Securing the Oligarchy

Here we go again. The Times reports that leading figures in the Labour Party are trying to strip members of their say over the party's leader. This, apparently, is to avoid the party succumbing to a "Liz Truss moment". Instead, who gets to be leader will be in the gift of Labour's MPs. Just like it was before 1983.

The Labour right are fans because it makes politics easier. With candidate selection more or less under their complete control, the exclusion of the membership from voting on the direction the party should guarantee the party carries on providing careers for the chosen few in perpetuity. The chance of a left wing upsurge depriving the party oligarchy of their right to seats, briefcases, and ministerial cars is sunk forever. And it will be another step along the road of making Labour a party that can always be relied on, as far as capital is concerned.

There is a feeble political justification for going backwards on party democracy, ably set out earlier by "Red Historian" Robert Saunders. The parliamentary party is elected and they represent constituents. Therefore, the MPs are best placed to select the leader. Party members, however, are self-selecting, represent nobody, and aren't accountable.

Let's assume this is an argument made in good faith. Parties are not made out of complete randoms. As Engels once put it, parties are more or less expressions of classes and class fractions. Or, if mainstream political science is more your jam, parties correspond to cleavage structures. I.e. Every society is divided in a variety of ways, and political parties are responses to those structures. In Britain, as the world's first capitalist state in which the relationship between church and state, centre and periphery, and city and country are settled (more or less), class is unresolved and that's the axis around which British parties revolve. Bearing this in mind, the Tory membership tend to be more propertied and petit bourgeois than the general population. Labour's membership is more proletarian, which encompasses wage and salary earners from the organised workers movement to professional and managerial layers. Other parties have their own mixes and class compositions, which tends to condition their outlook and policies.

Party members therefore are not isolated cells swimming in an undifferentiated political soup. By and large, they are drawn from the layers that look to that party. To politics they bring their lived experiences, their views, and their interpretation of what their interests are. There is a tendency toward correspondence between these and the principles and objectives of their party, and are what they bring to bear when they participate in leadership elections, candidate selections, internal elections, policy debates, and party activism. This isn't a formal accountability mechanism, but what's important here is the weight of tradition, family histories, relationships outside the party, community, and other ties. Contrary to aspersions cast on members, they have very strong claims to being representative because they are more typical of the public.

Much stronger than MPs, in fact. Members provide the personnel from which candidates are selected. But the process of becoming an MP creates a constitutional fiction that poorly masks the obvious truth: that being a representative makes one less representative. As an honourable member, in 2024 you begin parliamentary life on £91k. You have a status that makes you a VIP. You are courted by organisations and businesses in your constituency as someone who matters. You are in receipt of gifts, freebies, and access to other notables. You are taken seriously. Well known journalists might want to know you. And your working life is spent inside the rarefied world of the House of Commons. The only people in the rest of the country you now resemble are professional/managerial layers. Conditions of work, money, status differentiate the parliamentarian from the people they represent. But doesn't the function of an MP give them a better understanding of politics? After all, their office is in receipt of all kinds of correspondence. They have to deal with the issues placed before them by constituents, whether they voted for them or not. This overview should afford them a privileged perspective. MPs have the need to exercise their judgement on the basis of these facts of political life - facts those back in the constituency party or association only have a dim awareness of, and can't possibly be expected to have a say over.

These conceits spiral out more conceits. Such as the idea MPs sit above the party that got them elected. Because of the constituency function, plenty of MPs think they're in the Commons because of their record as campaigners and being known in their areas. Only a few can make this claim with any credibility. The overwhelming majority of MPs who were elected last month got in because of the party label that was next to their name. They were voted in because of their party's association with interests, policies, ideas, etc. MPs like to think they're special, but they're the beneficiaries of collective decision-making made around collective preferences.

That MPs are the only ones capable of determining who a party's leader is an ideological exercise in the truest sense. This fundamentally distorts the workings of the most basic of political processes. And by pure coincidence it reflects the attitudes and interests of those set to benefit the most.

Nevertheless, it's one thing to want this and another to get it through conference. Leaders of affiliated trade unions will have their concerns, because it means surrendering their powers of patronage. That is, unless something significant can be offered in exchange. Like a seat at a tripartite table that would determine economic strategy, industrial activism, and collective bargaining across sectors of industry. Something that Keir Starmer has toyed with in the recent past.

What is obvious is how it would accelerate the decomposition of the Labour Party itself. Allowing the parliamentary party to perpetuate itself as an unaccountable clique disincentivises membership, attenuates the the representative correspondence between the party leadership and the constituency of the party, and strengthens the (already strong) tendency of Labourism to work against the interests of those it's supposed to champion. It's a recipe for dissolution, and on the basis of its shallow victory, a gift to those on the left looking to win over Labour's discarded support. Wouldn't it be funny if Labour MPs' moves to insulate themselves from political pressures makes them more vulnerable to defeat?

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