Playing the percentages game

More than 50,000 Party members voted for Christine Shawcroft in the recent NEC elections. Here she looks at the future of the Grassroots Alliance.

The voting figures for the Grassroots Alliance victory in the NEC elections have recently been subject to an analysis that amounts to what I call "doing a Peter Kellner". Somehow the narrow margin between the slates has been turned into a majority for the right wing.

The sleight of hand goes like this. The Grassroots Alliance received 46.4% of the total vote, Members First received 42.5%. But if you add the votes of Adrian Bailey, who stood against Members First, and refused to stand down under Millbank pressure, then Members First gets a total of 48.8%.

Clever, isn't it? Using Sooty's magic wand in this way, I could easily make a case that the Co-operative activists - myself, Adrian Bailey, Cathy Jamieson and Pete Willsman got 299,922 votes, so therefore a Co-operative slate of six could get over 40% of the vote and win all six seats on the NEC. Or, as it clearly helps to be at the top of the ballot paper, six candidates named Aardvark should make a clean sweep.

It is argued that since the anti-Grassroots Alliance candidates received a majority of the votes, we are in danger of losing all four seats next year unless we appeal to that majority. It is assumed that there are no more votes on the left, so a successful pitch needs to be made to the right. But if this logic had been applied after the 1996 NEC elections, we would have concluded that Ken Livingstone's repeated failures to get elected to the NEC meant that we should have switched our support to a candidate who could appeal to the right - and had we done that, we would have thrown away what proved, in fact, our best chance and best candidate to beat Mandelson.

Are we really going to lose ground by continuing our present appeal on the basis of Party democracy and core political demands? I would have thought this message would become more, not less relevant as the facts about the closed lists for Euro candidates, the undemocratic manoeuvrings on the London Mayor, and the prospect of panels screening candidates for Westminster elections sink in with Party members. As the economic situation worsens, our political message will also strike a chord with more people. In this context, to move to the right, in a cynical vote-chasing gesture, would actually lose votes.

We won in 1997 with a strong, well known left candidate by stressing issues of Party democracy and members' rights. This is the best furrow for the Grassroots Alliance to plough; this will broaden and deepen our appeal, and increase and consolidate our vote next year.

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