Ed Miliband's proposed reforms will open Labour up to people from all walks of life | Andrew Adonis
 Labour's special conference will engage voters who would never dream of joining a political party In the past week, I have crisscrossed London on more than 100 buses to speak to bus users and seek views on how the capital's transport system is coping. It was an exercise in total immersion: a refreshing, if bracing, experience that gave me a more useful take on the state of London and its public services than relying on the media or arid policy papers. It brought home to me the cost of living crisis: the anxiety caused to minimum wage workers who need to get two buses to work rather than one, because London's Oyster pay-as-you-go card charges per journey and the single fare has just gone up to £1.45. But it served another purpose for me as a Labour politician. For all the different and often strident views I heard on the state of the buses, not once did anyone suggest that a solution might be found by engaging directly in a political party or by getting involved in choosing a party's candidates and leaders. To most people, even those with strong political and social views, the party system is an irrelevance. This, in a nutshell, is the problem of modern politics that Ed Miliband is seeking to solve with the most radical set of reforms to the Labour party since 1918. Much of the attention has been focused on a reconstitution of Labour's financial relationship with trade unionists so that for the first time they make a positive individual choice on whether to pay an affiliation fee. But for me, the most dynamic and exciting part of the change being debated at the party's special conference this week is the prospect of direct engagement with hundreds of thousands of people who would never, normally, dream of joining a political party. Gone are the days when the Labour party and the Conservatives had more than a million members each. People do not engage in politics in such fashion – signing up to an ideology, an identity, and a party programme. But it is a mistake to conclude that people don't care. They are engaging in debate more than ever through the internet, through organisations ranging from the National Trust to Mumsnet, and on the top deck of buses. Ed Miliband's proposed reforms will not just open Labour up to trade unionists who agree to become affiliated supporters but people from every walk of life who will have the chance to become "registered supporters" and have their voice heard, including in choosing future Labour party leaders and Labour's candidate to be mayor of London in 2016. In return for a nominal registration fee – of just a few pounds – they will get a vote to choose leaders and a candidate for London mayor equal to that of any MP or union general secretary. No one will get more than one vote, no vote will be worth more than any other. Together, these "affiliated" and "registered" supporters could make Labour a mass movement once again – the "people's party" it has always aspired to be. Among these new supporters might be a small businessman who cannot get a loan from his bank, a single mother who thinks she is battling alone against welfare bureaucracy, or, among those I met last week, the young people worried about the cost of getting to and from college, or the campaigners for the blind, concerned that new buses will not be required to have audio technology for route announcements. Labour's task is to find new ways to engage with them, harness their interest and begin to revitalise our moribund politics. These party reforms are an important next step. If they succeed, Labour could be electrified by a surge of energy coming directly from people: their ideas, their donations, their communities and their experience. And those aspiring to be political leaders would need to engage with the wider public – beyond the party activist core – in a wholly new and bigger way, as in the primary system in the United States. This would offer a clear contrast to the Conservative party as it shrinks into itself, ever more reliant on a handful of very rich donors, its membership falling below 100,000 for the first time in modern political history and local associations deselecting the few female Tory MPs. These reforms could help Labour outnumber Conservatives on the ground by three, four or even five to one in years to come. They can help change my party, change the relationship between parties and, most importantly of all, change the very idea of what it is to be a political party. On my bus tour, I stopped off at Stratford town hall, from whose balcony, in 1892, Keir Hardie was declared to be Britain's first Independent Labour party MP. Within a decade, Labour was a national party. With a will, Labour could soon become a mass supporters' party and prove wrong the cynics and pessimists. Andrew Adonis is shadow infrastructure minister theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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