Millbank's desperation tactics

Ken Livingstone comments on the desperate tactics of the Millbank Tendency.

Like razor clams on a sunny day, Labour's activists suddenly find themselves the focus of press attention each summer, as the annual NEC debate draws the gaze of the media into the inner workings of the Party. Last year it got so ridiculous that I found myself at one point doing a phone interview in the small hours of the morning for BBC Radio from my hotel room in a different continent and time zone. This year it has been the turn of the candidates from the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance, and they must have wondered what hit them.

What hit them was an amazing level of desperation on the part of the Millbank Tendency. For the General Secretary of the Labour Party to press release a letter to him from Liz Davies suggests that the Millbank machine was genuinely worried by the alliances that have been assembled by the left and centre left.

My battle with Peter Mandelson for election to the NEC last year resulted in close co-operation between broad sections of the Party committed to democratic participation and decision making. This co-operation was hammered out in the heat of the Partnership in Power debate. Although we lost the vote at Conference last year, we won the NEC election, indicating that the purest expression of Millbank opinion is still a minority in the Party.

The failure of the Party's apparatus to learn a constructive lesson from that election led to the 'cash for access' debacle. Had the leadership looked more closely at the debates taking place last year it would have realised that the Party has a powerful instinct for detecting when things are going wrong. They understood well before the media that there was a self-serving and arrogant aspect to the Millbank Tendency.

The thing which kicked off the row this year was telephone voting. I have no particular objection to phone voting and there may be quite a good case for it -- but that case was never made to the NEC. When the NEC met in July, those in charge of conducting the ballot must have known that this system was going to be used. Had it been raised it would have been possible to address the concerns which are now preoccupying Party members and the press. Safeguards could have been put in, a consensus could have been reached, and Party officials would not have had to defend an internal balloting system to the media.

It is the very method by which this system was introduced, and the subsequent partisanship of Tom Sawyer in media interviews during a period when he should be completely impartial, which explains the debate inside the Labour Party about meaningful democracy. It is articulated by both the 'traditional' left and new groups of the centre-left and the 'Hattersleyite' right like Labour Reform. If nothing else, the events of the summer indicate why these alliances have been such a massive step forward. If the left is to continue to be relevant to the Party's grassroots, then we have to continue to work in this way long after the last NEC ballot paper has been counted.

On the subject of the NEC slate, John Spellar recently argued in the Guardian that "the core of the organisation and several of the candidates are the same alliance which nearly wrecked the Labour Party in the 1980s, and made it unelectable until 1997." This is the official history, but it is not accurate. The Party was torn apart because the last Labour government pursued economic policies which drove away our supporters. The right wing, having destroyed the government, then split the Party and tried to destroy it too. Throughout most of the 1980s Labour was regarded by most voters as the party least competent to run the economy. Now, one year into the Labour Government, economic indicators are not looking good. The Chancellor has failed to take the choice of slowing overheating by fiscal means instead of interest rate rises. Rather than lifting the ceiling on national insurance contributions, raising the top rate of tax for those earning over £50,000 and introducing tax discrimination in favour of investment and against dividend payments, he has left British industry struggling to cope with an over-valued pound. Doctors' pay has risen by 2.6%, while private sector pay has increased by 6.2% -- directors' incomes have risen by 18%.

It is not clear yet exactly how deep the downturn will be, but it has already been enough to force organisations like the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce into conflict with the Government over the effect on British manufacturing. We must learn the real lesson of the 1970s and 1980s, which was that we were thrown out of office because the Government did not listen to the grassroots members, who had been warning them for years that the economic choices the Government was making were eroding our electoral support.

Paul Richards took up the cudgels against the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance much in the same way as John Spellar, adding (12/8/98): "for the first time, a member of the Labour Party can have a say on who their parliamentary candidate should be, what the constitution should say, how the manifesto should look, and who should be on the NEC. One member one vote means Party members have real power for the first time." Put like that, it is difficult to see how anyone could argue that such principles cannot be applied to the selection of Labour's candidate for the Mayor of London.

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