Dear Jeremy - I'm a Labour member, but I'm not the one you need to hear more from

Jeremy Corbyn is outlining plans for a “democratic revolution” in Labour that will give individual members more say over party policy. This will include online ballots and a review of the powers of Labour’s National Executive Committee (currently elected every two years by party members like me).

The measures would therefore move things away from the status quo, whereby official party policy is mostly decided by a mix of the party leadership, the National Policy Forum (also elected by members) and motions at our annual conferences. They also fit into the broader vogue to open up democracy and shift away from top-down representative systems that we’ve seen in recent years, which I’ve at times been favourable to (I’ve blogged in support of recall for MPs, the EU referendum and electing Britain’s EU commissioner, for example).

However, I must say that speaking as one of the rank-and-file party members Jeremy is offering to empower, I actually believe this particular reform to Labour’s internal democratic procedures would do more harm than good. The pitch sounds instinctive and fair enough ("To many, it's felt like a small cabal in Westminster decides, while you're expected to be loyal foot soldiers pounding the streets for Labour”, he’s said), but the problems are twofold.

The first is basically a question of expertise and coherence. The reason I’m satisfied with Labour’s current representative model for policymaking is that as the country’s official opposition, ideally aspiring to be its government, a rigorous policymaking process is vital. The people Labour has in public office and those I’m able to elect to bodies like the NPF can devote their time to scrutinising ideas and ensuring that they are workable and costed. It also leaves room for the central party to consult expert voices from relevant fields and sectors, assuring that the well-intentioned aims of our party faithful are leavened with real-world practicality. As a member, I of course want a say, but I’m also mindful of the limits of my policy knowledge, and of the fact that my party is nothing unless its manifesto is credible. The Labour movement is bigger than me, and our processes must reflect that.

One cautionary tale is what happened to the Lib Dems, which had long prided themselves on being the most internally democratic of the main parties. It is documented that Nick Clegg, David Laws and others resisted a motion at their 2009 party conference that committed the party to abolishing tuition fees outright, at a point in time when the size of the national deficit was public knowledge and even the NUS had shifted away from all-out opposition to fees. However, the motion passed anyway, due to strong support among the party’s grassroots for the pledge, and the issue went on to wreck the party’s reputation in government. This doesn’t exonerate Clegg, by the way (if he had doubts, no one forced him to put the issue front and centre in the 2010 campaign and quite so thoroughly mislead young Lib Dem-inclined voters). But the whole saga is still a stark reminder about the need to strike a balance between activists and the instincts of those looking at the hard numbers.

Further, from a point of view of message and strategy, there’s also an importance in making sure not only that individual policies are sound, but also that they fit together. Here Labour’s own history is a warning. I’ll forgo the obligatory Gerald Kaufman quote, but Labour’s 1983 manifesto was effectively a collection of the party’s conference motions at the time. To win, Labour has to present a governing programme for Britain projecting a unified vision, not a laundry list bodged together bit-by-bit. This was also a criticism of the party's 2015 agenda (“Vote Labour, win a microwave", as David Axelrod acerbically put it), but proposals to weaken central direction will only make a tough job even tougher.

Then, there’s the second issue, representativeness, which goes to the heart of the current challenges facing Labour. 422,871 people voted in our leadership contest (including registered/affiliated supporters) and our core membership has doubled to 370,658 since May, compared to a total Conservative membership of around 150,000. Even some of Jeremy Corbyn’s harshest critics agree these numbers are a testament to the enthusiasm he has almost single-handedly generated. However, this must also be taken in context:

• Even before the post-May increase, Labour still had a larger (and more active) membership than the Conservatives – this did not prevent us from losing the election
• As an aside, Labour also won elections under Attlee, Wilson and Blair in eras when the Conservative membership tended to be larger than Labour’s (and with the exception of Blair, in times when Labour members lacked the right to vote even on who the leader was – the decision was exclusive to MPs until 1981)
• The net increases in our membership mask recent resignations by more moderate members who voted for Cooper, Burnham or Kendall in the summer – a senior MP told the New Statesman 25 have left for every 75 new signups
• Signups were mainly 2015 Labour voters or were specifically Corbyn supporters who found the party too right-wing in May, as opposed to those who hesitated to back Labour for other common reasons reported by pollsters and Labour canvassers – one shadow cabinet minister cautioned that Labour is “getting deeper, not wider”
• The enlarged membership is equivalent to around 5% of the 9.3 million who voted Labour in May 2015, and the views of the membership are not necessarily representative of them (or of Labour’s current support)
• The membership are even less representative of the UK as a whole (relevant as even those 9.3 million votes still weren’t enough to elect a Labour government and because any government is somewhat beholden even to those who didn’t vote for it)

Labour should of course continue its efforts to expand the ranks of both members and supporters, but my point here isn’t that failing to be a flawless microcosm is an inherent problem for Labour. It’s not possible or in some respects even desirable for a socialist/social-democratic party that aims to move the country leftward to be wholly representative, and YouGov data found that even members voting for Cooper, Burnham and Kendall were markedly to the left of public opinion in their self-description and attitudes to public ownership and redistribution of wealth. Further, though political party membership in the UK has declined, it’s long been very much a minority pursuit anyway (1% of the population now, down from a whopping 3.8% in that 'golden age' political types obsess over). But building coalitions to win elections does demand a constant, vigilant self-awareness that we’re not representative, and I increasingly fear we’re failing to demonstrate that.

For example, Labour MPs are coming under intense grassroots pressure to back the leadership’s stances when their own views conflict, at which point a common response from Corbyn supporters is that MPs should simply “respect his mandate” (i.e. 59.5% of the 0.5% of all Britons who voted in our internal leadership contest, seemingly regardless of MPs’ individual judgment and without reference to the millions of constituents that elected them in May). More worryingly, Jeremy Corbyn himself explained these proposed reforms by saying "It's about being open to the people we seek to represent”, a statement that risks defining “the people we seek to represent” strictly as current party members like me.

In sum, I recognise that Jeremy’s best intention here is to make the party in some sense more representative and accessible. But considered in context, I fear that these reforms will do the precise opposite, severely constricting Labour’s ability to craft credible policy on behalf of our potential voters at large, let alone the entire country. I’m glad that my party gives me a vote for leader and for deputy, local candidates and NPF/NEC representatives, on top of the ability to vote on policy submissions at my CLP and speak out generally (as I'm doing by writing this). But the Labour movement must be far, far bigger than a few hundred thousand of us if it is to succeed, and these proposals will jeopardise that. We must reconsider.