Green Party members are being asked to sign a letter defending one member, one vote at conference. Socialists in the party should sign it. Then we should say what real member-led democracy would look like, because it is not what either side of this argument is offering yet.

There is a letter going round the Green Party in defence of one member, one vote. It asks members to protect the party’s “member-led democracy”, and it has been passed hand to hand through local WhatsApp groups over the past few days. Socialists in the party should sign it. But we should be clear about why, and about what we are signing it against, because “one member, one vote” is not a principle that stands on its own. Its meaning depends entirely on what it is being counterposed to. Socialists in Labour fought it as an attack on delegate democracy. Socialists in the Greens should defend it, for now, for the same reason: because of what it is being weighed against.

At present the Green Party makes policy at conference, and any member who turns up can speak and vote there. Conference is, constitutionally, the party’s highest decision-making body. That is now under review. On 26 October the party leadership announced a working group to look at how “progressive parties with mass memberships” develop policy, with a first stage of changes expected to come to a vote at Spring Conference. The statement does not say what those changes will be. The discussion around it has been less coy. The New Statesman reported earlier in the month that the ideas being floated include delegate conferences, with each local party sending a quota of representatives; waiting periods, that would prevent newer members from voting, and vetting, which would put unelected party officials’ impression of Google searches in control of admissions, should be opposed outright: a party that wants to grow cannot tell the people joining it that they are under suspicion. The same piece framed the whole question as one of entryism, dating it to conference passing a motion that Zionism is racism.

The case against the present arrangement is not a stupid one. Conference is open to all, but in practice it is open to those who can afford the train fare, the hotel and a weekend away from work or children. With the membership now many times larger than it was two years ago, a few thousand people in a conference hall are deciding policy for a party of well over a hundred thousand. Anyone who wants the Greens to become a party of working-class people, not only a party for them, ought to find that uncomfortable.

The argument among the people who agree

The most interesting discussion I have seen about this has not been between defenders of OMOV and its opponents. It has been among people who all want more democracy, not less.

One comrade’s objection to the letter was that it might shut the door on a delegate structure. Real democracy, on this view, starts with policy discussion in local parties, and conference delegates should be chosen by those local parties as the people best placed to carry their members’ views. Another, who has sat through a great many trade union and Labour delegate conferences, said that Green conference had been a breath of fresh air by comparison, and wondered whether the two annual conferences might be split: one all-member, with in-person and online voting, one delegate. He was honest that he could not see which would have the last word.

Both points are right about something. Delegate democracy, done properly, is more democratic than a mass meeting of whoever can get there. And a delegate conference, done badly, is a stitch-up by full-timers and branch secretaries, which is what most people who have been to one remember.

What OMOV has been used for before

The left has been here before, and the history ought to make us careful.

In 1993 John Smith won one member, one vote for Labour’s parliamentary selections. It was sold as giving power to the members. Its purpose, and its effect, was to take power away from the trade union block vote and the general committees of constituency parties, the bodies through which organised workers and activists could hold the party to account. An atomised membership voting at home on a ballot paper, having read whatever the press and the leadership put in front of them, is far easier for a leadership to manage than a room full of delegates who have argued a position out in their branches and been mandated to defend it.

Four years later, Blair finished the job with Partnership in Power. Socialist Outlook warned at the time that it would make a Labour government unaccountable to the wider movement. Critical motions would struggle to reach conference floor, and most policy discussion would be moved into a new National Policy Forum, a smaller body on which the unions had a far lower share of places than they had at conference. Conference stayed formally sovereign. The decisions were made somewhere else.

So the left in Labour opposed OMOV, and was right to. But it opposed it as a step away from delegate democracy, which is what Labour had. The Green Party is starting from somewhere else. It has no delegate structure to lose: its conference is already open to every member. That turns the question round. In Labour the left asked whether OMOV was better or worse than the delegate system it replaced, and the answer was worse. In the Greens the same question has to be asked of whatever is proposed to replace OMOV, and the answer depends entirely on what that is. Anyone who quotes the Labour left’s opposition to OMOV as if it settled the Green argument has missed the point of it.

That is the danger the Greens should be watching for now, and it comes in a less obvious form than it did in Labour. What is being floated is, on paper, a delegate conference, the very thing many on the left would want. But a delegate structure is only as democratic as the way it is built. One built from the branches up, with local parties that discuss policy, choose delegates to carry their view and hold them to it, would be a gain. One brought in as a defence against entryism, alongside a waiting period for new members and vetting for anyone who wants a say, is something else. It is a filter, designed to keep a newly enlarged membership, and above all the left that has arrived with it, at arm’s length from policy. Quotas handed down to local parties, with nothing to ensure that delegates are mandated or answerable, would simply pass the decisions to whoever already runs the local party.

And a working group told to study how other mass-membership progressive parties make policy will not have to look far to find Labour’s policy forums. A forum like that is smaller and more manageable than conference, and even more self-selecting, because its long rounds of meetings, papers and consultations demand even more time. It rewards the people who already have the time, the confidence and the contacts, and it puts more distance between the member in a local party and the policy that is finally adopted. Measured against that package, all-member voting at conference is the more democratic option, and it should be defended.

Agitation and propaganda

So there are two things to do, and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is agitation, the fight that is actually happening. Here the choice is between all-member voting and something worse, and socialists should be on the side of all-member voting without hesitation. Sign the letter, raise it in your local party before Spring Conference, and make sure nobody can present a narrowing of democracy as a technical tidying-up of procedure. Waiting periods and vetting should be opposed outright: a party that wants to grow cannot tell the people joining it that they are under suspicion.

The second is propaganda, the case we make for what ought to replace the present system when the conditions exist to win it. That case is for delegate democracy, but delegate democracy of a particular kind. Not delegation of policy to the people who were going to conference anyway, given a badge that says “delegate”. Real delegation begins much earlier, with local parties that discuss policy as a matter of course: that hold political education, read the motions, argue about them, and send people to conference to represent a view they have worked out together and can be held to on their return.

That is where the two comrades’ arguments meet. A delegate is only as good as the discussion that sent them. In a party where local meetings deal with leaflet rotas and candidate selection, and policy arrives from above, a delegate structure would just hand the existing activists a more formal claim to speak for everyone else. In a party where local parties are places of political argument and education, delegates would carry something real, and conference would become what it is supposed to be: the place where the membership’s thinking is brought together, not a substitute for the membership having any.

The point for socialists

None of this is only about the Greens’ rulebook. A great many socialists have joined the Green Party in the past two years, many of them people who left Labour or never joined it, because it looked like the one place on the electoral map where the left could breathe. Whether it stays that way depends a great deal on how the party decides things. Leaderships under pressure, especially leaderships that start to see office within reach, have every reason to want decisions taken in rooms they can manage. Labour shows where that ends.

The answer is not to choose between a mass meeting and a managed forum. It is to build the local life of the party, so that the members who cannot get to conference are not left voting alone at home on someone else’s framing, and the members who can are answerable to the rest. Defend one member, one vote now, because the alternative on the table is worse. And make the case, starting in your own local party, for the democracy that would be better than both.