Labour Insiders Fear Rule Changes Could Prevent Leadership Challenges
Keir Starmer (Credit: PA Images / Alamy)
3 min read
Labour Party insiders fear that a new set of changes to the rulebook could prevent challengers from forcing a leadership election to be held, PoliticsHome understands.
A number of rule changes being put forward by the party are set to be reviewed at a meeting of Labour's ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) on Tuesday, before being voted on at the party's upcoming Conference.
Documents seen by PoliticsHome show that the proposals would scrap current rules that state leadership elections should nominally take place at every annual party conference, and that when Labour is in government leadership elections proceed if requested by a card vote at conference.
The rules currently state that "In any other circumstances an election shall only be held when a vacancy occurs".
However, with the rules around party conferences and governance scrapped, this final sub-clause would be changed to simply read: "An election shall only be held when a vacancy occurs".
Under the changes being proposed, the rules around challengers needing to secure nominations from 20 per cent of Labour MPs remain. This has caused confusion among party insiders as there appear to be rules around a challenge but no provision for holding a leadership election subsequently.
Some believe that this would leave no route to leadership challenges, resulting in legal confusion because even if a challenge secured nominations from 20 per cent of Labour MPs no leadership contest would be guaranteed.
A concerned party insider told PoliticsHome: “The basis for any democratic system is that there has to be a clear mechanism to trigger challenges to the leadership – under this proposal, that is not possible.
“This appears to be an attempt to insulate the party leadership from democratic challenges for the foreseeable future.”
Other Labour sources insist that the proposals would enable a leadership election prompted by a valid challenge to take place at any time.
A Labour spokesperson said: “Under the proposals it would remain the case that 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party would need to back a leadership challenger to trigger an election. If that happened, a leadership election would then take place.”
PoliticsHome understands that there are no plans at this time for Labour to amend the rule changes going to the NEC today to reflect that.
Changes to Labour Party rules – officially called constitutional amendments – are subject to card votes rather than a show of hands at Conference because the will of delegates is binding when it comes to rules, unlike policy motions.
The leadership therefore needs support from affiliates, particularly trade unions, to pass rule changes.
Under Keir Starmer, efforts were made in 2021 to replace the one-member-one-vote system of leadership elections with an electoral college that would limit the votes of party members and increase the power of MPs, but these were unsuccessful.
Instead, Starmer passed amendments that scrapped registered supporters (which had allowed non-members to pay to vote in leadership elections) and changed the nomination threshold for leadership candidates from 10 per cent of Labour MPs to 20 per cent.
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