Ed Miliband’s Labour party reforms

The reform of the Labour Party Ed Miliband promised last July is nearly ready for publication. It should be circulated to Labour National Executive Committee members over the weekend.

It is currently being finalised in conversations between trade union general secretaries and Lord (Ray) Collins, the party fixer and former general secretary brought in to finesse this process.

Labour’s NEC will endorse the proposals on Tuesday and the 1 March special conference will be a rubber-stamping exercise – to the annoyance of some in the party who think there’s been a stitch-up between party and union bosses leaving the poor bloody infantry out of the picture (and spending money the Labour Party can probably afford to spend). They may have a point.

On a number of levels, Ed Miliband has ended up delivering what his rhetoric in July promised. Back then, in the heated aftermath of the Falkirk scandal, the Labour leader said there was rottenness at the heart of Labour’s affairs and fundamental change in the Labour/trade union relationship was needed to sort that out.

Under the new reforms, the electoral college that elects Labour leaders will no longer be divided into three separate sections made up of MPs/MEPs, union members and constituency members. Instead, the leader will be elected by One Member, One Vote (OMOV) … except it’s a bit more complicated than that.

MPs will get to decide a short list of candidates that then goes to the membership to vote on (as in the Tory Party and the Lib Dems). The important new and distinct element in Labour’s version of OMOV is that Labour is trying to sign up as many union members as possible to a new discounted associate membership.

These new associate members, people who have decided to pay the levy to the Labour Party as part of a switch to opting, will get a vote in the leadership that is the equal of ordinary Labour members’ votes (even though the associate membership might cost one tenth of what an average member sinks into the party in a given year).

Ed vs David

Associate members will not get all the privileges of a full party member. I understand that the plan as out-lined at the moment will not automatically give them the right to be a constituency delegate to conference and will not give them a vote in choosing parliamentary or council candidates (though this might be relaxed for moribund constituency associations where they need all the help they can get).

That matters because back in 2010, when Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership under the old rules, his brother’s supporters declared the contest a scam. David Miliband’s campaign could not make contact with those trade union members who voted in their section of the electoral college.

The trade unions withheld their names and addresses from the main campaigns but the bosses of Unite, Unison and the GMB operated (in brother David’s mind) as campaign organisers for brother Ed, swamping their union members with pro-Ed propaganda, making the contest unfair and biased.

Ed won the contest thanks to a big lead (once other eliminated candidates’ votes were redistributed) in the union section of the electoral college. Brother David won the constituency section and the MPs/MEPs section.

There will be interest in re-running the 2010 contest under the new rules – would Ed still have won? One calculation says he would’ve done –  – but brother David’s supporters would say that doesn’t take into account the impact of the one-sided pro-Ed propaganda that unions sent to their members.

I should say that some would dispute whether it was the union members or a few pro-Ed Balls MPs who won the contest for Ed M. There was last minute lobbying for Ed M which swung some Ed Balls-supporting MPs critical second preferences – including lobbying by Gordon Brown I am told.

But you have to say that Ed Miliband could not have got within striking distance of his brother without the heavy lifting done in the trade union or “affiliates” section of the electoral college.

So that contest between the brothers lies at the heart of this big changes but it wasn’t the trigger. Internal party reforms weren’t part of Ed Miliband’s agenda until the Falkirk selection scandal popped up. Even then, as Ed Miliband launched his reforms last July, he didn’t publicly commit to changing the election system. He talked only in general terms of “consequentials.” His aides say he was simply making sure he didn’t over-promise. Senior Labour figures closer to his brother in the past say Ed Miliband had to be pressured last autumn into making bigger changes than he’d ever envisaged.

The trade union vote at conference on policy – where the votes are divided 50:50 between trade unions and members – are not explicitly affected by the changes. But one of the last minute sections of the deal being crunched between general secretaries and Lord Collins is the wording of the published deal on where that is likely to go.

If there is too much determinism about how that system will likely perish just like the union’s separate electoral college, the unions won’t be happy. But it’s hard to see how Len McCluskey can continue to raise his hand to vote on behalf of the block counted trade union levy payers if there is a completely different method of counting their votes individually going on in another part of Labour’s constitution. Even uber-Blairites don’t fetishise about this though and salute a reform that goes further than anything Tony Blair ever dared.

One of the other big sticking points at the last stage has been the unions’ treasured contacts lists for members who opt into Labour associate membership. Will the unions retain that list? It seems hard to imagine they’ll cede that even though some Blairites think that will give them what one called the ability to “monster” their members with material supporting one particular candidate in a leadership election.

Financial hit

Labour figures on all sides of the party now warn that the party will be massively out-spent by the Tories in the next election because the party is ditching the security of union affiliation fees for the leap in the dark of trying to win over who knows how many individuals to associate membership.

One shadow cabinet member said the party will “take a big, nightmarish financial hit and quickly” but in exchange will gain a bit of “moral high ground.”   Prof Mark Wickham-Jones of Bristol University was quoted in The Guardian suggesting that the number of trade union members who opt for associate membership could be one tenth of the figure who currently get signed up as political levy payers (2.3m).

And is the collective voice of unionised Labour a complete dispensable? Some will see it as the sheet anchor for Labour which has avoided it floating off in all sorts of directions on the whim of a leader buffeted by polls, newspapers or the latest fashion. A supporter of the status quo might point to how Tony Blair was a leader enchanted by the prospect of a merger with the Liberal Democrats, intolerable to trade union Labourites (amongst others) and blocked by them.

I’m in Sheffield, home to England’s longest continuous Trades Council and also home to a fine Socialist Choir who are in good voice and who you can hear on Channel 4 News tonight.

Follow @GaryGibbonBlog on Twitter.