beginning of the 1980s — also involving a special conference — the electoral college was an advance. Up until that point the leader of the Labour party was elected purely by the parliamentary party. An electoral college was the first breach in the wall that made way for members to have a vote. It was flawed. Votes were not equal. But nonetheless the college was the first stage in a democratic advance, fiercely resisted by those who believed it gave the wider labour movement more of a say and would hand the left too much influence over who became leader — and potentially the Prime Minister. It is one of the ironies of this week’s revivalism that the electoral college’s proponents now seem to see it as a protective barrier against the grassroots.

We have now gone beyond the original problem that gave birth to the electoral college. MPs don’t decide alone; members have equal votes. Going back to an earlier model is a retrograde step.

Under John Smith the debate about party democracy moved to the question of one member, one vote — OMOV. In the end, the Smith-era reforms stopped some considerable way short of changing the electoral college to full OMOV but the principle of one member, one vote had been raised and has never gone away.

The electoral college has been reintroduced to controversy before. Having decided not to completely block Ken Livingstone from standing in the London mayoral selection of 1999–2000, the party leadership instead adopted a fix. One member, one vote was jettisoned in favour of an electoral college for London. Unhappily, the Minister for London — Nick Raynsford — had previously told the House of Commons that the selection of Labour’s candidate would be by OMOV. To widespread scorn, an electoral college was imposed instead. Trade unions called the leadership’s bluff. Starting with the TGWU and the FBU, the unions announced they would ballot their members, even though the leadership did not require it. Wherever a trade union balloted its members, they voted for Ken Livingstone. Sixty per cent of the party members voted for Livingstone. The selection itself became a low point in rule-stretching and fixing. We calculated at the time that Ken Livingstone received around 74,000 votes to Frank Dobson’s 24,000. Frank Dobson was declared the winner.

The principal mechanism for London’s Kafkaesque outcome was the golden vote of London Labour MPs. Labour’s process became a laughing stock. Labour MPs, Assembly candidates and MEPs had blocked the candidate favoured by members and trade unionists and who was also — crucially — the most popular potential Labour candidate with the public. The party leadership was prepared to adopt an undemocratic system to stop Labour voters’ choice for mayor of London. Such chicanery should be consigned to the movement’s history books, not its future.

As a footnote to the London fiasco, when Labour next came to select its candidate for the mayoralty, so discredited had the electoral college become that the MPs’ section was abolished altogether.

Some will attempt to argue that an electoral college will enhance the rights of the trade unions. Don’t be fooled. Presently the vote of a trade union supporter of the party has exactly the same weight as that of a Member of Parliament. Under the electoral college things would be very different — an MP would cast a vote very many times larger than an individual member or supporter. Through their nominations, MPs already get to decide who is on the ballot. Their elevated status does not need further enhancement. Unite’s new General Secretary, Sharon Graham, is right when she says that the electoral college proposal is ‘unfair, undemocratic and a backwards step for our party.’

If, during the leadership election, Keir Starmer had proposed to return to the MPs’ golden vote, he would have been comprehensively defeated in that election.

Those Labour strategists who want the party to seize the agenda on the economy, climate, work and public services ought to be seething that an unnecessary row about rules for future leadership elections has now taken centre stage in the week before conference.

Some members who voted for Keir Starmer may feel out of loyalty that they should give him the benefit of the doubt over this latest episode. That would be wrong. It is about members’ rights now and in the future: the electoral college should be stopped, and left in the past.