Campbell

I never thought I would say this, but I am going to stick up for Alistair Campbell.

He should have never been expelled. The rule that did for him - the one proscribing support for another political organisation - was an unhappy legacy of earlier times and should have been done away with a long time ago.

Here is the rule in full : 'A member of the Party who joins and/ or supports a political organisation other than an official Labour group or other unit of the Party, or supports any candidate who stands against an official Labour candidate, or publicly declares their intent to stand against a Labour candidate, shall automatically be ineligible to be or remain a Party member [...]'. Whilst joining another organisation or standing against Labour candidates are quite straightforward to establish, the word 'support' is controversial as well as having a nebulous meaning: exactly what should qualify as 'support'?

It is no surprise that this rule was introduced during the Blair years. It was handy to deal with those who openly sympathised with parties on the far Left, unhappy with Third Way politics. It would allow party members sympathising with those pesky independents to be shut up, the wounds of Ken Livingstone's victory still being fresh. Whilst there is a certain satisfaction from hoisting Campbell by his own petard, we should avoid copying techniques of control conceived at that time.

If Labour really is a broad church, a social movement, who is to say that its members should not have total freedom regarding who to support (and, indeed, vote for) in elections? Why should it not seek to have 'switchers' and 'waverers' among its members, people who might, for instance, vote Labour in a general election because they oppose austerity but against it in a European election because they support revoking article 50? If the membership really is to represent the votebase, it has to represent that part of the votebase that occasionally looks elsewhere.

There are, as always, exceptions. Elected representatives who stood on a Labour ticket do have a duty to work towards a Labour government. This is part of the unspoken contract they entered into when they first expressed a wish to stand. Anything else would be fundamentally unfair to the constituents who voted for them. But Campbell is not an elected representative, has no voters to be answerable to and should be free to choose his political platforms as he sees fit.

The European election last May showed why this rule is not possible to enforce. In single-issue elections, disagreements between the leadership and the bulk of the membership are likely and expecting all those members to stay silent about the fact another party's position is closer to them than Labour's is both unrealistic and unfair. One is left with a choice between a disastrous mass expulsion and looking the other way.

The rule is also too easy to manipulate. Because 'campaigning' and 'support' are so loosely defined, the interpretation is usually based on what is politically expedient. Ken Livingstone kept his membership after campaigning for Lutfur Rahman, yet some of the new members who signed up to vote in the leadership election in 2016 lost it because of past social media posts supporting other parties. Those decisions can be used as a tool of political control and a way to attack factional opposition. Controlling the committees that make these decisions becomes part of the power struggle.

But it works the other way too. People opposed to the leadership can intentionally push boundaries, bend the rules or break them just a little. That way, they can claim victimhood if they are expelled and continually taunt the leadership if they are not--either way they can claim a moral victory. All this would be totally avoided if the rule were no more - Campbell and the likes of him can take principled positions all day long and all we would need to do in response is point out how tolerant and broad church we are as a party. To me, this is a pragmatic if drastic step, which would also allow us to poke fun at the Tories who at the same time suspended Michael Heseltine for the same reason.

But what if they support the Tories, I hear people ask. Indeed, what if they do? As long as they are not actual elected representatives, I say let them. Robust mandatory reselection mechanisms should be in place to ensure the elected representatives do remain accountable to their constituents, but members of a party that aspires to represent a whole section of the electorate, even to become a social movement involving people from all walks of life, should be free to support whoever they wish