Leadership Elections and Democracy in the British Labour Party

Abstract

The stark contrast between the marathon race to succeed Gordon Brown after he stood down as Labour Party leader in May 2010 and the bypassing of the Electoral College to appoint Brown in 2007, both of which triggered heated debates about the victor’s authority and legitimacy as Labour Party leader, provide an interesting entry point into Labour Party leadership elections. Ed Miliband’s subsequent struggle to counter his ‘Old Labour’ image with little legitimacy within his own party, followed by a complete overhaul of leadership election rules on 1 March 2014, also highlight the paramount importance of processes on perceptions of leaders. If we track the series of constitutional changes in the Labour Party since the 1980s, we see that leadership elections have increasingly been underpinned by a double imperative: on the one hand the need to choose a credible party leader and potential Prime Minister, and on the other the need to meet the requirements of internal democracy. This highlights the fundamental tension at work in any organisation between outcome and process and even more so in a political party committed, at least in theory, to the egalitarian principle: the Labour Party was created at the turn of the twentieth century as a coalition of various groups, among which trade unions played a major part, and as a result adopted a federal structure whereby the various stakeholders of the party were represented in the decision-making bodies, especially at the annual conference, the supreme authority in the Party.