I was writing about something else, and wrote this on party management. It’s coherent, but doesn’t belong in what I am writing, and so I thought I’d share it now,
“Your Party” is planning a Sortition based founding conference. It has probably chosen this for reasons of control but, “Your Party”’s problems occur in many parties, and I am reminded of the white paper “The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party…, a white paper to the PSA” by Emanuelle Averil on New Labour, which examines its managerialism and the destruction of its activist commitment and influence.
The paper was published in 2015 before the General Election. I read it in 2017 and strangely ended up sitting next to her at Conference ’19. I posted my comments in a blog, A note on Emanuelle Averil’s “the unintended consequences of New Labour” and in that article I selected some quotes. While being 20 years old, these comments seem equally relevant today, particularly about the Labour Party. I quote her on how suppressing the activist layer was mistaken and led to a failure to connect to the electorate, how factionalism suppresses plurality which made renewal impossible, how triangulation led to voter alienation and its control freakery led to a toxification of its image.
We might debate about the noughties, but it’s clearly true today.