Two major problems of the NPF
There’s a National Policy Forum this on Saturday. It may or may not vote on Trident. That vote may or may not be used to show there has been a democratic consultation and – depending on how the vote goes – a decision taken to renew Trident.
The first question is this: If you have an opinion on Trident, how will you make it known to the NPF members?
Question 2: If the NPF votes against Trident renewal, will that decision be respected?
In terms of democratic accountability the make up of the NPF is quite odd. Members do not represent CLPs, which, along with wards or branches, are the basic unit of Labour Party organisation. Nor are they elected from the regions. The NPF has ten divisions, including CLPs, Trade Unions, Regional conferences and policy forums (although regional provision is also written into the CLP section), Local Government (also with regional provision) , Socialist Societies, Labour Party Black Socialist Society, the EPLP, Labour Students, the House of Lords and eight frontbench representatives. All members of the NEC are ex-officio members.
It may look like an attempt to represent all units of the party but the relation between NPF members and party members is muddy to say the least. Here’s one easy test: do you, if you are a member of the Labour Party, know who your NPF representative is? How would you get in touch with them? Some of the better NPF rep and members of the NEC (who are ex-officio NPF members) have actively sought the opinions of Labour activists on what is clearly a controversial issue.
But the fact that a few have made the effort on this question begs the question of why this does not happen as a matter of course.
The second problem with the NPF is the process itself. The idea of a more deliberative policy making process is one worth preserving, particularly if it means ideas can be debated without hysterical tabloid headlines skewing the debate. But the problem comes with turning decisions from the NPF into party policy and – crucially – the party programme.
Every year since 2004, conference has debated and agreed to a motion backing the fourth option in regard to council housing. It is party policy. But it is not part of the party programme. In 2004, Conference voted in favour of restoring the railways to public ownership - a vote winning policy. That too is not part of the Labour programme. The same is true for motions passed by conference on foundation hospitals, pensions, marketisation of the NHS.
It is the NPF process which enables this. Whenever a minister or party official is questioned on such a topic, the response comes that the decision of conference will be referred to the relevant policy commission of the NPF. Er, isn’t that where we started?
The process is clearly not irrevocably broken – otherwise the motions would never have been debated at conference, because they were presented as minority reports from NPF meetings that became the majority position of the party.
But we cannot continue with a situation where these decisions are rebuffed and referred to a policy commission of the NPF in an endless circle. If a policy has gone through exhaustive analysis, been debated at conference and adopted as party policy, it should not be permissible to exclude it from the party’s programme. Either it should be accepted, or a committee consisting of proposers of the motion and NPF or NEC members (both those in favour and those against) need to produce a compromise.
People don’t join political parties to go round in circles, they want to influence policy.