Clive Lewis: to beat Tories, Labour has to work with other progressives
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Version 0 of 1. Lords reform and PR must be part of radical political reform, says leadership contender Labour must embrace radical political reform – including a proportional voting system – and ditch party tribalism to take on the Conservatives, leadership contender Clive Lewis argues. The Norwich South MP is pitching himself as the candidate to tackle what he calls the “crisis of democracy”. “If the rules of the system are rigged, don’t fight by them,” he said. “So let’s talk about having a constitutional convention, let’s talk about PR [proportional representation], let’s talk about reform of the Lords. Let’s talk about devolving, and moving power-structures out of London. “I think now, being on this political precipice as we are after that result, the worst since 1935 – now is the time for telling the truth.” He said Labour must overcome the internal divisions that have riven the party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and reach out beyond party boundaries to other progressive campaigners. “Do I think we can go on another five years divided as we are? I don’t. I really don’t. Not just as a Labour party. Divided parties fall. But it’s also as a progressive movement in this country. How can we stop trying to dictate to what you would call progressives in the UK?” He decried what he called “Labourism”: the mentality that Labour is the leading leftwing force in British politics, and that those outside it, in other parties and beyond, are “viewed with suspicion”. “We can actually begin to build the cement of those alliances that are actually going to be needed to take on the Tories: on climate, on racism, on democracy in our society. That can be by working together with others who want the same thing,” he said. And he warned against the leadership race being used as an opportunity for a different section of the party to take control. “I think most people, including MPs, are tired of the swing that’s gone on, in the postwar period, between left and right – where one faction takes over, and sees it as its almost God-given right to suppress the other side,” he said. “What we had under the New Labour years wasn’t unity, it was hegemony. The left did exist, but it existed in a tomb.” He called for a thorough review of Labour’s internal democratic processes, to be overseen by a “deliberative convention” of party members. Corbyn’s leadership pitch included a pledge to democratise the party; but Lewis said that had been “lost along the way”. Giving examples of reforms he would like to see, he cited giving constituency branches the power to decide whether they would stand candidates aside for other likeminded parties such as the Greens. And after Labour was reduced to a single MP in Scotland at the general election, he said Scottish Labour must be able to decide what its policy should be on independence. “In Wales and Scotland, it’s about saying that the December result was more than just a devastating election defeat; more than just a Brexit outcome; it was also about, I think, the ability for the union to survive in its current configuration,” he said. “Now what form that takes I don’t know; but the change is coming. And I think what we now have to do for our Scottish and Welsh colleagues is to say to them, we want to give you full autonomy, to decide the best way forward now. Is that for some kind of devo-max federal structure? Or is it for you to campaign for an independent Scotland, independent Wales? That should be their choice.” Unlike most of his rivals, Lewis is cautious about criticising last month’s manifesto – but says the party had failed to prepare the ground adequately for such a radical set of policies. “I loved that manifesto,” he said. “In many ways, it was almost like a fantasy football manifesto. It was a brilliant manifesto – and if you take each individual idea, I think most people who are left of centre in our party would have said: ‘I love this.’ But the trouble was, we tried to drop one of the most radical manifestos of the 21st century in a six-week campaign, and I don’t think you can do that.” He says if he was Labour leader, the party’s manifesto would be developed “from the bottom up”. Lewis has only been an MP since 2015, but was quickly earmarked for promotion to the frontbench as a staunch supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. He resigned rather than obey the three-line whip to trigger article 50, the formal Brexit process – but had been back on the frontbench, in John McDonnell’s Treasury team, since 2018. He helped form the campaign group Love Socialism Hate Brexit, with colleagues including the York MP Rachael Maskell, to call for his party to embrace a second referendum. That policy was blamed by many Labour candidates for the loss of their seats in the Midlands and north last month. But Lewis claims the party would have suffered at the hands of the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, if they hadn’t supported a people’s vote. “If we had had a more overtly Brexit position, arguably we would have haemorrhaged more votes.” And he says the Brexit vote was a symptom of longstanding problems in many of the “red wall” constituencies that fell to the Tories last month. “What happened in those seats, yes it’s about Brexit, but if you understand it in the context of the crisis in democracy, if you understand in the context that people wanted a sense of agency over their lives, of control over their lives, and they don’t have that, then you understand that this has been 40 years in the making,” he said. |