Constitutional specialist Vernon Bogdanor wrote recently in the New Statesman

The Labour Party is composed of three main elements – the Parliamentary Labour Party, the trade unions and the members. But the PLP is the most important, given that it represents the nine million people who voted Labour in 2015, and any future Labour government will be responsible to MPs. A government is not, ought not, and cannot be constitutionally responsible to the few hundred thousand party members outside parliament, who represent nobody but themselves and who are, in Labour’s case, apparently, three times more likely to be well-off urban professionals than the population as a whole. (Emphasis added)

This sums up the view of most in the anti-Corbyn camp. It effectively rejects the idea of national political parties as anything but an appendage to the parties in Parliament. This view is repeated over and over again. On the Save the Labour Party.com website are told that “… Labour MPs have the mandate of the 9 million ordinary voters who elected them in 2015”. Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political journalist, tweeted that Labour MPs “… point out they have [the] mandate of 9 million voters …”.

The YouGov psephologist Peter Kellner (writing in the same issue of the New Statesman as Bogdanor above) asked if Corbyn has a “mandate to impose his views”. He answered

Emphatically not. Together, Labour MPs won 9.3 million votes last May. Just 250,000 people voted for Corbyn to be party leader. Their mandate is much greater than his.

The Daily Telegraph was already singing the same song on 1st December 2015: “The Labour leader keeps boasting about his mandate from over 250,000 party members. But MPs represent more than ten times that number”. It continued:

In short, they have mandates of their own, from the electorate who voted to keep them in Parliament for another five years.

The common theme from these diverse voices is that each MP can appeal to the authority of his/her electors to overrule any commitment to the authority of the party on the ticket of which they were elected to Parliament. This idea is repeated so often that in the minds of many it has taken on the force of the blindingly obvious (never a good guide in politics). It may therefore be useful to consider how best to respond.

1. The argument is neither credible nor consistent. The argument that the voters provide a greater mandate is an attempt to by-pass the views of the members. It is certainly not a positive commitment to carry out the voters’ wishes. Those presently using that argument didn’t do so during the lead up to the Iraq war. All the MPs voting for war knew full well that this was opposed by both a majority of Labour members and the electorate. So much for “mandates”. They didn’t protest when the leadership under Miliband chose to ignore conference decisions, supported by the general public, to take the railways and the Royal Mail back into public ownership. The “greater mandate” argument has therefore no other purposed than to justify ignoring policies determined by members when MPs don’t like them.

2. Do MPs consult the wider public about changes in party policy? The Labour Party has changed from an austerity-lite party at the time of the last general election to an anti-austerity party. That wasn’t the basis on which MPs were elected in 2015 (except for the minority who openly opposed the Miliband/Balls auterity cave-in). Do MPs consider themselves tied to the views of the “greater mandate” of 2015? Do they even know what the views of their constituents are on the matter? How would they know? Have they gone back to the constituents to see if they can win support for the change of policy? These questions only have to be asked in order to realise how completely vacuous the claims of the “greater mandate” are.

3. Voters vote overwhelmingly for parties and not individuals. The fundamental hypocrisy of the “greater mandate” argument is located in the fact that the MPs using it stand on a Labour Party ticket and would not (at least in the overwhelming majority of cases) stand any chance of being elected without that ticket and without the electoral support that it brings. Not only that but even though traditional party loyalties are clearly breaking down, most people still vote on the basis of party, even if not always the same one. The support for the individuals who become MPs is support given to the party for which they stand. To claim after being elected that their policy mandate comes from the wider public and not from the party is therefore to turn what everyone knows is the reality completely on its head. The party goes to the country on the basis of its policies and its general standing and respect for its way of working. It therefore mediates between the voting public and Parliament. The pretence that there is no such essential mediation is a pretence that MPs have a relationship of some kind of direct democracy with their constituents. No one really believes that, least of all those using the “greater mandate” argument. It has no substance.

4. What is the point of party programmes and policies if MPs are not answerable to the party? The mediating role of the party between the public and government is due to the fact that it spends time and resources to develop policies which do not arise spontaneously out of the heads of separate individuals. Parties present the public with views and policies that it has developed. The general public then chooses the views and policies with which it agrees most. The MPs’ mandate therefore comes through the party and not by some direct relationship with individual members of the electorate in their tens of thousands.

5. The “greater mandate” argument treats the PLP as a party within a party. If a group of individuals within the party claim that their first loyalties are not to the policies decided collectively within the party but to people outside of it who have allegedly given them a separate mandate then they constitute a party within a party. The “greater mandate” advocates believe that MPs have a right to operate as such a party within a party. There is no basis within Labour’s rules and this needs to be acknowledged. MPs have as much right as any other party member to fight for changes to party policies but no more and no less than that (just as they have the right to use the considerable advantages they enjoy a MPs). We should also note that the Standing Orders of the PLP require approval by Labour’s National Executive Committee. Maybe it is time to consider changes to it to clarify the situation.

6. There must always be room for dissent and the party must provide channels for it to be expressed. There will always be different views of the party’s goals and the strategies required to achieve them. Party policy must evolve and that requires open discussion. MPs have the same right to contribute to those changes as everyone else but this should not take the form of overt and public personal hostility to the party leader. If a Party leader is a poor organiser or incompetent then, given that he/she is chosen by all the party members the onus is clearly on those who believe that they have information to this effect to put it to the members of their constituency Labour Parties rather than to set themselves up as judge and jury on behalf of the party as a whole. They should take the debate to the ordinary members.

7. There can be no unity not based on policies. The present arguments in the Labour Party have taken the form of support for or opposition to a person (Jeremy Corbyn). Policy debates have rarely got beyond headline statements and this has encouraged personalisation of the issues. The failure to develop clear policies since the last leadership election has not helped. It is the paucity of policy development that has enabled Owen Smith to look as if he is making a policy offering by drawing up a list of 20 points on less than one side of A4. The response from the Corbyn camp has seemed reactive and equally short on details. For example it would be great to have some flesh put on the idea of a National Educational Service that Corbyn first proposed 10 months ago. and above all an explanation of how over the next year party members can be mobilised toparticipate in informed debates about contending viewpoints on the key issues.

The pretence of having policies by making grand promises for the leadership election does credit to neither candidate. What, for example, are we to make of the promise of “Full employment and an economy that works for all” (with an elaboration limited to 90 words) while global capital still dominates our economy?

Promises of membership involvement are not enough. We need to know how this will be achieved. Unity on the basis of policies must be the work of the whole party and cannot possibly be achieved by headline promises made during the remaining weeks of the leadership election. Far more important would be to tell us in some detail how the promise of making the party more democratic and of putting the members in charge of policy is to be realised in the period following the leadership election.