Starmer’s team plans to strip Labour members of right to vote for party leader

Keir Starmer’s team has reiterated plans to make it so only Labour Party MPs can vote for the next party leader, if the contest happens while Labour’s in government.

A senior Labour source said:

There’s a plan to bring a constitutional reform to conference that would cut out the membership for electing a leader when we’re in government, and only allow the MPs to decide.

This is seen as the last reform that needs doing to syphon off any threat from the left

Starmer’s attempts to override Labour democracy

Currently, there is a one member one vote system for electing the Labour Party leader. This was introduced under Ed Miliband in 2014. Starmer’s team already tried to overturn this system at the 2021 Labour conference and replace it with the electoral college. This reduces the say of each Labour member to just a third of the vote, with another third going to MPs and a further third going to trade unions.

Crucially, before a leadership vote can happen, a number of MPs must first nominate leadership candidates. While Starmer failed to replace one member one vote in 2021, he did double the threshold of MP nominations necessary from 10% to 20%. This makes Labour less open and democratic, moving power from ordinary members to MPs.

Only a grassroots campaign convinced enough MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015. He secured the 35 nominations necessary minutes before the deadline. That’s because a lot of the parliamentary Labour Party is made up of the careerist nodding dogs of the right, so genuine left-wingers can be locked out of a nomination. Under pressure, numerous MPs ‘loaned’ Corbyn the nomination to broaden the debate.

Back then, the nomination of 15% of MPs was necessary. Given this was such a struggle for Corbyn, Momentum and the left reduced the threshold to 10% at the 2017 Labour conference. Starmer then increased it to 20%.

“Undermine members”

Now Starmer’s team wants to remove the right of Labour members to vote altogether, if the contest happens while Labour’s in government.

Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said: “drunk with power the boys in key roles in party hierarchy aim to undermine members’ rights further”.

Starmer’s team are characterising the proposed change as the “Liz Truss lock”. This is a reference to Tory members voting in Truss as Tory leader. Then, her hard right policies undermined the credibility of UK government finances for investors.

But Corbyn and his economic approach of a mixed economy are far from Truss. In 2017, 128 economists and academics backed Corbyn’s manifesto as “fiscally responsible and based on sound estimations”. And three of those economists predicted the 2008 financial crash.

Starmer’s anti democratic internal policymaking is in line with his former membership of the Trilateral Commission. Billionaire banker of inherited wealth David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 as an elite networking operation.

The organisation views increased democratic participation from across society, such as what happened under Corbyn, as an “excess of democracy”.

Instead, Labour should be expanding its democratic participation through reducing the threshold of MP nominations for party leader and introducing open selection of MPs. Open selection ensures each Labour candidate for MP is democratically competitive by making it easy to challenge them.

Featured image via Sky News – YouTube