Club Government‐the Crisis of the Labour Party in the National Perspective

Extract

WHATEVER MAY BE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE CURRENT CRISIS IN the Labour Party, one thing is clear. In a sense true of no other internal crisis in the 62 years since the loose and inchoate ‘Labour Alliance’ of 1900 first became a true political party, with individual members and a distinctive claim to power, the arguments which have provoked it concern the rules of the game as well as moves within the game: the way in which party decisions are made and enforced, as well as the content of the decisions themselves. This, of course, is why the arguments are so fierce and the crisis so deep. Policy defeats can be revised later if Fortune's wheel turns again. Constitutional defeats damage the losers permanently. It is true, no doubt, that both sides in the current struggle have exaggerated the likely consequences of the changes forced through at the October party conference. The old French saying that there is more in common between two deputies, one of whom is a Communist, than between two Communists, one of whom is a deputy has not suddenly lost all relevance to Westminster merely because Labour MPs will have to face compulsory reselection between general elections, or because the party leader is elected in an electoral college. Reselection will not re-make the Parliamentary Labour Party in the image of constituency management committees, and the creation of an electoral college will not free the leader from the need to win and hold the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues. When all the necessary qualifications have been made, however, there can be no doubt that the constitutional changes will shift the balance of party power to the advantage of the Left and to the detriment of the Right — as, of course, they were intended to do. That is what the struggle has been about; and the media have been right to concentrate their attention on that aspect of it.