Campaign news

Progress - welcome to the Blairite Party-within-a-party

1st March 2015

Progress - Welcome to the Blairite Party-within-a-party

Last weekend, in the sumptuous surroundings of a Jacobean-style Victorian country mansion in the beautiful Lincolnshire countryside, New Labour enthusiasts gather for a weekend “political school“.  At £175 including overnight accommodation, two lunches, dinner, breakfast and refreshments, it’s a snip thanks to the generous sponsorship of Bell Pottinger, founded by Maggie’s favourite Ad man, and PR consutants to such eminent wealth creators as tax dodgers, Vodaphone, and stalwart defenders of media freedom, Sky. Those attending, not that they all know it, are at the heart of party within a party, a largely-covert organisation whose over-riding objective is to keep New Labour alive.

This is Progress.
If you’re a young, ambitious Progress-member with your eye on a seat who can write a convincing New Labour essay, the costs are a mere £75. You will rub shoulders with Shadow Cabinet members and benefit from expert tuition on “the art of writing and delivering a speech” and how to “navigate the selection process“.

These are the people who are going places. They may be temporarily out of Government; they may have suffered a temporary set-back in Labour’s choice of Leader. But with the best organisation in politics and Lord Sainsbury’s considerable largesse, they’ll be back in charge before too long and you can be part of it, provided, of course, that you have the Right politics.

This may be the first such occasion in this parliament that Progress has been training Blairite would-be MPs but, in the last, it held six parliamentary candidate workshops. As they say:
Preparing for Parliamentary selections can be daunting, difficult and time consuming, but with good preparation, the barriers which may prevent Labour members from representing the Labour Party at the next election are not insurmountable. Progress has therefore developed a workshop for those who are interested in getting selected. The workshop will go through planning your campaign, considering your message and organising your campaign team.
They provide expert advice, which is followed up, for their chosen favourites, with significant help in the selection process. Richard Angell, the selection specialist, is the former Chair of Young Labour and now Deputy Director of Progress who they say “helped with successful selection campaigns for a number of people including Stephen Twigg in Liverpool and most recently Emma Reynolds in Wolverhampton.” Paul Richards, former chair of Labour Students and of the Fabian Society, SpAd (Special Adviser) to Pat Hewitt and then Hazel Blears, “unashamed master of the dark arts“, author of Be Your Own Spin Doctor, will assist with the speech-writing. Matthew Doyle, Blair’s deputy director of communications at No 10 and Political Director since, will advise on handling the media.

When it comes to the actual selection process, the help of Progress will be invaluable: building the team who will canvass party members, introductions to key local contacts, arranging self-promotion opportunities, providing you with the full list of local party members’ addresses and phone numbers well in advance (courtesy of friendly party officials), and producing printed literature.

Progress operates at several levels of course, like the Militant Tendency in the 1980s: the politics (and the surroundings) may be very different, but the methods are surprisingly similar. They even have readers meetings! Perhaps the term “Mili” would have a different connotation were it not for brother Ed.

Some of the MPs and other luminaries who appear as ‘Progress speakers’ or write for the magazine and website are wholly uninvolved in, even entirely innocent of, the true purpose and methods of Progress. They are used to give the impression that the organisation represents the party mainstream. We must assume, for example, that Lucy Powell, Ed Miliband’s acting Chief of Staff who still appears on the Progress speaker list, is one person exploited in this way.
It is only someone who is regarded as politically reliable, truly “one of us”, who is introduced to the covert layers of operation, and only as necessary, though many more are aware of the kid of activities that Progress is engaged in than are themselves involved — the way any secret organisation sustains and protects itself.

At a covert level, Progress promotes candidates for parliamentary selections and internal Labour elections. Unlike on the Left, the Progress slate for Labour’s National Executive is not publicly declared, although it is referenced by the semi-detatched, more traditional right-wing candidates like Luke Akehurst. It operates through networks of trusted confidants, who provide information to the centre, and promote the line or the candidates through layers of increasingly less well-trusted contacts.

Many of the most important and trusted cadres are embedded in the Labour official structure — regional officials, HQ staff, members of Regional Boards or the National Policy Forum. It is they who ran the party under Blair, and, to a very large extent, still run it now. It is they, for example, who brief CLP delegates on which candidates and what motions to vote for, at official party meetings to which known left-wingers are not invited, and by trawling the conference hall, bars and cafeteria of party conference.

How does Progress afford to maintain this web of covert activity, you might ask? That’s where Lord Sainsbury comes in. When Militant was around, David was funding David Owen’s SDP. He may have great abilities, but that isn’t why he’s where he is today. He went to Eton and inherited the family grocery business – a more successful venture than the Thatcher’s. He became a peer after giving millions to Labour — not that there was any connection of course.  He had funded David Miliband’s campaign to the tune of over £200,000. He funds Progress to the tune of £250,000 a year (figures from the Electoral Commission), and has been its primary benefactor, at this level, it is reported, for 10 years.

The Labour Party is still very short of funds. Unfortunately, according to the Times (£), Lord Sainsbury has stopped giving any money to the party:

Labour’s biggest benefactor is refusing to give another penny until he receives assurances about the direction in which Ed Miliband is taking the party, The Times has learnt.  Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who has donated more than £12 million over the past five years, was alienated by Mr Miliband’s leadership campaign and subsequent comments apparently intended to draw a line under New Labour.  The former Science Minister with an estimated £1.3 billion fortune from the family’s supermarket business was a strong supporter of David Miliband and deeply upset by the result of the contest.”

The parasite within Labour continues to prosper.

From Left Futures