It seems to be a perverse rule in British politics that the party that loses an election (or a referendum) gains members and the party that wins, loses them. No sooner had the scale of the electoral disaster inflicted on the Liberal Democrats last May been absorbed, than the remaining rump of eight MPs were being cheered by a giant spike in membership applications.
Within days of the decisive “no” vote in the Scottish referendum last September, an appreciable percentage of the population seemed to have signed up to become members of the defeated Scottish National Party. Perhaps this attests to the truth that — in the words of Joni Mitchell — “we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.”
Yesterday the four candidates for the Labour party leadership met the acting leader, Harriet Harman, to discuss the unexpected problems arising from Labour’s own shattering defeat. In particular, they were talking about the challenge posed by the additional 106,000 new party members, the 148,000 new trade union affiliated supporters and the 113,000 £3 registered supporters, all of whom are entitled to vote in the leadership election.
The electorate for this vote is very different from the one that chose Ed Miliband in 2010. As a result of the new system, nearly 80 Labour staff have been involved in processing the new voters and in some cases discovering them to be dubious friends of the party. More than 3,000 applicants have been referred to a special panel and most of those have been declared ineligible. Four hundred were Conservatives out to cause mischief. Almost 2,000 were Greens, who tend to be the kind of people who think that it is a human right to belong to any party or parties that take your fancy. A handful more were old Trotskyists like Derek Hatton, the former poster boy for the Liverpool Militant Tendency.
Unsurprisingly, both the process of vetting and the ability of “outsiders” to take part in the vote have led to legal threats and demands for the election to be annulled. Readers with long memories may recall that the expulsion of Mr Hatton’s secret faction (Militant was the cover name for the Revolutionary Socialist League) was accompanied by injunctions and court cases which cost some constituency Labour party branches a great deal of time and money.
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Any legal case which sought to reverse a decision either to admit or bar a voter would bring comfort to the lawyers and no one else. The question of defining whether someone does or does not support the aims of a party is necessarily subjective. Unless there were evidence of a substantial conspiracy to obtain a particular result, the chances are that a challenge would fail.
So it should. Parties are voluntary associations, not arms of the state. They must decide who to let in and who to exclude. If people do not like it, they can join other parties or start their own. Labour had the freedom to create a category of £3 supporters, misguided as it was not to have a longer period of membership. They also have the freedom to expel so-called supporters.
Furthermore, a failure that looks likely to end in the election of a far-left rebel who has never held any kind of office to become leader and alternative prime minister has not been a constitutional but a political one.
The result looks unlikely to be close enough to be decided by disputed votes. It has rather been decided by the short Miliband years in which Labour forgot the lessons it learnt with such difficulty over decades.