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Editorial: Labour and the coming elections: trying to lose?

LABOUR’S election campaign is running up against the difficulty of mobilising supporters it has disenfranchised and insulted.

The resignation of 11 executive members from the Glasgow Kelvin constituency party, including its chair Pauline Bryan, is a protest at the contemptuous way in which the locally chosen candidate Hollie Cameron has been removed and somebody else imposed in her place.

The 11 say they will not be campaigning in the Holyrood seat.

It is not doing much better south of the border, where the lack of democratic choice in a candidate for Hartlepool — Dr Paul Williams, the former Stockton South MP, was imposed in a “longlist” of one — has provoked anger.

Unite leader Len McCluskey says it “beggars belief,” while noting it is part of a pattern: “At the moment in terms of the internal democracy of our party, nothing is surprising.”

The decision follows Labour’s intervention in Liverpool to disqualify the entire all-women shortlist for mayor. Nothing approaching an adequate explanation of that decision has been offered.

A right-wing saw of the Jeremy Corbyn years was that the party membership were less representative of the wider population than MPs, whose election by the public conferred on them greater democratic legitimacy. The current insistence on central control of candidate selections suggests a similarly low opinion of Labour members. 

There were always a number of problems with the argument — opinion polls on issues such as public ownership showed it was often MPs and not members who were out of touch. Probably the most dramatic indication of MPs’ insulation from public opinion was Brexit, where two thirds of Labour constituencies voted Leave in the 2016 referendum despite almost universal support for Remain in the Parliamentary party. 

Labour paid the price in the starkest possible manner in 2019 with the loss of the Red Wall. Dr Williams, a vocal opponent of Brexit, who argued for a second referendum despite his Stockton South constituents having voted by more than 60 per cent to Leave, is a classic example, though he signed a post-defeat letter to the Observer blaming Corbyn and attacking the party’s support for nationalisation and public-spending increases.

So his selection for Hartlepool, which voted by almost 70 per cent to leave the EU, might seem a gift to Tories who are gung ho about taking the seat. 

Dr Williams is a GP, we are in the middle of a pandemic and Labour has focused its election messaging so far on opposing the Tory pay cut for nurses (while declining to support nurses’ actual pay demands). A logic is discernible. 

But gratuitously offending members by refusing them a role guarantees a lacklustre local campaign — many members may feel, with former Momentum co-ordinator Laura Parker, that “we deserve to lose.”

The same squandering of political opportunity applies in Scotland, where the SNP’s reputation has been damaged by the rift between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, with polls even showing a 12-point drop in support for independence since Sturgeon gave evidence to the Salmond inquiry. A Labour Party that provokes committed constituency-party officers to quit in disgust is in no position to exploit the SNP’s difficulties.

The tragedy is that the pandemic has thrown up huge questions about the nature of our economy and society, movements such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion indicate passion and political engagement on a large scale, and Labour’s hundreds of thousands of members could spread the message that change is both possible and necessary nationwide.

Yet they are so muzzled that they cannot hope to do that through their own party, which, as McCluskey observes acidly, no longer appears to stand for anything. Many continue to do valuable political work — but, of necessity, as trade unionists or activists in tenants’ unions or peace or anti-racist campaigns rather than as Labour members.

Unless that changes, Labour’s outlook in the local elections looks bleak.

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