Labour’s membership should be given more power to stop the party’s MPs “selling out”, deputy leadership candidate Richard Burgon has declared.
Calling for a “Bernie Sanders-style grassroots revolution” in the way the party fights elections, Mr Burgon tells the Mirror that if the party had listened to its members it could even be in government now.
The Shadow Justice Secretary shot to prominence as an unwavering defender of Jeremy Corbyn and the left-wing politics which propelled him to power inside the Labour party.
The party is still licking its wounds after its heaviest defeat since the 1930s, and a long contest to replace Mr Corbyn, and ex-deputy leader Tom Watson, has seen all but the most loyal question the ‘people power politics’ which put Labour’s left in control of the party – but didn’t put them in power.
Mr Burgon believes that this brand of Bennite politics will eventually win the day – if the party has the appetite to face the heat it generates from a powerful establishment.
Many of Mr Burgon’s former comrades on the barricades seem to have lost their appetite for a strand of Labour politics that puts the party’s members, and affiliated trade-unions, firmly in the driving seat.
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But the Leeds East MP is unrepentant and believes it wasn’t the party left-wing policies that kept them from power.
Sat in his Westminster office, beneath photographs of former NUM leader Arthur Scargill being arrested and Labour founder Keir Hardie, the Shadow Justice Secretary firmly rejects the idea that it was the party’s left politics that lost them the last election.
” Brexit overshadowed traditional party loyalties,” he says.
Mr Corbyn was a man “targeted by the right-wing press” because of his socialist politics.
The answer isn’t to change course, he argues the heavy fire is evidence that the party is in the right place and the establishment is unsettled.
Polls put him in second place in the five-way race, behind frontrunner Angela Rayner.
Speaking to the Mirror, Mr Burgon defended giving Labour members, who critics say are far more left-wing than the general public, an even greater say over the party’s future direction.
His manifesto for reforming the party, the deputy leader has traditionally looked after internal issues within the party, is a radical one.
It would introduce Open Selections, making MPs compete to keep their right to stand for the party in an open contest at every election, reforming the party’s constitution to enshrine its socialist values and even giving members a vote on if the party should support decisions on war and peace.
A Tony Benn School for Political education would teach activists the ABCs of Labour politics. A hint of which brand of Labour politics becomes clearer when Mr Burgon picks left-wing academic Ralph Miliband – father of (soft left) Ed and (moderate) David Miliband – as his favourite member of the family.
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“Oh it has to be Ralph,” he laughs, “although I do like Ed a lot.”
MPs, he says, need to realise the limits of their judgment – and the risks that being in Parliament could see them lose their values.
Mr Burgon says: “I think people have got to understand, and Aneurin Bevan talked about this, that Parliament basically is a system designed to make people sell out without realising.
“It is a system designed to make people lose touch without realising it.
“So most people don’t wake up as a Labour MP, on the left or the right, and say, you know what today’s the day I’m going to sell out and forget my roots.
“The system embraces them, the system seduces them.”
This he warns leaves them at risk of becoming “out of touch” and leads them occasionally “losing the plot”.
He added: “A good example is the ridiculous attempts to get rid of Jeremy in 2016.
“It was outrageous, but looking back at it now people can more clearly see: the Conservatives were in crisis, David Cameron was on the way out because of the way he’d handled the EU referendum.
“But Labour MPs thought the priority should be to turn that into the crisis of the Labour Party, and that’s why we lost the 2017 general election .
“If we had listened to members at the time, we’d have got it right.
“If we’d listened to the members over the war in Iraq, we’d have got it right and wouldn’t have gone into the war.
“The same with PFI.
“Obviously the Parliamentary Labour Party is vital, I respect the role my colleagues play. I think we all play an important role but we’re part of a movement, we’re not the movement on our own.
“There are so many issues where Labour members across the country got it right and MPs would do well to listen to them. It would be for their benefit.”
Mr Burgon goes on to say that when it comes to future Labour manifestos he would give members the final say on what the party’s policy will be.
Historically, Labour’s conference has selected policy which has informed, although not necessarily closely, the ideas which go on to make up Labour’s offer to the electorate.
Instead, the Shadow Cabinet and Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee have hammered out an agreement – often making conference resolutions less left-wing than those backed by the membership.
Even under Mr Corbyn, the party manifesto weakened conference demands around abolishing private schools and closing immigration detention centres when putting its offer to the public.
But the Shadow Justice Secretary in unambiguous about who he believes should decide policy.
“If something is passed at Labour party conference to be in the manifesto, that should end up in the manifesto.
“It has to be phrased in a way for public consumption that’s, you know, almost like in tabloid language, but the substance of the policies should end up in the manifesto.”
It is a big break from the way Labour decided upon its policy when it was last in government.
Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, a streamlined process gave members a voice, but the final decisions were ultimately made by politicians.
Asked about Mr Blair, who has been critical of the party’s leftward drift, Mr Burgon said the ex-PM “should really get a grip”.
He said: “Some of the things he says you wonder why he wants to be a member of the Labour Party.
“People have made the point to me about Tony Blair, that when in 2016 when people were being suspended for a tweet saying they effing liked or hated the Foo Fighters or liking a tweet by Caroline Lucas.
“And there’s Tony Blair, who was the leading player in getting us to support an illegal war in Iraq, whose sniping against the Labour Party all the time and attacking it.”
A running theme in Mr Burgon’s politics is the forces he says are arrayed to stop the party’s left-wing direction.
“Socialists get demonised because their political ambition is the radical transformation of the system,” he says.
“The reality is if you’re not offending the establishment then you’re not a threat to things making us a more unequal society.
“We need to be a threat to a system that makes people homeless, we need to be a threat to a system that takes us into illegal wars.
“We need to be a threat to a system where people can’t get a mortgage or a council house and where people on zero-hours contracts are being treated like dirt.
“Of course, I oppose that system, and those who support the unfair system don’t like people like me for that.
“I’m afraid it’s part and parcel of being a socialist and only when you’re completely irrelevant to the establishment will they stop criticising you.”
Mr Burgon will find out on April 4, when the new leader and deputy leader are unveiled, if Labour’s members will follow him into the fire.
