Labour’s
National Executive Committee is right to have launched an investigation into
Terry Fields, the MP for Liverpool Broadgreen - although not because he
deserves to be disciplined simply for his refusal to endorse or campaign
for Peter Kilfoyle, the Labour candidate in the recent Walton
by-election.
Inaction
or lack of enthusiasm during election campaigns is not in itself grounds for
disciplinary investigation of Labour Party members by the NEC, nor should it
become so: members of the Labour Party have a perfect right to be as indolent
and unenthusiastic as they choose. Terry Fields's lack of support for Mr
Kilfoyle is on a par with the refusal of Frank Field, the MP for Birkenhead, to
endorse Lol Duffy, the Labour candidate for
Wallasey in the 1987 general election. Frank Field's reasons may have been
rather better than those of Terry Fields (Mr Duffy was a member of Socialist
Organiser, a Trotskyist entrist group), but that is beside the point. Were it a
simple matter of refusing to endorse an official Labour candidate, Terry
Fields would no more deserve investigation than did Frank Field.
But
Terry Fields's lack of enthusiasm for Mr Kilfoyle is not the reason that the
NEC has set up the investigation. Nor is it that he has made a fool of himself
by getting himself banged up for non-payment of poll tax. Rather it is that the
NEC believes that there is now enough evidence of his membership of the
Militant tendency to have him expelled from Labour.
If
indeed there is such evidence, he can expect no sympathy from the democratic
libertarian Left if he is given the boot. The same would go for Dave Nellist,
the MP for Coventry South East, if an investigation were to find against him on
similar grounds. Membership of Militant, a Trotskyist entryist party with its
own discipline and programme, is quite simply incompatible with membership of
the Labour Party, a democratic socialist party. That goes for MPs as much as
for anyone else.
Nothing perfect
The
weighty interim report of Labour's working party I on electoral reform, chaired
by Raymond Plant, is right to reject the idea that any
particular electoral system is intrinsically the fairest, and it is right to
insist that the system used to elect the House of Commons should maintain the
link between MPs and constituencies.
Although
the Additional Member System yields representation in parliament approximately
proportional to votes cast, it has the disadvantages of creating two classes of
MPs and of virtually guaranteeing Centre parties far more power in coalition
governments than their support warrants. The Alternative Vote system gets round
the problem of two classes of MP, but most versions yield excessive
representation in parliament to MPs from Centre parties elected on
second-preference votes. The Second Ballot system suffers from a similar
weakness and, like the status quo, tends to produce parliaments in which
the seats held bear scant relation to the votes cast.
In
short, nothing is perfect, and Tribune will continue the debate. The
priority, however, is winning under the current system. It would be a mistake
to distract Labour from that mammoth task.
