Jon Lansman, secretary of the Labour Party Democracy Task Force, spoke to Martin Thomas.
Labour Party Democracy Task Force: http://labourdemocracy.wordpress.com.
MT: In recent months, over 40,000 people have joined the Labour Party. That's quite a big figure in terms of today's politics. What's your assessment?
JL: We don't really know the complexion of those numbers. Some may well be disaffected Lib Dems. However, it's pretty clear that some of them are people who've previously resigned from the party in disgust at previous shifts to the right and are now returning. That's good news. We want to get more returners, and we also want to recruit people who've never been members and are attracted to the prospect of the party shifting to the left. In particular that means young people, who're being seen to be far more politically active than for some time.
MT: One problems about attracting people to the Labour Party and keeping them involved is that Labour really doesn't have a functioning youth organisation at the moment. Do you think that the discussion now open on party structure should be looking at that?
JL: Absolutely. It's something that the Task Force needs to looking at. In discussions we've had so far it's not something we've focused on but we have flagged up a need to focus on it in future. While we don't have a properly functioning youth organisation, there are people in the Young Labour national leadership who are committed to turning YL into a functioning youth organisation. The current chair of Young Labour wants to address that.
There are elections in early 2011 for a new chair, a new National Committee for Young Labour, and a new youth representative on the NEC and we need to ensure that there are people elected to those positions who are going to push to turn Young Labour into a real organisation. We've got to address that in rule changes in this review.
MT: Another problem is highlighted by the figures for CLPs sending delegates to Labour Party conference. In 2010 only 65% of CLPs sent delegates, the lowest figure for decades, although right up to 2003 near to 80% sent delegates.
JL: Yes, even in the early Blair period constituencies continued to send delegates. The real death knell seems to have been the abolition of contemporary motions. Although they were reinstated this year, I think people can be forgiven for not believing this was going to happen until it actually happened.
There were debates and motions and there were votes on motions – not very satisfactory, you might say, and the restrictions on what those motions could be about were ridiculously tight, but at least they were reinstated.
It's going to take time to rebuild the credibility of conference with activists within the party, never mind people outside the party. There's a deep cynicism about it. It's only when the changes are seen not only to have happened but to be working that people are really going to believe again. It isn't going to happen overnight.
MT: What are the main things the Task Force should be campaigning for in order to do that?
JL: We have to have a real conference, which has real debates and real votes. For me the real test is how much of the time at conference is devoted to delegates being allowed to speak about things that they want to speak about, and having votes at the end of those debates. That's absolutely critical.
A lot of the rest is really finer detail about who you get to the things that you actually vote on and become part of the party's programme.
If party and union activists can see that policies that they propose can find their way through into conference decisions and get into the manifesto, that will make a fundamental difference.
MT: The Labour Party has had reviews of policy making before. It's characteristic of the recent era of the Labour Party; they've had lots of reviews about all sorts of things. Do you think there's a basis for thinking that this review is more open than, say, the one in 2007?
JL: We have to distinguish between Blairite new-speak (where “review” meant a closing down of possibilities rather than an opening up) and what's happening now. I don't place Ed Miliband, or indeed Peter Hain, who's now the chair of the National Policy Forum, particularly on the left of the party, but I do think that they have a commitment to restoring some democracy in the party.
The proof will ultimately be in what they do, but the indications so far have been pretty positive.
We need to ensure that there's maximum pressure, because I have no doubt that there will be a concerted opposition from some of the Blairites to any changes that could benefit the left. I think that will come in the form of campaigns for primaries, for breaking the union link, and abolishing anything that could potentially transfer power back to the rank-and-file of the party.
MT: How do you think this issue can be best pursued in the unions, who are after all still quite decisive in getting any positive changes through conference?
JL: What union members should do is what they have always been able to do, and that is to make proposals in their branches or other organisations within their union structures, about the Labour Party policy structures. Unions do have democratic internal procedures, some perhaps more than others, and they need to be used in order to influence the policy of their own union.
I'd hope that trade union members who want to see real democracy restored do put up motions to their union's conferences in order to ensure that their unions do back positive changes at conference, and indeed that their reps on the Labour Party NEC back those changes. In the past, trade union representatives on the NEC have been rather too keen to back whatever the leadership is asking for, rather than their own union's policy.
MT: You've been through this sort of thing before; you were the secretary of the Rank-and-File Mobilising Committee many years ago. How would you compare and contrast that with the campaign now?
JL: The left is an awful lot weaker. It's weaker in society as a whole, but it's clearly very much weaker in the Labour Party. There's more than one new generation that's simply not joined the Labour Party, and other people have left. That's one thing.
In the trade unions, I think a large section of the left in the unions are, understandably, pretty cynical about the Labour Party. I don't blame them for that. But I don't think the right solution is to disaffiliate from the Labour Party or ignore the Labour Party;
I think we need to look to the whole left in the trade union movement to respond positively to initiatives that are now underway in the Labour Party.