Second time lucky for Labour?

Labour Party members are today having a second go at selecting a Labour Party candidate for Mayor of Tower Hamlets. The last time they had a go, September 2010, their National Executive stepped in, vetoed their chosen candidate and imposed its own candidate on the local Party.

Come the public election, however, and Labour’s National Executive was not, however, able to veto the local electorate’s choice – or impose its own candidate instead of the man who won the backing of the voters. As we all know, not only did Lutfur Rahman win, he won convincingly – on the first ballot, with over 50% of first preferences and twice as many votes as the official Labour candidate.

Since then, Labour has sulked like a great big sulky thing – and this is why the last selection hasn’t gone away.

First, Labour rejected the new Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s offer to sit in his Cabinet and help him deliver the Labour manifesto, on which he had stood for election. In other parts of the UK, Labour has sat in coalition in local government with other parties: in Tower Hamlets, Rahman’s former Labour colleagues preferred to stand back and criticise the mayor for, usually imagined, wrongdoings than help implement their own manifesto. That is playing politics with people’s lives at its very, very worst.

Second, the National Executive vetoed local members’ 2010 selection because they received some allegations that membership irregularities had affected the selection result and that Lutfur Rahman was  unfit to be a Labour candidate.  The Executive had one attempt at investigating the allegations about membership which concluded that, despite the allegations, there had not actually been any widespread abuse. And the local party has just concluded a membership audit which has again revealed virtually no irregularities.

Labour is selecting its candidate over a year before the next election for Mayor is due. The candidate therefore has a choice to make:
-will they spend the next year peddling the same old local Labour line that Lutfur Rahman was evil and the voters got it wrong to elect him?
or
-will they call for Labour to investigate the allegations that were made just over two years ago and establish whether party officers and the National Executive acted wisely or were hoodwinked into dressing up political censorship as an organisational decision?

The first option would polarise politics in the Borough for another year (probably making the divisions much, much worse) and show that Labour is still controlled from the top – though this would probably give Mayor Rahman his best chance of being re-elected. The second option would allow the winning candidate to clear the decks and show that Labour is an open and democratic party, which acts only on the basis of proven allegations, not personal vitriol, and would offer the Labour candidate a better chance of winning.

The electorate is not stupid. In May 2010, several thousand people across Tower Hamlets came out to vote Labour in the local and General Elections. By October, only 11,000 people came out to vote for a Labour candidate who was widely discredited.  The electorate can be discerning again, and Labour’s candidate should not take the voters for granted.

The two front runners in this contest are, frankly, John Biggs and Rachael Saunders. Cllr Saunders has done an excellent job of getting round the members – but there are reports that this may not help her vote as meeting her has put many party members off voting for her. If she wins the selection, it will be a triumph for organisation (and the Saunders/Weavers team is strong here), a sad day for politics and democracy and a challenging year ahead for the Borough. John Biggs AM may have been away from the borough too long to have retained enough support to win this selection – but if he does, he is likely to stay sitting on that fence he’s occupied for umpteen years as long as possible.

The outcome of the selection is likely to depend on the second preferences of the candidates who are placed fourth and third in the first and second rounds, which will itself reveal much about the present composition of the local Labour Party.

The signs are not good. The national Labour Party has already ensured that David Edgar is not on the ballot paper, so it is already manipulating the vote to some extent – though whether that is a wise move remains to be seen, as Edgar’s absence is more likely to benefit Cllr Saunders than John Biggs. We can only wait to see if the winning candidate takes Labour’s vote for granted again.