Younger brother: new leader!

So the older brother has been passed over in favour of the younger.

No, not the Labour Party but the ruling Workers’ Party in North Korea. Kim Jong-il has apparently decided that the older boy has in some way transgressed. The Dear Leader’s youngest son, Kim Jong-un, has been appointed a general which analysts say could point to a dynastic succession. Oh, and the leader’s sister, Kyong-hui, has also reportedly been elevated to the post of general.

Thank God for North Korea – it at least enables us to bask in the ‘democratic processes’ which did the ‘Kim shifting’ job for New Labour. Only a satirist would contrast the ‘dear leadership’ antics of North Korea’s Worker’s Party with our own dear Labour Party. But as Ed Miliband prepares for a speech that is said to be about to lay into aspects of the Blair Brown leadership period, one doubts he will address his predecessors’ failure to reform our own workers party.

For whilst Blair used his elevation to forge momentum to abandon ‘Clause 4’ (the bedrock party commitment to socialism), he did much less to democratise the workings of the party. Ed Miliband appears unlikely to stand up and call for an end to the Union vote in the election of the party leadership.

No one is certain of what a vote North Korea’s Workers’ Party leadership election amounts to. But our own Labour Party allows some people six or seven votes each. Other party members find themselves with only one vote each. Do I hear the call, one member six votes? In fact the older brother in the UK context won every round of five, until the last and even then won every category of votes other than that of the unions.

Ed Miliband will indeed be a surprising new leader if he declares “the voting system by which I was elected is flawed and manifestly undemocratic – I insist from henceforth on one person one vote”. Don’t hold your breath.

And hereby hangs Labour’s worst mismatch with the Coalition Government. For the first time in our lifetime there is a government in power that holds a majority of the votes cast by one person one vote in the country. It is now challenged by an opposition led by a man who could not even summon a majority of its individually paid up members.

At the root of all this, a problem which does not threaten North Korea’s Workers party – party funding. Labour is held hostage to its union funding. Its leader is powerless to divorce himself or his party (with its £16m debt) from that reality.