A senior Labour figure has attacked proposals to let party members elect the leaders of their local Labour councils, calling the idea unworkable and saying it would undermine hardworking councillors.



Trade union general secretaries were briefed this week on proposals to give party members the right to elect the leaders of the local Labour council groups. Other proposed changes include reducing the number of MPs needed to nominate a candidate for party leader.

Nick Forbes, the leader of the Labour group on the Local Government Association and a member of Labour’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), said the Labour leadership should stop undermining councillors.

“While we need a debate about how to improve local accountability, this idea is unworkable,” he wrote in an article for the Guardian. “It risks legal challenges to local authority constitutions, which state that councillors should choose the council leader. It risks endless infighting as groups within the party are pitted against each other.

“It risks turning every council decision into a local membership referendum. And it could end up with the party spending millions organising ballots of members every year, which would be better spent competing with the Tories’ election warchest.”



Forbes, who is also the leader of Newcastle city council, said it was vital that the NEC backed councillors “as the frontline in the fight against austerity”.

He said: “Our councillors need to be able to come together, face up to the realities of sometimes complex and difficult decisions, secure in the knowledge that they will be backed to the hilt by the party for the challenging job they do.”

Katy Clark, a former MP, is conducting a review of the party’s democratic structures for this year’s conference, which could herald an overhaul of how Labour elects its leadership and selects its MPs.

On Wednesday, Corbyn’s spokesman said the proposals had not received specific endorsement from the Labour leader. “There are no concrete proposals yet; there are many proposals from within the party but whatever would be agreed about any change would be agreed by the NEC and then put to conference and none of that has happened,” he said.

The spokesman said it was not unprecedented for party members to choose the leaders of the local Labour council groups, saying it “existed in earlier periods in various forms”.

He said party reform was a key plank of both of Corbyn’s leadership campaigns. “Jeremy’s made clear and stood on a platform … that he wanted to open up party democracy and democracy more widely in society,” he said. “The party and Jeremy have not endorsed any particular proposal.”

Other Labour sources said proposals would probably be diluted before they were put to members at the party’s conference in September. It is understood the Momentum leadership, including the leftwing group’s founder, Jon Lansman, is unhappy that the changes do not go far enough, especially regarding the selection process for MPs.

A Labour source said they suspected the left would be disappointed with the final reforms. “Unfortunately, the chances of Katy Clark using this review to deliver anything meaningful whatsoever for the left is a pipe dream. It’ll be the left not the right of the party complaining about the outcomes,” the source said.

Another source close to the NEC said: “There are a lot of practical issues that need to be worked through and it’s all probably going to be a bit less dramatic than what’s been briefed.”