How The Communists Turned Labour Into The Tories

I don't agree with every word of this, by Peter Hitchens, but it is basically correct:

There is no mechanism at all in the Tory Party through which ordinary members can exert influence on policy. Tory policy is not made by members, or even by MPs but by an undefined unanswerable cabal surrounding the leader's office. Even the Labour Party gave its members more say (or rather used to do so). Before the New Labour machine filleted the rule book, Labour allowed those who organised among Constituency Parties and in the Unions to influence policy and constitution - though since the left effectively destroyed the Labour right in the constitutional battles of the late 1970s and early 1980s there has been little of this.

These, by the way, were the battles which the pro-Communist Left won, while an ill-informed and gullible media concentrated on the symbolic crushing of the insignificant Militant Tendency. They all found it too difficult to understand the real left-wing forces in Labour - the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the Labour Coordinating Committee (ludicrously misrepresented in some biographies of Anthony Blair as 'moderate') and the potent network run and directed by the Communist Party's industrial organisation and its fellow-travellers in the major unions. These groups destroyed the independence of individual Labour MPs by forcing them to go through mandatory reselection, and stole their power to elect the leader by creating an 'electoral college' in which the unions had a decisive say.

Labour's internal 'democracy' was also hugely distorted by the power of the union block vote, which (like the Tory Party leadership group) was largely arranged and wielded through unaccountable cabals. The major example of a membership revolt in British politics was William Rodgers's 'Campaign for Democratic Socialism' in the 1960s, which eventually defeated the unilateral nuclear disarmers. Such a body could have no influence in the Tory Party, since the ward and general management committee meetings through which it worked have no counterpart in the Tory structure. Motions debated' at Tory conferences have no significance and nobody is obliged to take any notice of them at all. Labour under the Blairites adopted several of these practices, and the Labour conference, once quite a lively battleground between factions with genuine disagreement on display, is now as dead as the Tory one always was, and continues to be.