Socialists in the Labour Party who oppose electoral reform are dooming themselves and the rest of the left to permanent political subordination. Recent election results across Europe show that this need not be so.
While Dennis Skinner was fulminating against proportional representation (PR) as right wing, the leading figure on the left of the German SPD, Oskar Lafontaine, was welcoming the prospect of coalition with the Greens and co-operation with the ex-Communist Party, the PDS - made possible by PR - because it will pull his party to the left. While Blair dined with his favourite millionaires, treating ordinary party delegates with patronising contempt, Chancellor Schröder, facing electoral competitors on his left, has to treat the left in his own party seriously.
In England, however, the Labour leadership can take the left for granted because electorally the left has nowhere else to go. And being utterly ruthless and unprincipled, they will. For them, electoral advantage lies only in moving to the centre. Skinner should direct his venom against the system which leads to the disproportionate influence of the marginal voters in the marginal seats.
We should take our lead from the Chartists. For us as it was for them, parliament is not the be all and end all of democracy; our socialist vision is rooted in the resistance and alternatives that people engage in every day to achieve dignity and justice. The Chartists struggled for the vote not to displace this extra-parliamentary struggle but to build on it in terms of legislation, lasting change and wider legitimacy. Their principles of popular control and political equality should be the standards by which we judge ways of electing our public servants - which is what parliamentary representatives must be. As David Beetham argues, first past the post fails the Chartist test abysmally. So does the closed list system introduced for the European elections and manipulated to the full by Millbank. The predicted proposal from the Jenkins Commission (fudged and curdled through negotiations with No 10), AV plus may just scrape through, but only if it is treated as just the beginning of a process of change.
The democratic case for electoral reform is fundamental, and to attack it as somehow a right wing issue is a betrayal of the radical democratic tradition we inherit from Chartism. But there are other, strategic, considerations. The left needs, urgently, to win public support for an alternative to the warmed-up neoliberal economics which will undermine jobs and public provision. We should not delude ourselves that the failure of Blair and Brown’s economics will lead automatically to a swing to the left. Don’t ignore Portillo, smirking at the troubles of his own leader as well as at the difficulties facing the government. A rich variety of intellectuals and organisers are working on alternatives, collaborating with others across the globe, but in Westminster they lack the voice to put their own ideas without equivocation and distortion. In the Labour Party, the left speaks as a prisoner rather than a free agent. Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and a few others sometimes get their messages under the prison gates, by dint of their charisma but we should not have to depend on charisma. Elsewhere in Europe, with more democratic electoral systems, the radical left has achieved independent parties that force social democratic parties to look over their left shoulders rather than getting a crick looking over their right. This has also boosted the left wing within social democratic parties.
Under this scenario, Dennis Skinner would be more likely to get on to the NEC, Ken Livingstone could eventually, like Oskar Lafontaine, be running the treasury.
Long term thinking, indeed. But the changes resulting from Jenkins have long term significance. The left, inside and outside Labour, should create its own campaign, drawing on the non-sectarian spirit of the Grass Roots Alliance, on the side of the ‘yes’ vote in the referendum on electoral reform. It should do so to build up pressure for more radical electoral reform, including the unfinished item in the Chartist programme for annual parliaments.
Copyright 1998 Red Pepper
