What does Starmer stand to gain from proposed changes to the way Labour elects its leader?

Starmer’s push to scrap ‘one member, one vote’ for Labour leadership elections and return power to MPs has raised a few eyebrows. Sean O’Grady considers what the incumbent has to gain

Starmer speaking at the TUC Congress earlier this month (PA)

Given that Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner were elected leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party, respectively, only last year it seems odd that Starmer should want to reopen the question of the method of electing party leaders right now. To the casual observer, facing rising inflation, shortages, tax hikes, a winter Covid spike and a potential lockdown, it must look very much as though the Labour Party has got its priorities mixed up.

Ironically, and unusually for him, illogically, Starmer claims that the present arrangements, which haven’t been controversial for some time, are a pressing problem and prevent Labour from connecting with the voters: “Our rules as they are right now, focus us inwards to spend too much time talking to and about ourselves and they weaken the link with our unions.”

Perhaps Starmer judges that this early part of his leadership is the moment to exert his authority and strengthen the democratic base of the party (and shift it away from the left and towards the centre) on a permanent basis. More pertinently and immediately relevant than the eye-catching changes to leadership elections are reforms to the deselection of sitting Labour MPs, and reducing the role of conference in forming policy and the manifesto, again shifting it closer to public opinion. But it’s the leadership changes that will cause the fiercest arguments.

Starmer has said, rather bluntly, that he will be talking to the unions directly to get his reforms through – they still control about half the votes at party conference and without their support nothing will happen. Unless he wants to be humiliated, it’s likely he’s already informally fixed things up with the current union leaderships. He seems dismissive towards the mass membership – something of a gamble. People do tend to admire “strong” leaders, but one of the oldest pieces of political wisdom is that the electorate dislikes divided parties. No doubt Starmer’s new adviser, the pollster and psephological expert Deborah Mattinson, has reminded him of this.

It does seem strange.

So Starmer now wants to reverse years of democratic reform and return to the “electoral college” that used to divide the power to elect the leader between the membership (presumably as individuals rather than via constituency Labour parties), the trades unions and, very possibly, MPs. The proportions controlled by each group are up for grabs. Presumably mirror reforms on selecting parliamentary candidates will be brought in locally.

It is an unexpected revolution. “One member, one vote”, or OMOV, was one of the founding principles of New Labour. The idea was that ordinary party members were closer to public opinion, more centrist and more amenable to the kinds of things Tony Blair wanted to do with the party; by contrast, union leaders and, in particular, party activists at the annual conference were viewed with suspicion. Under Ed Miliband’s leadership the democratic reforms were pushed even further, and membership was made available more cheaply and more easily to trade union members and the general public.

The result went against all the usual assumptions of Omov when, in 2016, an influx of enthusiastic new younger members, very loosely gathered under the banner of Momentum, and old members alike elected Jeremy Corbyn. Shocked and stunned, the parliamentary party, where Corbyn support was minimal, tried to get him deposed by starting another election, at which point the membership gave him an even bigger mandate.

Now, it seems, the centre-right of the Labour Party has swiftly jettisoned its old devotion to Omov and wants to go back to the arbitrary world of the electoral college, which it once despised. Apart from anything else, it suggests an unattractive mindset that likes democracy only when it produces the “right” answers.

Pragmatically, though, the electoral college may be the historical compromise Labour needs to function in the longer run. When the party has run into long periods of division and decline in the past, such as the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, it was the leaders of the big unions who supported the party financially and organisationally, and eventually, helped the parliamentary leadership to restore its electability. They dominated conferences and were the paymasters, so they were listened to.

The electoral college formalised their power. It was invented after a party revolt in around 1980, when the unions and activists joined together to end the monopoly Labour MPs had on electing the leader. After months when all the various permutations of the college were debate and rejected, a compromise was reached, and the party elected Neil Kinnock as its first leader under the new system, with Roy Hattersley as deputy. Of course Kinnock went on to lose the next two general elections, so proving the point that, whatever else, the electoral college does not guarantee the election of a Labour government.