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If Political Parties are to be a functional part of democracy, then they have to run with its grain. If they do not, they become conspiracies against the popular will. New Labour is becoming just such a conspiracy, and this fact is plainly revealed in the extraordinary development involved in its selection processes for its new Parliamentary lists. This pamphlet provides a small part of the evidence on this matter.
Lord Evans of Parkside served on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party for some years, and has been able to document the working of New Labour's selection process from close personal experience. This pamphlet contains his graphic speech to the House of Lords on 12th October 1998.
Henry Pepper is the pseudonym for somebody involved in the selection process, and his article appeared in Tribune on the 16th October 1998.
And the final article in this pamphlet was written by a candidate who was not selected, and was published in The Parliament Magazine on 28th September 1998.
Of course, each political Party was able to make its own decision about how its candidates should be chosen. Some Parties opted for a one person one vote selection procedure, in which not only the choice of candidates, but their pecking order on the final lists, were determined by ballot. Beyond doubt the most undemocratic procedure was that in the Labour Party which put people through an examination, the marks in which were never published, to enable the judgement about both selection and ranking to be taken by a panel of leadership nominees. It is quite clear that this selection involved explicit tests of conformity. David Morris was asked how he could square his continuing membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament with Mr. Blair's stated preferences. David Morris is a consistent and dedicated pacifist, and he gave an honourable answer to this question. But he found himself at the bottom of the list in Wales. Of course this is an unelectable position. This implies that no supporter of nuclear disarmament should vote for New Labour, and that there is no place for pacifists in its ranks. Possibly, if this fact were widely understood, New Labour might repent of its intolerance at the next Election.
In the same way, many other persons of the left and centre-left found their way to the bottom of New Labour's heap.
But they were not the only victims. After the House of Lords voted to amend the Bill, to replace closed lists by open lists in which electors could choose which of the nominees of their chosen Party they preferred, Jack Straw once again explained that closed lists were necessary, because otherwise all the trouble already undertaken by the Party machine would be for nothing, and the voters would be able to prefer "old nags" over the washed and scrubbed Blairites and Blairettes, who were evidently more worthy. This is rather blatant ageism, and indeed, scrutiny will show that right or left, older Members have rather systematically been rejected. Of course, the number of pensioners in the population at large is constantly increasing, up to about a fifth of the population. Closely observing the low position of "old nags" on Mr. Blair's shiny new youthful lists, pensioners, too, might decide that New Labour is an inhospitable territory for them.
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ISBN: 0 85124 618 4
£2.00
Published November 1998