I keep reading comments which take it as accepted fact that the Bones commission report, and by extension the party leader, is about centralising power within the party and reducing democracy within it.
Now, while this may be the perception of people who haven’t actually followed the report’s progress carefully (and it seems to me at the moment that the number of people who have actually read the report is in inverse proportion to the number who insisted furiously over the summer on their right to read it!) I think anyone has actually read even the summary of it would accept that much of it isn’t about this at all, but about making other, much more operational matters within the party, work better.
But one proposal: the creation of a Chief Officers Group or COG (or in fact more accurately a slight formalisation of this existing loose grouping) does seem to have given to some the impression of greater centralisation. And I accept that on the face of it, there does seem to be a prima facie case here.
But once you actually look at the situation, in fact this isn’t my analysis of this development at all - and I’ll give two reasons why not.
Firstly, the entire Bones report makes no proposals whatsoever about the party’s process for making policy (with the arguable exception of a specific proposal relating to spring conference, which would not affect the fundamentals at all, and I get the impression is now anyway gradually being withdrawn).
The existing process, in which policy is made by conference, and the process is managed and led by an elected Federal Policy Committee (FPC), will continue, just as it does now.
This is important. While the questions of how we run ourselves as a party are obviously important, the reason we are actually in politics is in order to make proposals and change things - or in other words, policy matters. And the decisions about where we stand as a party and what we are proposing, will not be subject to any greater centralisation whatsoever, but will still come to conference just as before.
So to repeat: not one word in the Bones report implies changing the party’s procedures for deciding our policies.
And in fact as it happens I think we currently have broader involvement in decision-making about policies, than we have had for most of the time in recent years. As a result of some careful work over the last few years, when MPs and Shadow Cabinet members now want to make policy in new areas, they are more likely than was the case say five years ago, to take it through a proper party procedure, for example consulting FPC, and ending in bringing it to conference for debate and a vote by conference reps - rather than simply making a unilateral announcement, entirely independently of the party’s policy-making procedures, which happened a lot more a few years ago.
There is an inevitable constant tension between our ability as a party to make policy only twice a year at conference, and the requirements on spokespeople and MPs to respond on much shorter timescales, but by seeking to engage both sides I think we now have a much more integrated arrangement than has often been the case.
But that’s a bit of a tangent: back to Bones and COG. My second reason for thinking that the ‘centralisation’ analysis isn’t right, is this.
If it were the case that at the moment the Federal Executive (FE) ran the party in a strategic manner from the centre effectively, and decisions that it actually currently takes (not decisions that arguably it ought to take) were being removed to COG, then there might be a stronger case for this.
But from all my observation of the way things work at the moment, this simply isn’t the case. Whether for reasons of its set-up or structure, or its own failings - I think it’s probably a combination of both - the FE simply does not take this kind of role in running the party - either currently or any time in recent history that I’m aware of. It is not, in reality, in charge of, say, campaigning, or of policy-making, or of, say, press and communications, or of finances. And there is a crying need for someone to be in the centre, taking responsibility not for running each of these areas in detail, but for co-ordinating them. Indeed the failure to do this is I think our biggest organisational failing, and a question that we absolutely need to find an answer to urgently.
Now, some might say that this is the job of the leader, to draw all these areas together. But - and this is the irony here! - putting power over all these areas into the sole hands of the leader and his immediate team, really would be centralising!
What Bones has proposed instead is that a central co-ordinating group, based on an existing group of elected senior officers of the party - and I understand that the agreement at Conference between FE and the English Party means that it will be much closer to the existing group, with fewer new people appointed by the leader or by COG itself - should do this job of co-ordination. Now, as I’ve said in another post on Bones, I suspect that the precise membership of this grouping could usefully be refined further (as hopefully will its name!) - but essentially I welcome the creation/empowerment of such a group to take a lead in drawing all these areas of the party together. The historical relationship between some of these areas I’ve mentioned really has not served our party well. If COG gets bogged down in running each of these areas in detail then I think will not be doing its job properly and I don’t think it will do (though we should certainly keep it under review, and if necessary then change it).
But at the moment, and from where I’m sitting, the proposal to create a grouping which will take a strategic and comprehensive look across the whole range of key pillars of the party - in a way that the FE, bluntly, has never been able to do - exactly meets a central need of us as a party. I firmly hope it succeeds.
September 29th, 2008 at 13:06
Policy: total straw man. I’m not aware of anyone pretending otherwise.
FE: you are right about the FE’s effectiveness, but the point is that the Bones proposed solution to it’s lack thereof is to increase centralisation. Now, you can make an argument that that centralisation is necessary, but it is still centralisation.
The slight flaw in your argument is that the current state of the FE is due in no small part to a series of attempts to increase centralisation over the past decade or so. We’ve seen committees such as the CCC grow in influence in recent years, the splitting of the general fund and campaigns fund, the merging of the management of parliamentary staff and Cowley Street staff. None of it has got you the sort of strategic thinking you apparently support. Why will the COG be any different?
The real problem in my experience is that the centre doesn’t WANT a strategy. Every so often we acquire them and then the centre does its damnedest to bury it. As I have gone on about for more than I care to mention, the party took a strategic decision to set up the GBTF in 2001, yet it took us 6 years before it started to get anything like adequate funding. My deep concern is that the COG is going to lead to more of this sort of “making it up as we go along” thinking.
September 29th, 2008 at 15:21
Thanks for the comment.
On policy - I wasn’t claiming that anyone was saying that policy was being centralised. My point was that if a general accusation of centralisation was being made, the fact that no attempt was being made to centralise policy-making - the most important decisions we take as a party - was quite significant.
On the FE, my point is that this has been going on for so long now, that we can’t simply say that the FE doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job at the moment, but perhaps in principle it could do. And although I think we generally agree on “the FE problem”, I don’t think the way you frame it here is quite right. For instance, who allowed the CCC to arrogate power to itself? It was the FE which failed to assert its control over these areas that it is supposed to be responsible for.
I think it now seems to be a reasonable conclusion (even if not absolutely totally proved to be true) to draw that the FE is simply never going to handle this right.
I don’t agree that the various different party leaderships (three different regimes in recent years) have all been actively opposed to having a strategy. I think they haven’t liked various strategic proposals that have been proposed - perhaps such as the one you mention. But from talking to various leaders at different times, I certainly don’t think that they simply didn’t want to have a strategy at all - their frustrations have tended to be much more around the lack of a process to agree and implement one - yes, admittedly their own favoured one.
The reason I don’t think that COG will centralise everything is that while I hope it will do a job of leading, the existing constitutional bodies will still retain most - and ultimately of course constititionally, all of - their power over their own individual areas of responsibility.
But the reason I have hope for it which I don’t for the FE is that it should - I may be wrong and it may not, but I think it will - cover the whole range areas of responsibility which the FE has either not effectively asserted its rightful control over, or is not constitutionally its responsibility.
Sorry to return to the policy experience again, but the experience there has been that if elected party committees and senior MPs both engage constructively with each other (not stand defensively on their own formal rights) then it’s possible to find a way forward which benefits both, as well as the party.
September 29th, 2008 at 15:39
I’m sure leaders want strategies in principle, they just haven’t been prepared to abide by them. We’ve had various processes down the years, “No Glass Ceilings”, Hugh Rickard’s attempt at developing a business plan (swiftly dropped), various attempts to introduce inductions and planning away days for the FE. Each and every time they have been ignored or undermined by the centre (note: I didn’t say the leader deliberately; don’t put words in my mouth).
Yes, you’re right: the FE has given its power away time after time. In the case of Bones, it rubber stamped a paper it hadn’t even read at the time. But it is short sighted to conclude that the solution is to centralise.
What is wholly lacking in Bones is a clear analysis of what the FE SHOULD be doing and proposals for making it closer to the ideal. If those were being looked at, I for one would be a lot less anxious about COG, but Bones is completely silent in this regard.
Ultimately though, and here I suspect we will agree, if the FE wants to be taken more seriously, it has to sort this out itself. The problem is, until it’s prestige is improve, it will only attract “be-ers” and not “do-ers.” It is a chicken and egg situation, but it is unfortunate in the extreme that the centre seems to view this as an opportunity rather than a threat.