Labour's general secretary tells Paul Anderson about the
party's problems with cash and morale
"It is clear that there is a morale and involvement
problem in many constituencies," says Larry Whitty.
"We need to give new life to party branches. The whole
party organisation needs a big shake-up. We need to change the whole ethos of
the organisation. The level of membership at the moment is worrying. We need
to take some major new initiatives. While the more alarmist figures about our
real membership are wrong, we are on a declining trend and that needs some
dramatic initiatives to reverse it."
It is unusual to find a politician prepared to admit that
his or her party is in a terrible mess, but it is hardly surprising that
Labour's general secretary is prepared to go public about the state of the
organisation of which he is manager-in-chief.
Whitty, who was appointed in 1985 and is now aged 49, has
just finished presiding over production of a draconian cost-cutting plan,
passed by the party's National Executive Committee last month, which will see
Labour's organisation slimmed down as never before in living memory. And his
next task will be to steer the potentially explosive debate that will follow
publication of the report on links with the trade unions.
Labour's financial plight is grave, he says, and the main
reason is a projected decline in income from the unions and from membership
fees. "The fundraising is going very well. But on all our estimates we
are going to face a real income cut next year of at least 30 per cent compared
with where we were before the election. A very substantial part of our support
will continue to come from the trade unions but they are going to suffer
further losses of membership. The worst case scenario would be that unions vote
no in their political fund ballots. But income could go down further than 30
per cent in any case.”
.
The upshot is that, even with increases in trade union
affiliation fees and levies on MPs, MEPs and councillors, massive cuts in
spending arc unavoidable: the only question is where they are made. Whitty,
now backed not just by Labour's finance working party but also by the NEC,
argues that the choice had to be made on the basis of the experience of the
last general election. The Tories had a pathetic central organisation and an
almost non-existent regional one," he says. "But they did have very
effective local organisation and they did shift national resources to the local
level.
"Similarly, the greatest success of the election was
our performance in some key marginals. We need to shift resources closer to the
ground for a longer period, away from head office and away from regional
offices. Unless we shift personnel and money closer to where the battleground
is going to be at the next general election and in the Euro-elections, we're
not going to have the organisation that we need."
Last month the NEC agreed to change the ratio of party
expenditure on head office, regions and local parties from 75:20:5 to
60:20:20. The number of staff at Labour's Walworth Road headquarters will be
reduced from 130 to 90, with research particularly badly hit, while the
party's English regions will be cut from nine to six or seven.
Other cuts will include a reduction in the regularity of
Labour's youth, women's, local government and European conferences, the
replacement of regional conferences with regional input into the proposed
national policy forum process, abandonment of the bookshop and library service
and a reduction in the volume of bumf put out by Labour.
Whitty puts a brave face on the cuts, arguing that the shift
of resources to local parties will mean that Labour will be able to regenerate
itself from the bottom up and that the paring down at the centre will force
greater openness on the policy-making process. The party plans a series of
campaigns for ordinary members to get stuck into and hopes to draw into the
policy-making process many of the experts whose services were shunned by Labour
when Neil Kinnock was leader.
"I do not consider that we need to issue as many
detailed policy statements as we did," Whitty says. "We need real
strategic thinking about policy. Our policy-making also needs to be more
outward-looking. We need to inspire and mobilise outside expertise, which to
some extent we phased out in the past few years. The relationship with the
pressure groups and the academic community is not as good as it should
be."
He hopes that changes in policy-making will improve that
relationship "There are resource constraints, but the principle of a
rolling programme and the principle of involving all elements of the party will
be maintained. The suspicions about this process are misplaced. Policy-making
will be more open than in the past."
Meanwhile, he goes on, the teething troubles of Labour's
national membership system are well on the way to being ironed out. "It's
been one of my most serious headaches in the past few years. But although there
are still problems with it, we've got over the worst. We made a mistake in
trying to introduce the whole system at once and by not having communication
with branches, which is where members are made, not at constituency level.
There were also a number of technical and staffing problems." Now,
however, the national party has direct communication with branches and the
regions will soon be linked into the national membership scheme's computers.
As for Labour Party
News, the free magazine sent to all party members, it will be slimmed down
and become a newspaper but will not be closed, "It's essential that the
national party has some way of communicating half-a-dozen times a year with all
party members."
+++
Whitty’s worries do not stop with money: he is also charged with
the unenviable task of acting as midwife to a new settlement between Labour
and the trade unions.
Last week, the NEC working party on the union-party link met
to discuss an options paper which, says Whitty, “will almost certainly
form" the basis of its submission to the NEC. "The working party reaffirms
the role of the trade unions and states that the unions will continue to have a
major part in our policy-making and organisation. We want to preserve
involvement by the trade unions in the party, both through their delegations to
conference and as a means of generating substantial support for the party among
affiliated trade union members."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty is not very happy about the
way that Labour's debate on the union link has turned at times into spectacular
public feuding. "There are some very fundamental debates going on in the
party which need to go on, not just on trade unions but also on social justice,
economic policy and the electoral system. All will be subject to wide consultation.
They need to be taken slowly and seriously and not degenerate into a sort of
Mods versus Rockers confrontation."
The author of Labour's official post-mortem on last year's
election defeat, he is particularly annoyed at the way Labour's warring
factions have learned from Bill Clinton's winning American Presidential
campaign.
"The Clinton campaign did not have an argument about
whether to concentrate on the Democrats' core vote or whether to reach out to
new constituencies. It first of all consolidated the core vote then extended
the appeal outwards. We need to do the same. That's a real long haul.
"Having a leadership contest immediately after the
election defeat, and the government being on the ropes during the autumn,
delayed the self-analysis that the party needed to engage in. I'm not unhappy
about that. We needed the dust to settle a bit. Now we've got to structure the
debate. People who are asking for immediate answers are not doing the party a
service. The party is not in great shape in many parts of the country and is
undoubtedly disheartened by this current argument.”
