Centre-Left Parties and the European Union: Power, Accountability and Democracy by Isabelle Hertner

Author:Isabelle Hertner [Hertner, Isabelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: European, Comparative Politics, Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process, World
ISBN: 9781526120335
Google: Q46uyAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 36860839
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T06:58:27+00:00

European policy-making: the Labour Party

On its website, the Labour Party writes:

To newcomers, working out how everything fits together can seem a bit of a maze – but don’t let that put you off as there’s a common goal: ensuring the party remains open and democratic and help maintain contact between the party, the people and the government. Our structure, and our open policy development process enables more people than ever before to have their say. (Labour Party, 2016a)

This quotation illustrates that openness, inclusiveness, and intra-party democracy matter to the Labour Party. Still, Labour has never conducted an internal referendum on EU affairs. Instead, the party has recently opened up policy-making to the wider public, ‘thereby removing (in part) what was once the privilege of party members’ (Gauja, 2013a: 98). This trend started in November 2003 with the launch of ‘The Big Conversation’ by Tony Blair. Members of the public were asked to comment on a 77-page policy document entitled ‘A Future Fair for All?’ via an online forum (BBC News, 2003, 28 November). Thirteen wide-ranging questions were asked in this consultation, and one of them focused on the UK’s relationship with the EU, namely: ‘How do we make Britain stronger in Europe?’ This policy consultation format has been repeated twice since (‘Let’s Talk’ in May 2006; ‘Fresh Ideas’ in 2011). Whilst Labour’s Parliamentary Party was very supportive of these public policy consultations, grassroots members argued that the views of the membership were further marginalised, and that the power of the party conference was further reduced (Gauja, 2013a: 102). Hence, Labour has not given the grassroots members a direct say in the formulation of European policy. Indeed, the party on the ground can only participate through a complex system of power delegation.

Labour on the ground includes thousands of local wards, the CLPs (of which there are 533 in England), and the nine English Euro-constituencies. Especially the CLP plays an important role in the life of the party, as it selects the candidates for national parliamentary elections. The Labour Party Rule Book (2013, Clause VI) specifies that the CLP may set up a women’s forum, an ethnic minorities forum, and ‘other such forums among common interest groups’, which leaves it to each CLP to set up an EU forum. According to the survey respondents, not a single CLP had set up an EU forum, and only three out of 85 respondents wrote that their CLP had a designated EU policy officer. CLPs thus dealt with the EU in a more ad hoc manner, whenever EU topics became salient, mainly before European parliamentary elections. The majority of respondents (71.76 per cent) stated that they sometimes/occasionally/rarely discuss EU-related topics, whilst 21.17 per cent replied that they never deal with the EU in their CLP meetings. Only 4.7 per cent of the respondents stated that they regularly discuss EU topics in their constituency. The CLPs that discussed the EU covered a wide range of issues. The most frequently mentioned topics were: the Transatlantic Trade Partnership

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