Electing a New Labour Leader

I am a long-term supporter of the Labour Party who has from time to time been a member of the party and who resigned on the last occasion when Gordon Brown failed to honour his promise to take the NHS out of direct political control.  He had given this undertaking and I wrote a letter to The Times applauding this undertaking.  This elicited a response from Daniel Finkelstein who said the idea was bonkers and that a service spending so much money must be under direct political control.   I doubt whether I am alone in thinking that it is Daniel Finkelstein and not Gordon Brown’s promise that is bonkers. Political micro-management of many highly expensive services, be it the Universities, the Research Councils, the schools or the NHS, has been a marked feature of governments since Mrs. Thatcher and is slowly being recognised to be a thoroughly bad idea,  not least because the management of these services is long term and cannot be tied to the electoral timetable. 

 

  When, in 2010, Ed Milliband was elected to the Labour leadership, despite having the majority of neither MPs nor the constituency members, but solely because he was the choice of the trade union movement, I was not tempted to rejoin the party.  This is not because of any qualities that Ed Milliband did or did not have, but because I could not bring myself to regard him as a legitimate leader of the Labour party.  To his credit, he altered the system but sadly it does seem to me that the system which has now been introduced is even worse.  I had wondered when it was proposed to have a one member one vote system for those who were members of the Labour party and those who were subscribing members to the political fund of  trade unions, that there would be a time limit imposed so that only those who had been members before the last general election would be allowed to take part.  I now read in the newspapers that this is not the case, and that anybody who joins or pays up before August can take part in the leadership election.  This is an open invitation to corruption.  The trade unions may pressurise or even give inducements to members to pay up in order to be able to vote and the possibility that there will be frank bribery to get people to join the Labour Party just for this purpose can by no means be excluded, especially in view of some scandals of this kind in local government in the past.  It again offers the opportunity for large trade union leaders to exert excessive influence in determining the outcome and those of us who remember the terrible damage they did to the Labour Party in the 1970s will not be tempted to see a recurrence.