Playing the federal card

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Over the weekend, Labour’s remaining leadership candidates have been competing to see who can come up with the best way of strengthening ‘our precious union’ although none of them managed to articulate what’s so precious about it or why they want to maintain it.  And, as seems inevitable when Labour’s thoughts turn to devolution, one of them has played the federal card.  In this case, it’s Starmer, who has at least recognised that a federal UK with real power for the nations and regions means breaking up England into smaller units.  He didn’t put it that way, of course – but that can only be the outcome of setting up regional parliaments with full powers over all devolved areas.  A federation which leaves England untouched can never be a federation of equals.  In truth, what sounds like a radical plan is little more than an attempt to kick the can down the road by setting up a long-term process which will lead to a written constitution at some unspecified future date after listening to people's opinions (and guess what the reaction in England will be?).  Too little, too late.

Long-Bailey took a trip into an imaginary past where the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd “were meant to be on an equal footing” with Westminster.  (Spoiler: No, they weren’t.  That was never the intention of any part of the Labour Government which set them up.)  She went on to argue that she wants “our Scottish parliament and our Welsh parliament to feel as completely autonomous and independent as they possibly can whilst having that collaborative relationship with Westminster”.  If the relationship with Westminster is collaborative rather than hierarchical, I can see nothing much wrong with that, although it sounds a lot like what I’d call independence.  I hope that an independent Wales would always be willing to collaborate with our neighbours in these islands and beyond.  I rather suspect that “as completely autonomous and independent” as possible has a rather more limited meaning for her than for me, and that her idea of "collaborative" is rather more of a straitjacket.  And the one thing that comes through very clearly is that she somehow thinks that strengthening devolution will regain Scotland for Labour; and I suspect that party political objective is the real aim for all of them.

Nandy doesn’t seem to have had much of import to say in the eyes of whoever wrote this piece, merely talking vaguely about handing power back to the nations and regions.  It’s another version of alternative history, because the regions never had the powers (whatever they are) which she says she wants to give them back.

Thornberry sounds much more like the authentic voice of Labour which we know so well, and whilst she seems to be on course to be knocked out of the contest soon, I rather suspect that her traditional approach is the one that will actually be followed by Labour, whoever wins, after a decent period has elapsed in which to bury all talk of federalism.  Bash the SNP, label them as tartan Tories, and wait for the voters to return sheepishly to the Labour fold.  It’s not exactly been a successful strategy to date, but it does at least show that she understands the problem she’s trying to solve – it’s nothing to do with devolution, independence or the best interests of Wales or Scotland, it’s all about how Labour can win the seats it needs to form a government in London.  The problem isn’t a constitutional one, it’s about those contrary Scots refusing to vote the way they’re told to vote.

We're not the target audience

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The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which, for reasons that are dubious to say the least, has become the ‘go-to’ organisation for the media when it comes to government economics, has been very critical this week of the two Tory leadership candidates, accusing them of misleading the public with their extravagant spending pledges.  This seems to me to be more than a little unfair, for two reasons.

Firstly, the IFS always take a very conservative (with both a small and a large ‘c’) view on government finance.  Their opinions are based on the orthodox but mistaken view that the government must, in essence, ‘balance the books’; that taxation and spending must match over an appropriate timescale.  In fairness, that has also been the position of both the major UK parties for some years; austerity (and let us not forget that Labour never really opposed austerity, just wanted a different form of it) is but the most obvious result of that.  Orthodox it might be, but it has always been a nonsense.  It was a pretext for the ideological aim on the part of the Tories of shrinking the state and Labour went along with the principle in the hope of avoiding potentially damaging criticism of their alleged financial profligacy (from organisations like the IFS, the BBC etc).  It was always an ideological choice, though, and all the wild spending pledges of Johnson and Hunt have done is to expose what has always been the reality, namely that government spending is not at all like household finances.  (None of that means, of course, that whoever wins the race will not then try and put the cat back into the bag.)

But secondly, neither Johnson nor Hunt are trying to mislead the public at this stage; they are only trying to mislead the membership of the Conservative party (along with the UKIP/Farageist entryists) who have a vote in the leadership election.  They don’t need to mislead the public yet; that can wait until the general election in the autumn.  In the meantime, they only need to convince a comparatively tiny number of people; the public are just the ‘accidental’ audience of a race which is using the media to reach that small number of people.  Whether the candidates’ increasingly wild promises will convince even those people is an open question; the electorate for this race is after all composed largely of people who have swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the household budget analogy.  I rather suspect that the promises to drastically cut taxes whilst hugely increasing spending will have little effect on that target audience.  It’s a bidding war which is not only unnecessary, but also largely futile; these aren’t the issues on which that electorate will make its choice.

Some Tory bystanders such as Patten and Hammond are becoming increasingly alarmed at the prospect that all Johnson and Hunt are succeeding in doing is legitimising the more modest spending commitments of the Labour Party.  I’m not sure that they need to be over-worried; the way things are going, the irony is that it will be the Labour Party at the next election which is arguing for financial orthodoxy, and which will take the electoral hit which is otherwise due to damage the Tories.  And if the Tories repeat such wild promises in a manifesto for a General Election and then win – well, no-one will really expect Boris Johnson to honour a promise, will they? 

Not bizarre enough yet

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Some Tory MPs, including failed leadership candidate Dominic Raab, have been arguing in recent days that it will be “the EU’s fault” if the UK walks away without a deal at the end of October.  It sounds a bit like the playground argument that ‘some big boys made me do it, Miss’, a level of argument wholly appropriate to the farce of the Tory Donkey Derby. 

But in principle, he does have a point – if someone is refusing to accept a reasonable argument, then they are at least partly responsible for what happens as a consequence.  My problem, though, is understanding exactly which bit of ‘we demand that you bend the rules of the single market to suit us, give us rights not enjoyed by member states to negotiate separate deals, and open up an uncontrolled back door into the single market in Ireland’ he considers to be reasonable.

Meanwhile the man who made the bizarre claim that he makes and paints model buses out of old wine crates (in what looks like an attempt to find out just how gullible his target electorate – the Tory membership - is) has displayed his mathematical ‘prowess’ by stating that setting a firm and immovable target for leaving, whether there is a deal or not, somehow makes the odds of leaving without a deal a million to one against.  This is tantamount to claiming that the odds of an EU27 which has consistently said that the withdrawal deal cannot be negotiated agreeing to cave in and make changes after all are 999,999 to 1 on. 

One possible explanation is that he’s actually realised just what a task he has in front of him and is now trying to lose; it would be a better explanation of some of his recent statements than that he’s making a serious attempt to win.  It might also suggest that he’s not quite as irrational as he appears.  The problem with this approach, however, is that he is seriously underestimating the gullibility of that target electorate.  He’ll have to come up with something much more bizarre than he’s managed to date if he really wants to lose.

Counting the numbers

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If the Conservative Party used the electoral system which they think is perfectly fit for purpose for the rest of us mere mortals, the two contenders going forward into the ballot of members would have been decided on the first round of voting.  Boris Johnson, with 114 for and only 199 against would have taken the first slot, and Jeremy Hunt with 43 votes in favour and a mere 270 against would have been declared ‘elected’ onto the ballot paper for the membership.  The reports would have said that Johnson had a ‘majority’ of 71 and Hunt a ‘majority’ of 6.  That is the standard way of electing MPs and councillors in the UK and pretending that those elected enjoy the support of the ‘majority’.

The Tories, however, have decided that that is not good enough for them.  Not only should their second choice be counted, but their third, fourth, and fifth choices should also be allowed to influence the outcome.  However, rather than count all those choices using STV in a single vote, they prefer to make the whole process more complex and drawn out than it needs to be by holding an exhaustive series of First Past The Post ballots.  It’s a bit like accepting the principle of proportional representation but pretending not to. 

It also has the side effect (and whether that’s desirable or not depends on whether you want a straightforward democracy or one which allows Machiavellian manoeuvring) under which a devious and dishonest electorate (which is what makes the system a perfect fit for Tory MPs) can game the process.  It has been suggested, for instance, that the sudden drop of 10 votes in Rory Stewart’s total between the second and third votes was due to a “few weak souls” (don’t you just love the terms of endearment that Tory MP’s use to describe each other?) having succumbed to the ‘charms’ (aka bullying) of one of Johnson’s lieutenants and voted for Stewart in round 2 in order to eliminate Raab.  And similar tactics are rumoured to be at play in an attempt by the leading donkey to arrange for the donkey he’d most like to be up against in the final run-off to be on the ballot alongside him.  Apparently, this is all part of what makes the UK’s democracy the envy of the world; if it doesn’t always seem that way, it’s just that the rest of the world don’t understand how envious they really are, deep down.  That is clearly their problem, not ours.  Those silly foreigners, eh?

Flavours of fantasy

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In their increasingly desperate attempts to get into the final two in the Tory Donkey Derby, the candidates are saying stranger and stranger things.  Michael Gove wins yesterday’s top placing for an ‘interesting’ take on the way his party’s internal democracy should work.  Trying to find an argument against letting Rory Stewart through to the final round, he said that it would be “a mistake to put forward two candidates into the final round who will polarise our party”.   With five candidates who subscribe to the fantasy that we just have to shout a bit louder at Johnny Foreigner to get him to bow down before us and only one who has a vague grasp on at least one element of reality, he is effectively arguing that the latter should be excluded on the basis that giving Tory members a choice between reality and fantasy would ‘polarise’ them.  Limiting their choices to different flavours of fantasy is, apparently, a much better way of conducting the race, and avoids the membership having to make a real choice between alternatives.  It’s a cunning plan, of sorts, but I think he’s worrying unnecessarily.  All the polls suggest that the chances of an average Tory party member voting for reality when fantasy is on the ballot paper are close to zero.  

Returning to default mode

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One of the characteristics of Labour’s leadership contest in Wales is that, in an attempt to differentiate between themselves, the candidates have all been busy coming up with proposed new policies.  It’s a bit presidential in style, implying that policy is decided by the leader rather than by the party, and the differences aren’t all that enormous.  And in general, they seem to be tinkering at the edges of what the Assembly might or might not be able to do.  Still, many of the policies seem worthwhile enough.

It does, though, raise some questions in my own mind.  If they’re so full of interesting ideas for things that they could be doing, and given that Labour has been in power continuously for the whole of the Assembly’s near 20-year existence, why aren’t they already doing these things?  Why does it take the resignation of a leader before they even start to come up with their proposals? 

Labour’s ‘policy’ at Assembly elections to date has boiled down to two main items:

a)    We’re not the Tories, and

b)    Voting for anyone else will let the Tories in.

Sadly, whoever wins the leadership race, I suspect that the discussion of alternative policies will cease, and they’ll return to their default mode of depending simply on a slowly disappearing hatred of the Tories in the population at large.

More of the same

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Under the curious hotchpotch which passes for a constitution in the UK, we do not elect the leader of the executive branch of government; we only elect members of the legislative branch, despite the increasingly presidential nature of the election campaigns themselves.  But at least when it comes to an election, we all know who the leaders of the parties are, and we all know that the leader of whichever party can put together a majority of seats in the legislature will become head of the executive branch.  From that perspective, it really is entirely a matter for the individual parties to decide who to elect as their leader and how to run that election, because the electorate decide on the basis of knowing the consequences of their votes.

There is a problem, though, when that leader falls by the wayside, for whatever reason, during the term of office of the legislature.  At that point, the leader being elected by the members of a party also becomes the leader of the executive, and who and how that leader is selected becomes a proper matter for debate by the wider electorate, especially given the constitutional fact that there is no requirement for the newly-appointed leader to face a general election.  In that context, the Labour Party’s electoral college system for selecting its leader in Wales is an entirely legitimate subject for debate.

The Western Mail reported on Saturday that “…critics of a change within Welsh Labour fear that moving to one member, one vote could increase the likelihood of a more radical, left-wing candidate winning the leadership”.  Stop and think about that for just a moment: the argument here is that the party needs a complex three part electoral college in order to place a deliberate constraint on who can be elected.  And underpinning that is an assumption that the trade unions and affiliated bodies and the party’s elected MPs, AMs, and MEPs will always and necessarily be more ‘conservative’ in outlook than the ordinary members.

It’s hard to know whether or not that’s true of trade union members, given that their leaders often support nominations on behalf of the members without consulting them, and then give them a very strong steer on who they should support.  What we do know is that many of those who are members of trade unions and/or affiliated bodies effectively get to vote more than once in a leadership election, since if they are also individual members of the party, they also vote in the membership section of the college.  Giving multiple votes in the same election to selected electors is a strange definition of democracy.

What we also know is that the assessment of elected members (i.e. that they are more ‘conservative’ than the rank and file membership) is broadly correct.  There is an argument that allowing the election of a leader who does not enjoy the full confidence of his or her fellow elected members can create problems, and that is a reason for giving those elected members more influence in the process.  That is part of the problem being faced by Corbyn – and I know that he isn’t the first or only party leader to find the wider membership more supportive than the parliamentary group.  The question that the Labour Party should be asking, though, is not ‘how do we ensure that the membership can’t elect a leader who does not enjoy the confidence of the group?’, but ‘why is there such a disconnect between the views of the elected members and those of the wider party membership?’

And actually, that isn’t only a question for Labour.  When I look at other parties I see a similar trend; those party members elected to legislatures, at Welsh and UK level, often seem to be more ‘establishment’ and ‘centrist’ than the wider membership.  Whether it’s the result of being elected and getting sucked into the system, or whether it tells us something about the selection processes being used is an unanswered question.  In a large enough elected body, such as the UK House of Commons, there are some who somehow get through both of those processes whilst retaining a bit more of an edge to their politics; people like Corbyn.  In a small legislature such as the National Assembly, however, the scope for that is more limited, and we see fewer ‘wild cards’.

The result, to answer those anonymous Labour critics referred to by the Western Mail, is that the Labour Party has generally managed to weed out the “more radical, left-wing” candidates before they even get to the Assembly.  It doesn’t matter which method they use to elect their new leader; the future looks like more of the same in any event.

Veterans and roadblocks

Tweet The Labour leadership contest seems destined to provide more fun for the spectators such as myself for the remaining days before the result is announced.  Last Saturday, we had the latest Blair attempt to assist stop Corbyn’s campaign.

It demonstrated yet again (not that we needed a further demonstration) Blair’s unerring ability to present his own opinions as incontrovertible fact and everyone else’s as fantasy.  He knows that he’s right; no evidence is therefore required (although if really pressed, he could probably find someone to draw up a dossier ‘proving’ his case).

He lambasts those who would fight an election on a manifesto similar to that of 1983 when Labour lost the election, demanding instead that members support one of the three candidates offering a version of the highly successful 2010 manifesto, on which Labour obviously won the election (although I must have missed that result somehow).

My favourite passage was this one:

“It is like a driver coming to a roadblock on a road they’ve never travelled before and three grizzled veterans say: “Don’t go any further, we have been up and down this road many times and we’re warning you there are falling rocks, mudslides, dangerous hairpin bends and then a sheer drop.”

The three ‘grizzled veterans’ are obviously Blair, Brown and Kinnock, but another part of history that I seem to have missed is the bit where all three of them in turn tried the Jeremy Corbyn route and found it wanting.  The tricks age plays with the memory, eh?  But in the version of history that I seem to remember living through, all three of the grizzled veterans ‘knew’ how bad the road was without ever needing to try it. 

I can understand his frustration though - why, oh why do these people not simply believe what they’re told by those who’ve never, ever been caught out making anything up?

Blind loyalty

Tweet ‘Loyalty’ is a curious thing in politics.  The word is one of those that always sound like a good thing, but in reality it is meaningless unless it is related to something else.  One can only be loyal to someone or something; using the word loyal as a generic adjective is well nigh meaningless.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t try it though.  One of the criticisms of Corbyn during the Labour leadership contest has been that he has been serially disloyal in parliament, voting against the party whip repeatedly.  Such a disloyal person, runs the argument, cannot expect that others will be loyal if he is elected leader.  But the question is – to what has he been disloyal, and to what might he reasonably expect others to be loyal in turn?

That he has frequently voted against the parliamentary party’s whip is an undisputed fact.  And since the party whip seems to be decided solely by the leader, then it is reasonable to conclude that he has been disloyal to the leader.  But, as far as I can see, he has been very consistent in voting in line with what he has told his constituents at election after election.  That, surely, is a form of loyalty in itself, rather then disloyalty – and it would be disloyal to those constituents to say one thing at an election and then do the opposite once elected.  (Although the idea that there’s anything wrong with doing the opposite to what they said before the election would, it seems, be a strange one to most politicians.)

Politicians – and not just Labour ones – are frequently placed in a position of having to decide to what or whom they should be loyal.  Should it be the ‘cause’ (for those who espouse one), the party, the leader, or the electorate?  For those who entered politics purely as a career choice, it’s easy enough to fall in and do whatever you’re told, even if it’s the opposite of what you claimed to believe passionately the previous week.  It takes a lot more bravery for someone to stand by what he or she believes.  I’d value that more highly than misplaced loyalty any day.

A one party state

Tweet One of the themes coming from those who issue increasingly dire warnings about the danger for the Labour Party if Corbyn should win the leadership contest is that democracy depends on there being an alternative party which can be elected to form a government.  Miliband Senior referred explicitly to the possibility of the UK becoming a “one-governing-party state”, which is at least a more accurate description of the feared outcome than the more simplistic “one-party state” used by others.

The Labour Party’s fears are not restricted to the UK level of government.  With the SNP on anything up to 62% of the vote, according to the latest opinion polls, even the much more representative system used for Holyrood elections looks likely to be dominated by one party with no alternative looking electable at present.

As far as I’m aware, though, the Labour Party’s deep and sincere concern for having a viable alternative party of government doesn’t extend to Wales for some strange reason, despite Wales being the one place in the UK where there has been no change of lead party in government for the last 16 years, and where there is no such change in prospect either.  It’s easier to accept the concept of there being only one party with a realistic chance of forming a government if it happens to be your party, I suppose.

Is it actually true that a functioning democracy depends on there being an immediately viable alternative government-in-waiting?  It’s asserted as unassailable truth often enough, of course.  In Wales, even the Tories claim it as a necessity, acting as a justification for their repeated proposal for an alliance of everybody else against Labour – a proposal which makes considerably more sense in terms of simple arithmetic than it does in terms of politics.

In Scotland, there have even been anguished howls from some commentators that the system is fundamentally flawed if it allows any party to dominate in the way that the SNP seem likely to if the polls are anywhere near correct.  Whilst the first-past-the-post system used at UK level could indeed be said to be flawed, producing as it has a majority government on the basis of a 37% share of the vote, I’m not sure that the more proportional system used in Scotland and Wales is as badly flawed.  And even though I’d prefer a system based on a single class of members using STV, there is no system of voting which can guarantee a viable government-in-waiting if the most popular party starts to attract 50-60% of the votes.

If the electors are happy with continued government by a single party (whichever party) and continue to elect it with a majority in successive elections, any claim that a functioning democracy depends on there being a viable alternative sounds a lot like saying that the electorate have got it wrong, and have no right to exclude other parties from government.  It’s up to those other parties to enthuse the electors enough to make them want to vote differently. 

The problem that dogs politics in the UK is that for too long, the ‘alternative’ parties have believed that the only way to do that is to sound increasingly like the party that they want to dislodge, and to fight elections on the basis of being different people rather than people with different views.  But having two parties saying the same thing and taking turns at governing is really little different from a ‘one-governing-party state’ in practice, because they become more like two factions within a single party than two different parties. 

In that sense, the idea that there needs to be an alternative to keep democracy functioning is a very superficial one.  Unless that alternative government is actually offering something very different, it’s more a way of preventing democratic change than facilitating it, by trying to convince the electorate that they have a choice when they don’t.

Fraternal comrades

Tweet Some of the recent opinion polls in relation to the Labour leadership contest, showing that Jeremy Corbyn may be attracting strong support outside the narrow Labour electorate, have surprised me.  Although I don’t think his views are as far outside the Overton window as they’re being painted, I was nevertheless expecting that he’d have to do a lot more to sell his ideas before seeing that sort of reaction.  I had thought that the Tories, aided and abetted by Labour, had succeeded in securely establishing the window in its current position.

Assuming that he wins – which now looks to be a likelier outcome than I had anticipated – will this last?  Can he build on it until the next UK general election?  I remain dubious.  The Tory-supporting press have barely started on him yet, held back at least in part by a feeling that perhaps a Corbyn leadership might actually help their cause.  But if he is elected, we can be sure that the muzzles will be off in no time at all.

The fact that so many in his own party are so willing to assist the Tories and their allies in rubbishing his views won’t help him either.  With comrades like these, he hardly needs political opponents.  The word of the week for the comrades seems to be ‘credibility’; they all claim that they have it, and that he doesn’t.  Chris Dillow has posted on the possible meanings of ‘credibility’ in this context.  I’m pretty certain that his fourth meaning ("unacceptable to the Westminster-media Bubble") is the one that is driving Corbyn’s ‘fraternal comrades’.

The Sunday Times carried a lengthy hatchet piece on Corbyn this week.  Well, one might say, they would wouldn’t they?  And as this sort of thing ramps up, no doubt there will be those in Labour who condemn the Tory press.  But one of the co-authors of this piece was a Labour man; if they’re willing to say it, they can hardly blame the media for being so willing to use it.

To me, the piece confirmed – as if we didn’t already know – how deeply into bubble-think so many in Labour have fallen.  The whole piece seemed to be predicated on an assumption that all the readers would start from the same place as the authors, and be horrified by the same things.  That simply demonstrates how badly we need a real alternative to be presented.

Amongst Corbyn’s most heinous crimes, apparently, is the fact that his political views haven’t changed at all over the years.  As an example, not only was he elected as an opponent of Trident, he has the nerve to continue opposing Trident.  Everybody in the bubble knows that MPs – especially Labour MPs – are supposed to get sucked into the system and change their views once elected, but this man is so outrageous that he hasn’t done so.  Whereas for many of us, consistency would be seen as a virtue, in senior Labour circles it is seen as something positively dangerous.

That goes to the heart of the problem of Labour, and the problem is very deep-rooted.  A Corbyn leadership will no doubt look attractive to many – he’s certainly closer to my views on many issues than any of the other candidates – but it won’t address the long term problem.  He’ll only be allowed one shot at winning an election before he gets replaced by someone more amenable to the bubble.  Sadly, in the longer term interests of replacing Labour entirely, we would be better off without the short term boost of optimism that he is supplying.

Could Blair be right?

Tweet “…walking eyes shut, arms outstretched…”, as Blair put it last week, is the classic image of a sleepwalker.  I’m not sure that it’s really true, though – eyes shut maybe, but as far as I’m aware, outstretched arms is much less typical.  Whatever, the analogy was clear; Blair was accusing the Labour Party’s members of sleepwalking into making the wrong choice of leader.

The analogy of sleepwalking is one much loved by politicians to describe a group of people making a decision without really being aware of what they’re doing or what the consequences might be.  And in most cases, including this one, it’s deeply insulting to those making the decision – usually the electorate.

Blair is in effect saying that the members of the Labour Party could not possibly arrive at the decision which looks increasingly likely as a result of a conscious thought process after weighing up the options, so they must be arriving at their decision without thinking too deeply about it.  It’s not far short of saying that the members of his party are too stupid to be trusted to take the right decision.

In fairness, though, looking at some of the leadership choices the Labour Party has made in the recent past, perhaps he has, unintentionally, made a valid point.

Something not new, something not old...

Tweet Earlier this week, in comments on the Labour leadership race which seemed to support precisely none of the candidates, the former Secretary of State said something to the effect that the party couldn’t go back to being Old Labour, but neither could it go back to being New Labour.  That left me wondering how exactly one could describe that which is neither old nor new.  Nondescript probably doesn’t quite do it.

In a car showroom, it would probably be ‘slightly-used’ Labour, even adding that it has only had one previous careful driver.  (Well, surely, there must be one of the previous drivers who could be described as careful?)

But perhaps a better answer might be ‘shop-soiled Labour’.  It’s not old, but not quite new, and comes with only a limited guarantee as to its efficacy.  I wonder if that’s what Hain meant.

Who to vote for?

Tweet At the risk of Adam Higgitt withdrawing his kind words, I'm going to make a comment on the curious way in which the Labour Party electoral college works. The spur for this is the discovery that a member of my local branch of Plaid Cymru – someone who's been a party member for over 30 years, and who thought that she had made it clear that she had no wish to pay her union's political levy – has received a voting paper for the Labour Party's leadership election.

Or has she? The Labour Party's processes are pretty arcane in many ways; but if I understand the process correctly, what trade union members have been given is not actually a direct vote in the leadership election itself, but a vote in an internal union poll which decides how the union's block vote is then distributed. The 'value' of an individual member's vote may thus be rather detached from the concept of one member, one vote.

I'm sure that someone from the Labour Party will correct me if I've actually got this totally wrong, but the number of members affiliated by any one union (and thus the number of votes allocated to that union) does not necessarily seem to be the same as the number of members paying the political levy (which explains why the numbers affiliated seem to be mostly nice round numbers). A union may choose to affiliate a smaller number, and thus pay less money, or even a larger number, and thus gain more votes.

If I'm right, that means that a union with 20,000 affiliated votes then casts 20,000 votes in the electoral college, even if they've only got 10,000 members paying the political levy, and even if only, say, 50% of those then actually vote. That's certainly what I understood Lee Waters to be saying, when he noted "Unions will have to ballot their membership and then divide their vote proportionally according to the wishes of their membership.".

It's the first time, I think, that I've ever seen a ballot paper which includes clear advice telling people for whom they should vote, given that the union concerned has chosen to support one particular candidate. It's also the first time I've ever seen a ballot paper which asks the voters to confirm that they are actually eligible to vote before they cast their vote, by ticking a box to confirm that they are not a "supporter of any organisation opposed to" the Labour Party.

There must be hundreds of members of other parties who have been given a voice in an internal election as a result of the curious process used, and as a member of an alternative political party, there's an obvious temptation for a bit of mischief making by recommending one candidate or another. But I couldn't honestly advise any Plaid member to tick the box confirming that they do not support an opposing organisation, and on balance, my advice would be to not interfere.

But to anyone in the Labour Party who's reading – you really do need to look at how you get yourself in a position of inviting members of other parties to participate in your internal election.