and successful party leader who has no wish to go. The best that can be
hoped is that the underperforming leader, long in office, can be indirectly
persuaded to do so.
19 Thomas Quinn, ‘Electing the Leader: The British Labour Party’s Electoral College’, British
Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6, 2005: 333–52.
Labour’s changing party structures
Tony Blair radically reordered Labour policy, but did less to remake
Labour’s organisation. In government after 1997, other than speak at it,
use it to run campaigns and occasionally seek support from it, he often
ignored it. Blair made few attempts to advance the careers of his supporters and made no effort to develop an extra-parliamentary cohort. Many
of the changes which empowered Blair predated him as leader. Neil
Kinnock had asserted the policy-making prerogatives of the leader and
his shadow cabinet, while John Smith had forced Labour to embrace ‘one
member, one vote’ in the selection of parliamentary candidates and the
election of the leader and deputy leader. Blair implemented party reforms
that were imposed from the top of the party down and, in the case of
women’s representation and the balance of constituency and trade union
voting at conference, promoted from the bottom up.20 As an example of
bottom-up reform, the introduction of quotas which ‘transformed
women’s representation at every level of the party’21 (not least in the
House of Commons), which had been argued for since the 1980s, owed
little to Blair. While being personally uneasy about all-women shortlists
for parliamentary selections, he might have backed the idea, but the
impetus was due to others. Similarly, when Scottish and Welsh devolution placed key policies in these nations beyond the reach of Whitehall,
one additional and unintended consequence was to partially re-federalise
the Labour Party, bringing new life to the Scottish and Welsh components
of the national party.22
When changes in a party’s organisational form are sponsored by the
parliamentary leader they are usually ‘motivated by the desire to enhance
the policy making autonomy of the leadership’23 Other than choosing
between leadership nominees occasionally presented by the parliamentary party (with only four such contests being held between 1981
and 2006), Labour Party members have fewer, increasingly nominal,
consultative rather than decisional rights over policy formation. Labour
election campaigns are now expensively fought out at the centre, local
20 Meg Russell, Building New Labour: The Politics of Party Organization (London: Palgrave,
2005).
21 Ibid., p. 237.
22 Martin Laffan and Eric Shaw, ‘British Devolution and the Labour Party: How a National
Party Adapts to Devolution’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9, 2007:
55–72.
23 Paul Webb, ‘Party Responses to the Changing Electoral Market in Britain’, in Peter Mair,
Wolfgang Müller and Fritz Plasser (eds.), Political Parties and Electoral Change (London:
Sage, 2004), p. 29.
campaigns tend to be adjuncts of the national campaign, and candidate
selection is strongly influenced by the party machine.
Leaders, should they be both electorally popular and politically successful, are strengthened when they control policy, campaign strategy
and the management of finance and party administration. Such leadership prerogatives, never under the sole control of the leader, are delegated
to a party apparatus which is dominated by (or in synch with) the party
leadership. Under Blair, Labour’s general secretary essentially worked for
him and his circle, not for the wider party. In 1994, having persuaded
Larry Whitty to step aside, Blair explicitly told the National Executive
Committee (NEC) that the appointment of Tom Sawyer as his replacement was now the responsibility of the leader, not the NEC. Sawyer,
Margaret McDonagh, David Treisman and Matt Carter, all selected by
Blair and his advisers, worked for Blairite officials, not the NEC. Blair’s
last general secretary, Peter Watt, worked with and to the Prime
Minister’s staff even if he had not been Downing Street’s preferred candidate for the post. Previous Labour leaders, notably Harold Wilson and
Jim Callaghan, had the party general secretary and other senior staff
appointed by an NEC over which they sometimes had little influence.
Blair’s creation of the Labour Party chair in 2001, a cabinet post and a
prime-ministerial appointment, angered Labour traditionalists. This
attempt to coordinate the government and the party, like most Blairite
institutional innovations, did not amount to much. Critics charged Blair,
by appointing successive party chairs Charles Clarke, John Reid, Ian
McCartney and Hazel Blears, with ‘controlling’ the party, but in truth the
party was already under the thumb of the party headquarters. Blair’s
appointment of Blairite loyalist Alan Milburn as Labour’s election coordinator in 2004 foundered, but only because he was perceived to be an
enemy of an empowered Gordon Brown who froze him out of the campaign when the Blair–Brown ‘dream ticket’ became the face of Labour’s
election pitch.
Labour Party structures have been significantly altered under successive leaders. Under Blair the NEC, while retaining some agenda-setting
functions at the annual conference, no longer has an extensive political
role. It does not make policy or scrutinise government decisions and it
cannot challenge ministers. It was supposedly tasked with administrating
the party, but actual control over party personnel, finance and election
strategy was exercised by party officials appointed by Blair or his trusted
aides and reporting upwards to the Prime Minister and his staff (and
often keeping the Chancellor, Gordon Brown in the decision-making
loop).The Labour Party conference, under recent rule changes, can only
support or reject policy proposals emerging from the NEC or the
National Policy Forum. Such proposals are unamendable and take precedence over other conference decisions. Conference may debate a matter
of topical importance, but the right to do so is pre-screened by party
officials who successfully pressurised delegates to avoid contentious subjects, particularly Iraq after 2003. Under Blair the conference weighting of
votes was reformed in favour of a 50:50 split between constituencies and
trade unions, something that marked a considerable shift away from the
90:10 split that previously favoured the trade unions. This made conference more legitimate, but gave constituency delegates ‘more power, but
over less’.24 Conference, for so long the party arena where left and right,
the parliamentary party, constituency activists and trade union barons
fought it out for control of the party, is now, like the Conservative conference, an advisory body, at best a sounding board for the leadership.
Of course, it remains to be seen if such changes persist bey
ond Blair.
However, Labour, whose members ‘retain important sanctions, whilst
leaders remain in control’,25 now operates an ‘individual’ not a ‘representational’ form of inner-party consultative democracy. Organised activists
have been supplanted by an atomised membership. Having always lacked
the practical power to instruct the parliamentary leadership, conference
effectively now lacks the theoretical right to do so, having become a ‘main
showcase for the Prime Minister, other members of the government and
for a review of progress and achievements’.26 Should, as happened on few
occasions, the party conference vote against the leadership (such as when
the 2002 party conference called for a review of PFI by 67% to 33%), ministers made it clear they would ignore the vote. Such was Blair’s command
of the conference – and so reliable was his base of support among a broad
swathe of party members – that Robin Cook observed there had been a
‘complete inversion of the traditional dynamics of conference votes.
Previously the platform relied upon the trade unions to keep some grip
on sanity, and to put down the more implausible constituency resolutions. Today, it is the constituency delegates who are the loyalists and who
stick by the platform even when the unions are rebelling.’27 In 2004 rail
re-nationalisation was supported by some 99.5% of trade unions, but
24 Russell, Building New Labour, p. 210.
25 Ibid., p. 283.
26 Labour Party, Labour into Power: A Framework for Partnership (London: Labour Party,
1997), p. 13.
27 Robin Cook, The Point of Departure: Diaries from the Front Bench (London: Pocket Books,
2003), p. 222.
only by 28% of constituency delegates. In 2006, conference opposed the
government’s use of private contractors in the NHS by 63% to 37%, but
with constituency delegates supporting the government by 62% to 38%
and trade unionists opposing by 87% to 13%. Such party conference
voting patterns would have astonished Hugh Gaitskell had they happened when he was Labour leader.
Some Labour Party policy deliberation might have been entrusted to
Labour’s National Policy Forum, a body representing MPs, ministers,
party members and trade unionists, but policy formation remained
firmly under the direction of ministers and their staffs. Some suggest that
the Policy Forum has ‘created new sites of dialogue between leaders and
members’28 but still the leadership has ‘the power of the drafter and the
agenda setter, it fixes the basic parameters of political acceptability. Wants
and demands that are deemed unacceptable will be suppressed or
deflected via the numerous gateways operated by official gatekeepers.’29
Labour’s extra-parliamentary party makes little contribution to sifting
policy options other than to endorse – and thereby legitimate – the
agenda presented to it by the party leadership. Such plebiscitory democracy empowers parliamentary leaders, particularly as older-style forms of
party democracy have been downgraded. Obviously, ‘the often disorganised and atomised mass membership of the party . . . is likely to prove
more deferential to the party leadership and more willing to endorse its
proposals. It is in this sense that the empowerment of the party on the
ground remains compatible with, and may actually serve as a strategy for,
the privileging of the party in public office.’30
Party membership
While still instinctively collectivist, well to the left of Tony Blair, 31 few
Labour Party members conform to the stereotypical leftist, inner-city,
bedsit-dwelling, polytechnic-lecturing Trotskyists of folk memory.
Under Blair Labour’s membership first rose significantly, but then fell
precipitously. From 265,000 in 1994 membership increased to 405,000 in
28 Russell, Building New Labour, p. 7.
29 Eric Shaw, ‘The Control Freaks? New Labour and the Party’, in Steve Ludlam and Martin
J. Smith (eds.), Governing as New Labour: Policy and Politics under Blair (London:
Palgrave, 2004), p. 61. See also Eric Shaw, ‘New Labour in Britain: New Democratic
Centralism?’, West European Politics, 25, 2002: 147–70.
30 Katz and Mair, ‘The Ascendancy of the Party in Public Office’, p. 129 .
31 See a YouGov poll published by the LabOUR Commission, in LabOUR, ‘Renewal’.
1997, but more than halved after 1997. At the end of 2002 Labour claimed
a membership of 248,294; in 2003, 214,592; in 2004, 201,374; in 2005,
198,026. According to one MP, Jon Cruddas, should this rate of decline
continue, Labour, having lost the equivalent of 27,000 members a year
since 2000, will have no members by 2013. Eight out of ten new members
apparently leave after a year. It was probably inevitable that those who
signed up to Blair-led Labour before 1997 (the majority of them creditcard supporters, not active members) would fall away, but the number of
members participating in party processes and events is now woefully low.
In 2006 some 178,889 ballot papers were distributed in the postal ballot
for the constituency section of Labour’s NEC but only 36,316 were
returned, a turnout of some 20%. Only 13,850 votes claimed the last
available of the six places when the winning candidate won fewer votes
than the person who came last in the first such election held in 1998. In
2002 only 12,000 London Labour Party members (a city with an official
population of over seven million) cast a vote in the ballot to select
Labour’s 2004 candidate for Mayor. In two recent all-member ballots to
choose the sitting MP to contest a new constituency replacing two safe
Labour seats, the successful candidate was selected in Gateshead by 138
votes to 117, and in Salford and Eccles by 133 votes to 118. This second
membership ballot, in a constituency which has a nominal Labour
majority of 12,000, claimed a 90% turnout. Such levels of participation
are the rule, not the exception.
Labour might have formed a Labour Supporters’ Network, a list composed of supporters who cannot vote in internal elections or stand as
Labour candidates, but a declining membership means a sharp decline in
its activist base. This is at its starkest in local government. In 1997 Labour
had over 10,000 local councillors, but in 2007 had less than 7,000. This
councillor base, the core from which party activists are drawn, has withered as Labour has performed badly at consecutive local elections and is
now at a thirty-year low. Of course, party membership across all types of
party is everywhere in steep decline. Such decline is considered by many,
not least by the Blair leadership, to be an unavoidable feature of modern
politics. While Labour’s membership decline owes something to disillusionment with Tony Blair, it also owes much to apathy and the transformation of parties into post-mass-membership organisations. There is,
however, evidence which
points to a ‘push’ of members away from Labour during its decade in government. For some people, their reasons for leaving were political and
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directly related to a dislike of specific policy positions decided by government (the most common cited being the war in Iraq). For many others,
there is clear evidence that members felt frozen out of the policy and decision making machinery of the party.32
Tellingly Hazel Blears, Blair’s loyalist Labour Party chair, admitted that
party members ‘feel left out. They don’t have a relationship with their
Labour government, other than what they read in newspapers.’33
Tony Blair’s ideal type of party, probably one financially sustained by
the state, would be backed by supporters, not members, and run by professionals reporting to the party leadership. It would be mobilised at election time and showcase the leadership at other times. Some say that
under Blair Labour, short of state funding, came close to such a model.
Party members are both resources and obstacles for any party leadership:
resources because they provide the personnel from which party elites are
drawn, legitimise the party in the eyes of the public, comprise a campaign
resource and, most importantly, form a necessary source of revenue;
obstacles because they have to be both serviced and managed, tend to the
radical and idealistic, and expect some say in determining the party’s
policy position. Blair, in common with all modern party leaders, would
have liked a mass membership and would have benefited from one, but
had no desire to delegate any form of responsibility or power to it.
Party finance
The income profile of all political parties has changed considerably over
the past thirty years. As Labour’s membership has halved, its spending has
almost trebled. By 2004 some 8% of Labour’s income came from
members’ subscriptions and 27% from trade union affiliation fees. In
the 1970s membership subscriptions had accounted for some 49% of
Labour’s income and in the 1980s trade unions provided some 75%. To
compensate for falling membership monies, while helping wean Labour
off politically damaging union largesse, Blair-led Labour sought funding
from corporations and wealthy individuals. Indeed, trade union opposition to much of Labour’s policy, particularly its commitment to
Thatcherite privatisation and a flexible labour market, meant some
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