In the run up to the founding conference of Your Party, several groupings and campaigns have developed and emerged. At The World Transformed, seven of these groupings came together to present a minimum unity declaration. At Prometheus we have interviewed these groups to provide a guide for people to understand them and their political differences more.
These groups are The Democratic Bloc, Democratic Socialists, Eco-Socialist Horizon, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Organising for Popular Power, Trans Liberation Group and People’s Front.
In this interview, we talk to Andrew Hedges from The Democratic Bloc. You can read their full proposals here and their submission to The World Transformed assemblies here. This interview was conducted on the 14th October.
HH – Could you briefly summarise what The Democratic Bloc are and argues for?
AH – We’re a pro-democracy campaign formed ahead of the founding conference of Your Party.
We aren’t a faction. If our members want this to continue after the founding conference, they’ll get the chance to do that. But we’re not trying to set up a new Momentum. This is purely a pro-democracy campaign ahead of the founding conference.
Our core demands are open selection, dual members and a sovereign conference. It is also crucial, in our view, that the top bureaucrats, like the general secretary, are elected by the whole membership. We are in the process of consulting with our members on the issues of DemBloc’s position on how conference should work (delegate structures or an open-to-all structure) and on trade unions.
HH – How did you come together?
AH – We were activists that met within the Labour Party. We’ve all left over the last couple of years but had all been active through the Corbyn period or the Starmer opposition years in trying to bring about democratic reforms to either Labour or Momentum. So we came together as The Democratic Bloc to try and create a campaign that would put forward a discussion guide that would get people talking about democracy within the party, and have concrete suggestions that we can collectively put to the founding conference and assemblies.
HH – What are The Democratic Bloc arguing people should be doing around the regional assemblies?
AH –It’s good that the party asked all the members to step forward to be facilitators. That’s a good thing – that they didn’t just come up with facilitators. But clearly the structure of the facilitation and assemblies mean they don’t have a democratic mandate. And the regional assembly structure is one that is very complicated and unclear.
Essentially a facilitator will run a breakout group within that regional assembly of 10 members and that facilitator will notetake, and then those notes will be passed to the lead facilitator who’s running the regional assembly session. And then those notes will then be passed to someone else to change the constitution. That’s that whole process. We’ve got a lot of qualms with that process. We’ve been told categorically there will be no voting, so it doesn’t seem like there’s a mandate to change constitutions. If we were in charge of that process, we’d probably think that the stuff that’s aligned with our beliefs around open selection, sovereign conference, etc, are really important and need to be part of the redraft. But you know, if there’s 15 different perspectives on open selection in a breakout group or in a few breakout groups, how can that be summarised and who makes the decision as to which decisions better to then make the new constitution? Well, it’s going to be informed by your biases. Of course it is.
That being said, what we should recognise as campaigns, factions or groups is that this is the first chance for Your Party members to come together in an official place. And that opportunity should not be underestimated – and this is the first chance that we’re going to get, in person in official Your Party spaces, to speak to others about our positions around democracy. The nature of sortition ahead of the founding conference is such that, unlike in the Labour Party, where you might be able to work out a fair number of delegates and who they are, and organise around them, this form of sortition prevents a key factor of democracy which is the ability to deliberate. When promoting sortition, Jeremy Corbyn wrote in an opinion piece in the Guardian that we would have a jury style selection at conference – a jury only works if they are able to deliberate the evidence presented to them with others. There is no room for deliberation of amendments in a conference of this size with people you do not know whether they have been sortitioned or not. That’s why these pro democracy campaigns are worthwhile. This is our chance to get the grassroots organised. So we would say to everyone who cares about democracy – make sure that you attend the regional assemblies.
Get those conversations going around the constitution about why democratic rules matter. Discuss what democratic rules we should pass. Get contacts of people, organise them, and then, if you’re not sortitioned, get in touch with these people. Even if you are sortitioned, get in touch with them. Have conversations with them ahead of the founding conference and try and build as much of a groundswell of opinion towards democracy as you possibly can. And that’s what these regional assemblies are really about. To us. It’s about getting the arguments out there, meeting your fellow members, and getting ready for founding conference. Because none of the regional assemblies, in reality, are probably going to create material change to the constitution as we would want to see it.
HH – These three or four documents, are meant to be dropping some point in the next week or so, I’m presuming part of your approach to the founding conference is you’ll have some responses to those documents, and you’ll encourage people, in a discursive way, to champion them if they are sortitioned, right?
AH – As soon as they drop, we’re going to be reading them and trying to provide an analysis of them and a critique and we’ll be trying to get that critique out to people. Which we hope can help them form their own critique. Not everyone wants to spend hours reading a constitution. I imagine the political statement will get a lot of interest, but the rules, the standing orders, the constitution, not everyone wants to sit and go through them.
The legacy of Tony Benn in the Labour Party for the left, especially in the Corbyn years, meant that there was already culture on the left that open selection mattered and that conference sovereignty mattered. When you come out of that atmosphere of the Labour Party, where you’ve got quite clear oppositional people like we had with the Labour right and you go into one led by someone who is a, you know, a hero of our movement, Jeremy Corbyn, there’s an assumption that it’s all going to be fine. But the nature of organisational politics is such that you can go into it as a leader with the best will in the world, but you can still inadvertently, close down spaces and democratic avenues without thinking about it. We need to try and make sure that we’re breeding autonomy, breeding democratic culture, as early as possible rather than having the founding conference and then spending the next 15 years of our lives arguing around constitutional measures to try and get democracy through. Because, with fascism posing its first serious threat at capturing state power in Britain, we can’t waste time.
HH – Let’s look at your submission to the TWT assemblies and your overall proposals on your site – a few things stand out. You argue for a list of approved dual membership organisations. Can you explain a bit more about that?
AH – When our founding committee first drafted the discussion guide, we based it on what we already knew to be priorities, shaped by our experience in the Labour Party and Momentum. After that, we circulated it to others within the wider movement, not as a recruitment exercise, but to invite feedback. We wanted to hear what we might have missed. During that process, some confusion seems to have arisen between our positions on party alliances and dual membership.
Our position is that decisions about party alliances should be made democratically by the membership not by the leadership. We don’t want a situation where a small group can decide, for example, whether to form an alliance with Labour or the SNP, without the membership’s consent. These are questions that should be settled by conference, where all members have a say.
The key principle is democracy: Alliances must be determined by members, not imposed from above.
The discussion around dual membership followed similar logic. Some people have read our initial wording as implying that there should be a list of approved or proscribed organisations. That was never our intention. Looking at it now and thinking ahead to amendments for our founding conference, we’re clear that we do not want an approved list.
We reject the idea of returning to anything resembling the Labour Party’s period of “witch hunts.” We don’t want mechanisms that can be used to expel or exclude socialists who are organising in good faith. Instead, we want an open, pluralist approach that strengthens solidarity across the movement.
In particular, we believe there should be space for the strongest possible cooperative relationship with the Green Party. We must avoid a sectarian approach. The reality is that the Greens can win in some areas, Your Party can win in others and on the vast majority of issues, we are aligned.
Dual membership between the Green Party and Your Party offers a real opportunity to build organic, grassroots links and the kind of cooperation that strengthens the whole of the left.
HH – I guess a huge part of your overall proposals and what you’ve organised around is mandatory reselection and open selection. Could you talk a bit more about that?
AH – The nature of most political party formations, including ours, is that they often begin with leadership from sitting MPs. We’ve seen this clearly with Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn providing the leadership to bring this new political force into being. It’s hard to imagine close to a million people signing up initially without their involvement. That’s simply the reality of our current political landscape.
But when a movement is already led by parliamentarians, we must ensure there are democratic safeguards in place. Open selection is central to that and more than just a safeguard, it is the foundation for real accountability.
It ensures that MPs are answerable to the working-class communities they represent, and that they act in line with the priorities of members rather than political convenience.
This principle has deep roots in the left of the Labour Party. The push for open selection was a major campaign led by grassroots members and its defeat at the 2018 Labour Party Conference was a missed opportunity to democratise parliamentary representation. That experience should be a lesson for all of us. If we want elected representatives in Your Party to truly represent the membership, open selection must be a vital and permanent feature of our structure.
It’s encouraging that the Green Party already has open selection mechanisms in place. Where we might differ is on the question of parliamentary discipline specifically, the use of whips and the extent to which MPs are bound to a central parliamentary line. That’s a discussion worth having in due course.
Many of us will be familiar with Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism, and its analysis of how parliamentary structures can blunt radical intent. MPs are paid around £93,000 a year, which for most represents a substantial pay rise and they spend much of their week in Westminster rather than in their constituencies. These are all structural things about the parliamentary process that often de-radicalise people. And what we need to do with open selection is make sure that the number one priority is societal transformation. So open selection is one of the core ways we think that you can ensure that in Parliament.
HH – I guess that you mentioned the whipping issue. I think Zarah Sultana has, for example, made a lot of noise about whipping. This is something you push in your documents as well.
AH – We believe that conference must be sovereign and that members should decide what our elected representatives do in Parliament, in council chambers, and across all levels of political activity.
This is the foundation of democratic socialism, that political representatives act on the collective mandate of the membership and not their own interpretation of public opinion.
That’s why we’ve put forward the Democratic Whip proposal which is a mechanism to make conference policy sovereign and the democratic basis for any three line whip. In practice, this means that the parliamentary group and leadership are bound by the decisions of the membership, as expressed through conference.
This debate is not new. In 1960, the Labour Party’s trade union affiliates and membership united around a demand for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Yet party leader Hugh Gaitskell overrode conference, crushed the policy and ensured parliamentarians maintained a pro-nuclear stance. That moment remains a warning: when MPs are allowed to override the will of members, democracy suffers.
We are seeing echoes of this today. Just three weeks ago, Labour Party Conference passed a motion recognising what is happening in Palestine as genocide and condemning it in the strongest terms. Yet we know that senior figures, including Yvette Cooper, continue to support the sale of F-35 parts to Israel. Once again, the voices of members have been sidelined.
The Democratic Whip proposal ensures that this cannot happen in Your Party. It prevents the leadership from claiming to be the ones interpreting themselves what communities think. A familiar argument from right-wing Labour MPs who have long said, “Don’t tell me what my community thinks.” But it is ordinary people, the members, who are part of those very communities. When MPs enter Parliament, they often become structurally and socially removed from those communities.
Our proposal is about restoring that link. It guarantees that members’ voices are heard, that conference decisions are respect.
It is crucial that the CEC oversees the use of the democratic whip – it is only through this procedure that we will stop willful misreadings of conference motions and how they overlap with parliamentary debates. Our delegates to Westminster must be held to account within the party.
HH – Can you talk a bit more about your approach to councils? Because, you know we are getting to a stage where people are defecting. You know, the question of council positions will be posed quite quickly.
AH – You think parliamentary politics is de-radicalising – wait till you see the council chamber!
So you see this attitude you get from ‘devoted’ socialists who have really good politics in abstract, but when they get into the council chamber, they might defend bin collection cuts or whatever, because ‘they’ve seen the budget and you haven’t’. And there’s a few issues with council politics. One, that is not particularly transparent to the electorate, and two, that it creates a group of people, councillors who are almost always very defensive and think they are more informed than the average member or the electorate about council policy.
This is all a product of a complete attack on local authority autonomy since Thatcher, but it is a reality we have to work in. Councils exist to implement cuts, they have virtually no ability to oppose them – not in the way Clay Cross, Liverpool or Lambeth councillors did.
That means it is more important than ever to make sure councillors are held to account in the communities, and that councillors don’t institute horrible policies. I’m from the North East, and I’ve got a long experience in the Labour Party, the councillors being Labour’s worst enemy. In County Durham, my mate was working for the council. He was on £3.70 an hour in 2018/2019, because he was an apprentice, and they were paying the George Osborne apprenticeship wage. Stuff like that can’t be allowed to be implemented by Your Party. You know Your Party councillors should never be paying someone £3.70, or however much the apprenticeship minimum wage is now.
Those sorts of things should be lines in the sand, because if we’re a party that’s supposed to represent the working class, we can’t be doing stuff like that. What we want to see in councils is that local members and local people are encouraged to write the manifestos with the councillors, and that Your Party council groups or council candidates should always be going into a council election with a manifesto that is going to promise transformative change to the extent that they can deliver it in councils. And that is, to us, the crux. You know, if you go back to Militant in the 1980s one of the big strengths for the membership in Liverpool was organising on a borough level, on a council level, around the manifesto and writing the manifesto.
But also, we need to think carefully about the party’s orientation to council chambers. There is no way that, under current legislation and budgetary constraints, local councils will achieve societal transformation – so the people we should send into the chambers need to be aware of that limitation and operate in the way Peter Mertens suggest at TWT – we shouldn’t speak to the other councillors, we should speak to the cameras.
HH – And I guess then there’s a question of the approach to the existing councillors that have come over, right?
AH – Yeah, it’s a tricky one, and and we’ve not discussed it in The Democratic Bloc massively, but I think it should be up to the branches, whenever they form, as to who they accept and who they don’t accept, because they’ll know what defectors have done in the community. But it should be a question every time. We shouldn’t breed this culture that any defector from anywhere is a brilliant thing because defectors come with baggage. And, you know, we saw that with Christian Wakeford when he defected to Labour in Bury from the Conservatives. These people are opportunists. A lot of the time, a lot of people who try to do political defections are opportunists. We need to make sure that hundreds of brilliant socialist councillors out there can join our party, but we shouldn’t have a position where we uncritically accept defectors. There should be, not a sectarian, not an oppositionist lens, but a critical thought about who we want to accept and who we don’t, and if they’ve implemented huge austerity in their local area, and they continue to back that position, then we should be thinking very critically. It should be up to local members as to whether they accept or don’t accept local councillors.
HH – Are there any of the other sort of proposals that you think you’d like to highlight?
AH – We really want to see data owned by the party. It’s not sustainable to have a party where the membership list is owned by two different organisations, and neither of them are the political party. It needs to be owned by the party as a collective. There needs to be a huge amount of transparency and a new culture of transparency around all of these things.
I would also say that the Central Executive Committee should only be composed of all lay members. You shouldn’t have any MPs sitting on that other than the leader, if the leader is an MP, and the deputy leader, if they are an MP. The CEC should be the decision-making body between conferences, but they shouldn’t have the right to overrule conferences. They should just keep the party running and hold the leadership to account.
Another thing is, we really believe in the equivalent positions of the General Secretary being elected in a one member, one vote election, not being appointed by the CEC. Too many bureaucrats in the Labour Party were never accountable to the membership. We need to make sure that the top bureaucrats are elected, and that means, you know, a regional director, or whatever we want to call them, whatever that job type would be, should be elected by the membership, and a general secretary, would be elected by the membership.
The Labour Party became an authoritarian structure because the General Secretary, appointed by the NEC on the behest of the leader, was given executive powers to do whatever they wanted. They knew they could do this on behalf of the NEC and hand those executive powers to Regional Directors and they couldn’t be challenged. That’s why all political appointees should be elected by members and not the CEC – so that we don’t create a culture where bureaucrats feel unaccountable.
HH – There is one last question I had, which has come up a lot in conversation with others. What do you see as the difference between The Democratic Bloc and the other grouping focused on democracy, which is the Democratic Socialists?
AH – The Democratic Socialists are doing really good work and we’re proud of the work that’s been done to bring other campaigns together at TWT.
Our starting point was simple, we needed a space where members could come together to discuss proposals and amendments, and the best way to begin was by drafting a set of ideas and inviting open criticism. The response has been tremendous. We’ve received a huge number of emails and messages from members offering thoughtful, detailed feedback that has genuinely strengthened our proposals.
When we publish the next edition of our discussion guide, it will reflect that collective input and it will form the foundation for collaboration with others at the founding conference.
We’ve always been clear that we are not forming a faction. Our aim is not to build a “Campaign for Labour Party Democracy” or a “Momentum” equivalent. What we’re building is an open, democratic process in which members shape the direction of the movement.
Within The Democratic Bloc, there are diverse views on many issues, such as regional structures and internal governance. The discussion guide was never intended to bind our membership, but to encourage debate and to get people disagreeing constructively with the aim to find shared principles through that process. We are still at the process stage: identifying the points of unity that can be taken forward to the founding conference.
One area where we are clear is the need for a democratically elected General Secretary. We believe that accountability in party administration is vital and that members must have the power to choose the person who manages their organisation. This is a lesson learnt from Labour as the General Secretary has too much power without recall from the members. Alongside this, we are prioritising several key democratic reforms which include strengthening the influence of conference policy motions, ensuring clarity over ownership and the use of party data, and defining transparent voting systems and the role of councillors.
The most important thing is that we establish clear, concrete amendments that can influence randomly selected delegates who may have very varied political experiences.
We recognise that the process set out by the leadership is limited but we intend to make the most of the space we have to advance democracy and accountability.
Ultimately, we don’t see deep divisions between different democratic tendencies within this movement. We see a shared purpose: to build a socialist party rooted in its members, guided by democratic principles, and committed to transforming society from the ground up.
