Building A One Nation Labour Party, Indeed

In my former life as a Labour activist, I never much liked the then-newfangled practice of self-nomination for interview with a view to inclusion on the panel of approved candidates for forthcoming local elections.

Before that, one had to be, as one still could be and as I believe that one still can be, nominated by one's local branch in order to be so interviewed.

Nominating oneself struck me as rude. But it is now wholly entrenched.

Meaning that, as part of the forthcoming changes to the Labour Party's Constitution, any qualified person (an individual Labour Party member of two years' standing for a parliamentary candidacy, a Labour MP in good standing for the Leadership or Deputy Leadership) ought to be entitled to - and this "word" really is used - self-nominate for a parliamentary candidacy, for the Leadership, or for the Deputy Leadership.

All such self-nominees, together with any qualified nominee of a Branch Labour Party or of an affiliated barnch at constituency level, and together with any qualified nominee of a Constituency Labour Party or of an affiliated organisation at national level, ought therefore to go out to a ballot of all individual members, affiliated members and registered supporters in the constituency or in the country, as the case may be.

The two highest scorers in that ballot would then be submitted to a decisive ballot of all registered parliamentary electors in the constituency or in the country, as the case may be.

Thus, there would be no repetition of the last Leadership Election, when John McDonnell, who had once challenged Ken Livingstone from the Left for the Leadership of the GLC but who had nevertheless secured the nominations of Frank Field and Kate Hoey, was elbowed aside by Diane Abbott on no better ground than that she happened to be black, a woman, and a television personality.

It was true that four out the five candidates were state-educated, and that three of them had been comprehensively schooled, in one case halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, and more or less equidistant among St Helens, Warrington and Wigan.

(The Conservative Party elected a comprehensive school Leader as long ago as 1997, he had already been a Cabinet Minister, and he is now the Foreign Secretary. The claims made against such schools in this kind of regard are plainly and simply false.)

But all five candidates had been to Oxbridge, none had ever worked outside politics and the attendant academia, and, almost incomprehensibly for the Labour Party, none had ever been a local councillor. Nor, unless I am very much mistaken, had any ever contested a marginal or an unwinnable parliamentary seat. This system would open up the field very drastically, and very necessarily.

Registering as a supporter, with regular but fairly infrequent updates and with the right to vote in parliamentary selections and in Leadership and Deputy Leadership Elections, but nothing more than that, ought to be free of charge, and conditional only upon neither being nor adhering to any non-Labour candidate for the House of Commons in Great Britain, including by being a member of any party that fielded such candidates.

It certainly ought not to exceed the one pound per annum that it costs to become a "Supporter/Friend" of the Conservative Party. Nor is it tolerable that membership of the Labour Party, at an annual cost of £46:50, is £21:50 more expensive than membership of the Conservative Party, and thus nearly double that rival offer. That is hardly the way to build a One Nation Labour Party.