What are the Labour leadership rule changes Keir Starmer is proposing?

After his electoral college proposals had to be abandoned, the Labour leader’s revised tweaks to the rule book could still have a crucial impact, writes Ashley Cowburn

The revised changes to the rule book were passed by the NEC on Saturday (Reuters)

On the eve of Labour’s last annual in-person conference in 2019, a monumental row erupted, threatening to plunge the party into a “civil war”. An audacious attempt was made by some on the left to abolish the position of deputy leader, which at the time was held by Tom Watson, who often spoke publicly against Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit policy.

After a considerable backlash – Ed Miliband decried the move as “undemocratic” and “wrong” – and with the prospect of a general election looming, the Labour leader quashed the motion, and instead suggested the role of deputy leader should be reviewed.

While the post was not in the end abolished, the argument overshadowed the initial days of the conference, with some urging the party to take the fight, instead, to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.

Sound familiar? This year’s Labour conference kicks off with an almighty row over how future leaders of the party should be elected, and with similar warnings of the party being plunged into “civil war” – despite the government juggling crises on multiple fronts.

Just days ahead of his first in-person conference as leader, Sir Keir Starmer’s team announced that he wanted to use the event to bring back the electoral college voting system, which was scrapped by Ed Miliband in 2014 and replaced with the “one member, one vote” system.

Under the system proposed by Sir Keir, responsibility for choosing the party leader would be divided between three groups, with a third of the vote going to MPs, another third to the unions, and the final third to constituency Labour parties, meaning that the votes of Labour’s 400,000 members would have the same weight as those of the party’s 199 MPs. This would be in contrast to the current system, in which each party member is given a single vote, and all votes have equal value.

The proposal enraged the left, but there was also a noticeable lack of on-the-record support for Sir Keir from leading Labour figures, including those in his own shadow cabinet. Early on Saturday, the Labour leader ditched the plan in an embarrassing U-turn on the eve of conference.

However, Sir Keir has put forward a compromise involving a different set of changes to the rule book, which were passed by the party’s national executive committee (NEC) on Saturday and could still have a profound impact on the future of the party’s leadership contests.

The package includes requiring candidates for leadership elections to have the support of 20 per cent of MPs in order to compete, up from the current 10 per cent – although Sir Keir had been understood to be pushing for 25 per cent.

The Labour leader also wants members to have been signed up for six months before being allowed to vote in a future leadership contest, and proposes that the “registered supporters” scheme, which allowed people to pay £25 to vote in the 2020 contest, should be dropped.

Perhaps the most controversial proposal is the increase in the threshold required to stand for leader, which would essentially prevent anyone in the party without a strong support base from being a candidate.

To put the proposed changes into context, if these rules had been applied at the outset of the 2015 leadership contest, candidates would have needed 46 nominations in order to stand. Neither Liz Kendall nor Mr Corbyn would have made the ballot, while Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper would both have qualified – the latter by just one nomination.

Sir Keir now faces a battle to get these rule changes passed on the conference floor, with the left-wing Momentum group, which welcomed the decision to abandon the electoral college reforms, branding the revised changes a “new anti-democratic package”.