Follow my leader
Some years ago, I was being interviewed by the BBC for one of our election campaigns. The young journalist asked me what we had against having leaders. They’re undemocratic, I replied, and a big ‘does not compute’ sign appeared above her head. For her, democracy was about choosing leaders. So I followed up by explaining how, if we had a leader, the first thing the media would do would be to find where they disagreed with party policy, and ask ‘Are you in charge? Can you change the policy?’ If the leader can’t dictate the policy, the party is officially divided and unruly.
I chose that tack of argument, based on an experience, many years ago, of a university occupation I was lightly involved in: the Vice Chancellor had come out, and his first words were to ask for a spokesman (and to demand their name and department). It was clearly a way to define and control the group who had entered the Senate Chamber. The choice of spokesperson would restrict other voices from being involved and allow the VC to control the discussion.
It is for similar reasons that the British state mandates that all political parties must have a named leader to define and control them. The interview with the BBC journalist could not be used because I was a candidate who was not a party leader (the BBC’s election fairness rules mandate that only leaders can get national coverage, again, an ideological framing that is part of a whole system of propping up minority rule under the guise of participatory democracy).
This gives some context to the ongoing Zack Polanski stories. Until a few years ago, the Green Party did not have a leader, they simply had a principal speaker until 2007 but they felt that to get media attention and traction, they needed to call that voice a leader.
Certainly, having a leader allows people to short-cut the decision-making process of assessing a party’s policies by deciding if they like the leader or not: and then internal struggles simply become around whether a person supports or opposes the leader. As the Labour Party under Corbyn demonstrated, the factional disputes, however based in reality on policy, can become exclusively about the person of the leader, completely obviating the need for any discussion on facts or intentions.
If people like the leader, they can join in, and say: ‘I agree with Zack’. It’s a very quick and human way to gather followers. The problem being, precisely that they are followers, and as Eugene Debs famously said, if someone can lead you into the promised land, someone else can lead you out of it.
A bold leader can move quickly, and adopt new policies, without the slowness of waiting for a messy conference debate and vote (completely closing off party democracy). They can bamboozle interviewers with their wit, and perform well in debates: providing, in this day and age, sound bites and clips that can be readily shared on social media. In short, a leader can prosper. By the same token, though, a party can be broken by having a leader who is reviled or at the least, a distraction, as their personal life becomes the topic of debate, rather than their party or its policies.
Polanski has already had some of that, from the old stories about bosom expanding hypnosis, to the details of his living arrangements and council tax status. The latest, a spat with Nigel Farage about a shared social media post showing a guillotine in one picture out of twenty, shows the dangers of an uncontrolled social media operation.
Farage himself is the (pity him) victim of this process, as the media, which previously gave him a fair wind, suddenly started turning the fire hose of attention on him regarding his funding arrangements. This has been a factor also in the rise and downfall of several previous Prime Ministers: Boris Johnson seemed utterly invulnerable with a sizeable majority until details of Partygate destroyed him: again, personal foibles rather than policy and principles ruled the debate.
Closer to the state of the Green Party, the Scottish Socialist Party was making headway using the Scottish Parliament’s proportional representation system, under its figurehead of Tommy Sherridan: until he was brought down by a combination of media attention and his own subsequent conviction for perjury in the libel trial he won against News International. In many ways, he brought his downfall on himself, but he took his party with him.
We could find many other examples, perhaps the most famous being Charles Stewart Parnell, whose marital infidelity broke the Irish Nationalist Party in the House of Commons in the late nineteenth century. The party was organised around him and was very much the old-fashioned party of parliamentarian manoeuvre, rather than being a mass movement. Indeed, the mass party was conceived as an alternative to the hugger mugger of deals in smoke-filled rooms, to replace loyalty to a man with loyalty to an idea and a programme.
A great deal of effort goes into turning us from being active participants in democracy and instead into passive observers or members of a fan club. This is why we refuse to have truck with having a leader, and why we put our efforts first and foremost into political education. In part, that explains our longevity, despite having made so little headway over the years. Our members do not join because they like that nice Mr Smeet, but because they understand what socialism is, what building it will mean and are agreed on the way forward. Where we disagree, we debate, and vote and abide by the decision of the majority of members.
One of our greatest achievements is showing democracy can work, and how it is precisely not playing follow-my-leader once every five years. It is natural for humans to think in terms of personal relations, but equally natural to create processes to prevent domination.
PIK SMEET