The Evolution of Decision-Making in the British Labour Party : From Grassroots to Netroots ? Emmanuelle Avril To cite this version: Emmanuelle Avril. The Evolution of Decision-Making in the British Labour Party : From Grassroots to Netroots ?. Emmanuelle Avril, Christine Zumello New Technologies, Organizational Change and Governance, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.102-117, 2013, 978-1-137-26422-0. 10.1057/9781137264237_7. hal-01378832 HAL Id: hal-01378832 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01378832 Submitted on 10 Oct 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. 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Emmanuelle Avril When it comes to branding, marketing, and election victories, the revamped British Labour Party, also known as ‘New’ Labour, undoubt- edly stood, until very recently, as a success story which other political parties wished to emulate. However, it is also now a largely discredited organization, which was defeated at the polls in May 2010 and whose members have been leaving in their droves, a disaffection which the 6 per cent post-election surge is unlikely to significantly counter.1 It is the contention of this chapter that while the business-inspired reforms account to a large extent for the success of the New Labour brand by raising the organization’s responsiveness to a range of stakeholders, such as voters and supporters, who had not previously been prioritized, the modernizers’ attachment to a technical, managerial conception of peo- ple management contained, from the very start, the seeds of future decay. The lessons drawn from the rise and fall of New Labour therefore provide a unique insight into the potentially disastrous effects of some of the most popular tenets of change management in organizations in general, notably the deleterious impact of the Party’s growing disregard for the role of members and activists in achieving the organization’s main goals. This chapter provides an overview of the overall transformation of the Labour Party from a social democratic political party into a marketing organization, through the adoption of change and process management techniques, in which new technologies have come to play a pivotal role.2 The transformation of the role of the membership under the com- bined effects of the Party’s structural changes and the development of Internet tools all intended to increase participation and mobilization 102 February 16, 2013 13:1 MAC/AVRIL Page-102 9781137264220_08_cha07 PROOF Emmanuelle Avril 103 in a context of long-term decline of party membership.3 Although ‘netroots’ is not usually used to refer to party members as such (Netroots UK, for example, aims to ‘support the growth of infrastructure, net- works and movements for left and centre-left online activism’), the term describes rather well the attempt to move from a formal model of membership (where one pays a fee in exchange for which one is granted certain voting rights) to the much looser model of the ‘Sup- porters Network’, attracting supposedly younger, more versatile, and less-demanding voters. The analysis starts with a brief review of the business-inspired struc- tural changes by which Labour was turned into New Labour, a suppos- edly more open and more internally democratic political organization; it then focuses on New Labour as a marketing organization whose entire communication strategy, geared to the capture of voters, appears to have been largely misguided; it finally moves to an evaluation of New Labour’s tentative use of new technological tools in implementing and communicating change, showing that, despite claims to have cast away the bureaucratic model, the Labour Party can be said to have remained in the thralls of the command-and-control model. New Labour offers therefore the paradox of potentially democratizing tools at the service of increased centralization and control. From Labour to New Labour: structural changes The model which inspired the restructuring of the Labour Party (a pro- cess referred to as ‘modernization’) was borrowed from the business world. The reforms, subsumed in the Partnership in Power policy-making process (Labour Party, 1997a), recently renamed Partnership into Power (Labour Party, 2010) and whose official objective was to ‘provide both Labour Party members and non-members with a forum for making their ideas and suggestions heard through discussions at local policy forums and through submissions to Policy Commissions’, in fact aimed to estab- lish a business culture at all levels of the Party. The main components of this new culture can be defined as innovation, adaptation, flexibility, as well as a certain idea of the role of leaders and of their relationship with the agents of change within the organization. The espousal by New Labour of the ideas and values of business did not only translate into the adoption of business-friendly policies; it also led to the adoption of a business-inspired process management aiming to make the Party more responsive to the electoral market. In par- ticular, the structural and procedural reforms turned the Party into a February 16, 2013 13:1 MAC/AVRIL Page-103 9781137264220_08_cha07 PROOF 104 Breaking Organizational Boundaries more professional organization and consisted in replacing the tradi- tional Labour Party culture by a culture of change embodied by the young and charismatic Tony Blair. At the beginning of the 1990s, the British Labour Party, which had lost four consecutive elections, undertook reforms aiming at revitalizing the Party, through, among other things, the introduction of delibera- tion processes in the development of policies and generally more ‘direct’ relations between the leadership and the wider grassroots (Quinn, 2004; Russell, 2005). However, very few would now disagree that despite the rhetoric of democratization, these reforms were not intended to lead to a reshaping of the internal power equilibrium in favour of grassroots party members, but were, on the contrary, designed to give the leader- ship significant new powers to control dissent in the Party in a bid to make the Party electable again. In terms of membership, the shift from highly structured and organized grassroots, with a formal and traceable impact on policy formulation, to a looser wider versatile netroots whose influence is much more difficult to pinpoint, mainly to pursue tradi- tional modes of campaigning and electioneering, coincides with a move to dilute the weight of activists within the Party (Farrell and Webb, 2000; Scarrow, 2000). The official discourse of modernization stressed the necessity for the Party to adopt a decision-making process, which would be more efficient and less off-putting for new and inexperienced members. In practice, it meant greater distance from the trade unions, increased professional- ization, and a more disciplined Party (Avril, 2007). The objective of the reforms was a move to a more unified structure, based on a more consen- sual decision-making process. Changes at the Party’s annual conference were particularly significant, this being the highest formal authority in the Party. The widening of consultation also took the shape of a move to the ‘one member one vote’ (OMOV) to replace the much maligned trade union block vote. What was less noticeable, but just as signif- icant, is that the principle of OMOV was also supposed to apply to constituency delegates at the annual conference who were urged to vote individually and not as a delegation. OMOV was also introduced in the electoral college to elect leaders and the national executive com- mittee, where ballot papers are now sent directly to members’ homes instead of a system whereby local parties mandated a delegate to reflect the constituency’s majority view in a vote at conference. The new sys- tem, although theoretically more ‘democratic’, is also open to influence by marketing-style campaigns since TV personalities, such as Eastenders actor Michael Cashman or Tony Robinson (also known as Baldric in the February 16, 2013 13:1 MAC/AVRIL Page-104 9781137264220_08_cha07 PROOF Emmanuelle Avril 105 Black Adder series), standing for the leadership, tended to score very high votes. In this way, it was thought the Party would no longer be in the grip of the supposed ‘dictatorship’ of local activists (Duverger, 1951), since the more inclusive decision-making processes would be open to a larger, but also more malleable, audience, who would be content with episodic consultations. The point was to replace what was a representative model, where power is concentrated in the hands of delegates elected by their peers and who take decisions in the name of their fellow constituency members, with a new and more participative consultation model where the decision-making process would now be open to all members through ‘policy forums’.4 In practice, therefore, the move towards ‘direct democracy’ has led to the erosion of the elective power of activists.