Labour badly needs leadership debate

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): This evening’s Fabian leadership husting featured three leadership candidates. It will be the only one to do so. Tomorrow John McDonnell and Micheal Meacher are expected to decide which of them is to face Gordon Brown – provided, that is, at least one of them can get the necessary 44 signatures from MPs. The first thing that stayed with me from the event is that Brown and even more important the Labour Party badly needs there to be a challenger. (Also, though I speak as someone who had not seen any of them before and is not a Labour supporter, it has to be McDonnell: in terms of focus, coherence and argument, Meacher came across to as a hopleless blatherer.) Both Meacher and McDonnell claimed to be running for the good of the party. They made a good case, to which Brown had no reply and did not acknowledge or address. This seemed to confirm the point. McDonald put it vividly. The Labour Party is hollowed out and is in desperate need of democratic debate to bring it back to life, so disillusioned are members with the leadership indeed, that, McDonnel claimed, “a third” of local Labour party groups don’t bother to send delegates to Party Conference because it is such a “stitch up”. Although Brown spoke in vague terms about broadening the appeal of the party and keeping it in touch with specific interest groups at a local level, he did not address its membership collapse suffered during ten years of Blairism. If Brown wants constitutional reform to deliver his promise to ‘build the trust of the British people in our democracy’, it seems he needs to start at home and build a more democratic party. McDonnel felt able to suggest jokingly that Brown might ‘help out’ in getting him (or Meacher) the requisite number of nominations. With the entire legitimacy of his accession in question, don’t be surprised if a few Brownites do help nominate his would-be opponents, they’d be stupid not to.