Blair strategy ups the anti

Tony Blair has made clear his intention to exclude Ken Livingstone from Labour's one member one vote ballot for London Mayor. At LLB's AGM Ken declared he would fight this battle "to the wire". His determination was warmly welcomed, as it will be among tens of thousands of Labour activists and millions of London voters.

Using screening panels for the Mayor of London, the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, European Parliament and local government is indefensible. The panels are wrong in principle, produce arbitrary results, restrict members' choice, function in secret, their members are unaccountable and their criteria subjective.

Blair and his followers peddle the line that "no one has the right to a seat", which is true but irrelevant. The issue here is the right of Party members to put themselves forward for selection as candidates for public office and choose freely from a wide range of candidates. It's not just Ken Livingstone's rights being infringed, but those of of every Party member in London.

The importance of this issue extends far beyond the confines of the Labour Party. LLB has often noted that the struggle for democracy inside the Labour Party is a key aspect of the broader struggle for a more democratic society. Pre-screening panels reach back into the womb of political choice, fundamentally skewing that choice in favour of the prevailing elites.

The Lords' resistance to the closed list system proves the old adage that even a stopped clock is right once every twelve hours. It is a measure of just how obnoxiously undemocratic the closed list system is that it allowed hereditary peers to pose as champions of the people. Closed lists expand the managerial regime imposed by the party onto the electorate as a whole, circumscribing choice, shepherding voters into carefully constructed corrals.

"Control freakery" is not just a bad habit of over-zealous Party apparatchiks. It is an intrinsic part of the Blairite strategy for managing a democratic society in conditions of economic instability. With the aid of the private sector, a top-down managerialism is being introduced into nearly every social institution, from education to welfare to criminal justice to sport. In power, New Labour is introducing curfews for youth and has restricted jury trials, but the Freedom of Information Act remains on hold. A tougher stance on film censorship goes hand in hand with carte blanche for Rupert Murdoch.

Blair's spokespersons argue that all they are doing is bringing the capital into line with Scotland, Wales, etc. The next step - screening out dissident MPs for the next general election - is obvious, and is currently being talked up by the usual "sources". If that happens, Blair will have succeeded in creating a closed, self-perpetuating system, which, in conjunction with a Lib-Lab agreement and a tightly managed form of proportional representation, would lay the basis for a permanent dictatorship of political professionals sponsored by big business. Already, this Government has stuffed a wide range of public and policy-making bodies with business appointees. Blair has made clear his own preference for a businessman ("someone used to running things") as Mayor of London. The fact that the Blairites' favoured model for the governance of a mass political party is the job interview tells us a great deal about their vision of social control, and its profound divergence from classical democratic norms.

The Blairites are fond of arguing that Labour's split from the Liberals a hundred years ago was an historic mistake. In fact the existence of a mass political party tied to the trade unions and, at least organisationally, independent of capital, was an essential precondition for a wide range of social and democratic advances (including the NHS). And its continuing existence remains a precondition for future advances.

There can be no doubt that Blair is steadily raising the stakes in the struggle for the future of the Labour Party. If Party members are still in doubt about where Blair is taking us, they should glance at Philip Gould's book on "the unfinished revolution", where a merger with the Liberal Democrats and the final jettisoning of anything even pretending to be a democratic internal party life are spelled out in gory detail. In the past, the leadership has been able to rely on the forbearance - rather than the enthusiastic assent - of the membership. But as New Labour reveals itself in all its arrogance, forbearance is wearing thin.

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