The Times runs a good piece of digging on its front page this morning, reporting that 11 people who stood as candidates for rival left-wing party the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) at the election have signed up to Labour to vote in its leadership contest, without being caught by its vetting process. The party insists that it has a “robust system to prevent fraudulent and malicious applications and duplicate votes.” Members and supporters of other parties are supposed to be denied a vote. The problem for the party, amid a large-scale panic about entryism, is how on earth you decide who the wrong sort of voter is in an open contest.
However many of the 70,000 new registered and affiliated supporters are or aren't entryists, the idea to open up the contest clearly isn't proceeding as planned. Harriet Harman, interim leader of the Labour party, said in May that leadership contenders should have to impress “not the politically obsessed public, the people like us, but the people who don’t decide about their choice of MP and choice of government until they have to.” The problem is that those people were hardly going to sign up to a grinding, squabbly mess of a race between three people they thought they'd booted off their screens forever and one they'd never seen before.
Instead, the new supporters are political obsessives—and largely, it seems, not the kind who go to think tank roundtables and get hot and bothered about public service reform. Many of them are the other kind; the grubby ones who go to marches and get hot and bothered about overturning the dead hand of capitalism. The YouGov poll which first put left-winger Jeremy Corbyn in the lead had 57 per cent of affiliates and supporters voting for Corbyn as their first preference, against 40 per cent of full members. The party mainstream is panicking because the arrival of a flood of supporters even more removed from the ordinary voter than the staffers of Labour HQ means the contest is now not being fought on who can lead the party to victory in 2020, but on what its very soul should look like.
From where I'm sitting, the decision to give any old student blogger or climate change campaigner or whoever a stake in Labour's future was a bad one. It isn't unreasonable for a party to say "in order to decide where we're going next, you have to show you're in it for the long haul." The Lib Dems have been signing up new members by the bucketload, but they're encouraging them to get properly involved in the "fightback." In trawling for new supporters, you might catch a few future stars who would otherwise have been missed, but you'll also dredge up a tonne of casuals who'll vote for what they want now, forget all about it and go somewhere else by 2020.
But that decision was made, and the party has to live with it. Telling MPs to check that new supporters "share Labour's values," as Harman has reportedly done, is meaningless. What are Labour's values? Are they Diane Abbott's? Tony Blair's? Ed Miliband's? You can root out the obviously dangerous types—Conservative writer Toby Young's personal "Tories for Corbyn" plot has been foiled, for example. You can (theoretically) root out members of other parties, though in practice this is reportedly proving tricky and could even be wrong headed in some cases. I spoke to a Green Party member at last week's Corbyn rally in Camden who joined the Greens because he felt Labour wasn't "socialist" enough, but thinks, in Corbyn, he sees someone he might vote for in 2020. Is he less deserving of a vote than the woman I spoke to there who left Labour in 2000 but might return to the party if Corbyn got in?
But even if you ignore the complexities and bar such people, there'll still be swathes of new supporters who don't know or care how their beliefs tally with those of the wider electorate, the history of the Labour party, or the aims of any of its MPs. Of course there will. Because if you open a contest, if you invite a "wide debate," you will have to confront views with which you are wholly uncomfortable and which don't serve your interests.
In that sense, then, this is the same old Labour. The party is allergic to the messiness of democracy. Ed Miliband wanted to work for ordinary people, but, in the event, ordinary people disagreed about what was best for them. Now those at the top of the party want to give everyone a stake in its future, as long as "everyone" only includes people in broad agreement with what that future should look like. Whoever emerges victorious from this contest doesn't just need to think about how to resolve internal battles on the left or the right. They need to ask why the party's plans so often falter when they crash up against that trickiest of obstacles: a whole load of independent minds.
However many of the 70,000 new registered and affiliated supporters are or aren't entryists, the idea to open up the contest clearly isn't proceeding as planned. Harriet Harman, interim leader of the Labour party, said in May that leadership contenders should have to impress “not the politically obsessed public, the people like us, but the people who don’t decide about their choice of MP and choice of government until they have to.” The problem is that those people were hardly going to sign up to a grinding, squabbly mess of a race between three people they thought they'd booted off their screens forever and one they'd never seen before.
Instead, the new supporters are political obsessives—and largely, it seems, not the kind who go to think tank roundtables and get hot and bothered about public service reform. Many of them are the other kind; the grubby ones who go to marches and get hot and bothered about overturning the dead hand of capitalism. The YouGov poll which first put left-winger Jeremy Corbyn in the lead had 57 per cent of affiliates and supporters voting for Corbyn as their first preference, against 40 per cent of full members. The party mainstream is panicking because the arrival of a flood of supporters even more removed from the ordinary voter than the staffers of Labour HQ means the contest is now not being fought on who can lead the party to victory in 2020, but on what its very soul should look like.
From where I'm sitting, the decision to give any old student blogger or climate change campaigner or whoever a stake in Labour's future was a bad one. It isn't unreasonable for a party to say "in order to decide where we're going next, you have to show you're in it for the long haul." The Lib Dems have been signing up new members by the bucketload, but they're encouraging them to get properly involved in the "fightback." In trawling for new supporters, you might catch a few future stars who would otherwise have been missed, but you'll also dredge up a tonne of casuals who'll vote for what they want now, forget all about it and go somewhere else by 2020.
But that decision was made, and the party has to live with it. Telling MPs to check that new supporters "share Labour's values," as Harman has reportedly done, is meaningless. What are Labour's values? Are they Diane Abbott's? Tony Blair's? Ed Miliband's? You can root out the obviously dangerous types—Conservative writer Toby Young's personal "Tories for Corbyn" plot has been foiled, for example. You can (theoretically) root out members of other parties, though in practice this is reportedly proving tricky and could even be wrong headed in some cases. I spoke to a Green Party member at last week's Corbyn rally in Camden who joined the Greens because he felt Labour wasn't "socialist" enough, but thinks, in Corbyn, he sees someone he might vote for in 2020. Is he less deserving of a vote than the woman I spoke to there who left Labour in 2000 but might return to the party if Corbyn got in?
But even if you ignore the complexities and bar such people, there'll still be swathes of new supporters who don't know or care how their beliefs tally with those of the wider electorate, the history of the Labour party, or the aims of any of its MPs. Of course there will. Because if you open a contest, if you invite a "wide debate," you will have to confront views with which you are wholly uncomfortable and which don't serve your interests.
In that sense, then, this is the same old Labour. The party is allergic to the messiness of democracy. Ed Miliband wanted to work for ordinary people, but, in the event, ordinary people disagreed about what was best for them. Now those at the top of the party want to give everyone a stake in its future, as long as "everyone" only includes people in broad agreement with what that future should look like. Whoever emerges victorious from this contest doesn't just need to think about how to resolve internal battles on the left or the right. They need to ask why the party's plans so often falter when they crash up against that trickiest of obstacles: a whole load of independent minds.
