MPs Don't Make Good Leaders

Max Shanly’s article Towards a New Model Left Party lays out a clear and correct assessment of what should be done to build a socialist party worthy of the name. There is one point absent from the article but essential to building a socialist party: the leaders of the party must not be its MPs. 

What is a socialist party? 

There are two things that people can mean when talking about a “party”. The first is a purely electoral party, like the dominant parties in the UK today. The second is the traditional idea of a socialist party: an organisation which leads the class struggle, coordinating all different forms of struggle into a single movement.

A powerful socialist party cannot just be an electoral party. No socialist party in history has won real power by primarily focusing on elections; those that win an election without building power in other parts of society quickly find themselves collapsing, unable to carry out the radical parts of their programme. A party capable of building socialism - not just making good arguments and passing reforms, but actually ending capitalism and building a new world - must build power in every sector. Trade unions, elections, direct action, political education, community organising, and more: all need to be taken seriously as part of a broader strategy. In the modern day, each of these is carried out by separate groups, and the lack of an overarching organisation means that they rapidly grow or fall apart as conditions change. The left will remain weak until we have a party which treats them as parts of a broader strategy, without permanently prioritising any one part over the others. 

Labourism - an excessive focus on parliament - is a major risk for today’s new party, due to the background of the people setting it up. This risk can be reduced by ensuring public debate about strategy and by holding leaders democratically accountable, but the problem goes deeper than the attitudes of individuals. We have to think carefully about the structures of the party, making sure its rules do not innately prioritise parliament - and there is no bigger guarantee of prioritising parliament than by making MPs your leaders. 

While it is clear that the founders of this new party intend for it to be an electoral party, we should still aim higher - pushing the movement towards the creation of a true socialist party. Even if the new party is primarily focused on electoral politics, it would still benefit from maintaining a broader vision. If elections are the only thing that matters, it is tempting to make concessions in order to get over that finish line. By remembering that elections are only one tactic among many, and that we are part of a wider movement, it is easier to resist the urge to compromise for short term gain. 

The problem with MPs - pressure to conform 

MPs are under more pressure than almost anyone in the country to conform to ruling class ideology. Their role is to spend hours listening and making speeches in a carefully scripted & stage-managed chamber. They learn to abide by every obtuse rule thrown at them: don't clap, don't point out if someone is lying, always speak directly to Mr Speaker - or else they're not allowed to take part in parliament. They spend their days reading and debating legislation to reform the state; directing constituents towards legal means to support them; using their position as an individual within Parliament to help people. They work with high up civil servants and the heads of large organisations - people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. 

It's impossible not to internalise the ideas and ideologies that surround you every day, especially when you have to act within tradition and existing laws in order to get anything done. While it is absolutely possible for people to maintain a firm commitment to socialism while sitting in parliament, we will put ourselves in a far weaker position by placing those people at the head of the party. 

Time and again around the world, we have seen left wing parties elected to government on radical programmes which they fail to deliver. While there will always be huge barriers faced by such parties, they are harder to overcome as a person surrounded by the establishment and their ideas of what is possible and sensible. When bureaucrats and bankers advise that your plans are impossible, MPs are too accustomed to accepting those boundaries. Resistance within the state has to be overcome by building power outside the state, not by negotiating and watering down your policies. A party leadership needs to keep their heads clear from the fog of “sensible politics” which fills the halls of government.

Strategy & priorities 

Like anyone else, an MP’s day-to-day experience of the world affects their conception of what is important and what is possible. Their position in parliament means they are far removed from most people’s lives - arguably by design - and makes it hard to stay in touch with a realistic picture of the wider movement, or the struggle to further the interests of the working class.

A socialist party needs to organise all forms of struggle into a single strategy towards socialism, adapting according to the situation it finds itself in. Electoral struggle is valuable, but it must not be prioritised above all other struggles. (The same applies to all other areas of class struggle, but there is very little risk of this new party abandoning elections in order to focus purely on, say, trade union organising.) MPs will naturally feel the need to prioritise elections because that's what their political activity revolves around. In a society where we are conditioned to treat elections as the be-all and end-all of politics, a party led by MPs will inevitably value electoral success too highly, and lose sight of broader strategy and the end goal of socialism. 

In addition to these pressures, MPs spend a lot of their time being MPs. Electoral party leaders spend most of their time leading not the whole party, but its tiny parliamentary wing, and the rest of the party follows. A socialist party deserves leaders who can dedicate all of their time to leading the party. 

What if we win? 

In the dream scenario where this party is so successful as to be able to form a government, this idea may feel uncomfortable: a party winning an election, and electing a Prime Minister who is not the leader of the party. The PM would be told what to do by other people! To this I would say: 

- A socialist party should not allow itself to be limited by assumptions of what is sensible and normal, by the standards of the dominant political parties. Anything that this party does will be mocked and criticised by its opponents. 

- We must always be clear that our goal is socialism, not just the next election. It is good that the country would be led by a democratic party and their representatives, rather than a single Prime Minister and the people they select. (Or more accurately, by a ruling class which pushes the Prime Minister one way or the other) 

- A socialist programme should feature the total transformation of the existing state and its political structures, replacing it with real democracy; the current parliamentary system shouldn’t remain unchanged. 

- And lastly, given the immense opposition we face, this is not realistically an immediate concern. We'd probably all get used to the idea by the time that a socialist party was on the verge of electoral victory. 

The rules we need 

I would hope that there is no chance of the founding conference setting rules in the model of Labour or the Conservatives, where a leader is elected only from amongst MPs. This would doom the party to Labourism from day one (not to mention drastically limiting the range of leadership candidates, now and in the future). 

But to found a socialist party that stands by its principles and resists the pressure of establishment ideas, we need to go further. The party should explicitly rule out any elected MPs as candidates for party leadership. This will be controversial, given Corbyn & Sultana’s central role in founding the party and attracting support to it. But our opinions of individual leadership candidates should not take priority over the long-term goals of the party. Rules and structures need to be built to work for any set of people who might be involved; not designed for whoever is around right now.