Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP
Chair of the Labour Party
Deputy Leadership of the Labour party
In the event of a contest for the Deputy Leadership, which now seems likely, I invite you to use your influence to secure a new facility for members of the Labour party and affiliated organisations when they are balloted.
As an alternative to voting for any of the candidates they should be allowed to cast one vote against the candidate of their choice. This would be subtracted from that candidate’s tally in the relevant constituency or affiliated organisation. The successful candidate would be settled on goal difference – votes for minus votes against. If, as is entirely possible, no candidate had a positive goal difference the constituency or affiliated organisation would be counted as voting against having any Deputy Leader at all. The same result would be declared if the total negative votes against all the candidates exceeded the total positive votes they had gathered.
In this way, a negative voting facility could allow party members to decide that the entire post of Deputy Leader is otiose, which indeed it is. Its modern function was invented only to provide a berth for Herbert Morrison on the party’s governing body during the 1950s and since then it has served largely as a consolation prize for defeated leadership candidates. It has had some powerful or colourful incumbents but frankly, none of the present candidates are in that category. One of them, Jon Cruddas, has rightly pointed out that there is no reason for the Deputy Leader to be Deputy Prime Minister or indeed any kind of minister (George Brown continued to serve as Deputy Leader even after he flounced out of the
As for the Deputy Premiership, this has become a useless barnacle on the ship of state. A negative voting facility would allow party members to extinguish two superfluous offices at once.
With all respect to the current candidates there is at least one compelling reason to vote against all or any of them: their support for the
It is of course open to Labour MPs to extinguish the Deputy Leadership by declining to nominate any candidate. They would thereby save the party a divisive and expensive election, whose result would make no measurable difference to the party’s prospects or the government of our country. As chair of the Labour party, with its financial and political interests at heart, you will no doubt be recommending this course to them.
Richard Heller