Blears on party funding

Question: You are responsible for Labour policy on party funding and Jack Straw for the government. How do those roles differ and what are the main things you want to bring to that job.

Hazel Blears: The way in which the roles differ are that Jack is responsible for negotiating this with other parties and taking forward any legislation, should that be necessary as a result of Sir Hayden Phillips' review.

My responsibility is to conduct the consultation within the party and all parts of the movement. We have issued a consultation paper. That will then come back to our National Executive Committee in September and then go to our party conference.

There are a few really key issues around all of that. The first thing I would say is that, as part of the party funding debate, it is really important that we start to rehabilitate party politics and say that in a democracy party politics matters. We have almost got to the point now where being involved in politics is somehow a kind of disreputable activity that you don't own up to in polite company.

We have got to reverse that and say look, you can't run a democracy on single issue pressure groups. You need political parties to aggregate opinion, to have a policy platform that people can then vote for and that is how you run your democracy. And therefore you need good, able, high quality people to be candidates at every level of your democracy. And so therefore one of the things in our consultation paper is that, if there is to be increased state support, should that be about enhancing the way our democracy works and really making an effort to put it on a better footing?

There are then issues around spending caps. I think most people want to see an end to the vastly escalated sums that people spend on elections. I am not convinced that spending £5m on billboards is necessarily a good use of money. The evidence is that it doesn't make that much difference to how people vote.

Having caps on spending at local and national level, all year round and every year, I think is important. I don't think it is fair that people can put a massive amount of money into particular constituencies, as the Tories did at the last election, and then get double the swing because they have been able to throw money in that way.

It is also important that we keep our trade union link in our party funding. Trade unions are an essential part of making sure working people have a voice in politics. And we are looking at whether or not you should have donation caps.

Question: Doesn't the resistance of Labour for any donation cap to apply to unions just look like naked self interest?

Hazel Blears: No I don't think it does. Because if you look at affiliations from trade unions, where the bulk of our money comes from, those are not donations. Those are basically a collective membership fee.

If you look at that from the individual member's point of view, it is probably 10 pence per person per week.

Question: But they are not paid individually. They are collected by the union and then paid up. Should that at least not be separated out to make the arrangement look clearer?

Hazel Blears: It is pretty transparent now and very highly regulated. People have to vote in a ballot to have a political fund. They then have to say that they want to pay it when they sign up, they can opt out of it. And most trade unions even have resolutions now at their conferences saying that they shouldn't affiliate to the Labour Party because we haven't delivered on all of their agenda.

So there are a number of opportunities for people to confirm or to opt out of their payment. It is not simply a matter that the trade unions sit there and decide to pay millions of pounds to the Labour Party.

Question: You have mentioned public scepticism about politics and democracy. In that climate, is it ever going to be possible to sell state funding of parties to voters? And what did you make of the idea in the Power inquiry report of a tick-box on the ballot paper indicating taxpayer support for a party?

Hazel Blears: I'm a bit sceptical about that, to be honest. I do think we should have increased state support. We have got state support now - Short funding, Cranborne moneys and all of that, there is a policy development grant which I think is only £2m at the moment, shared between all of the parties – and I think the public have an interest in good governance.

That means that parties have got to be paid for. I certainly think there is a case for having good policy development. Certainly for training good quality candidates at every level of your parties, because the public have an interest in people who know what they are doing.

There are a range of issues on which the public would be willing to support an enhanced democracy. Whether or not they are prepared to support general partisan campaigning I think is another matter.

Blears on the media

Question: How much of that lack of trust do you blame on a breakdown of relations between politicians and the media?

Hazel Blears: I think part of the problem with the media now, the print media anyway, not so much the broadcast media, is that because they have got declining sales generally, it has become a matter of comment rather than news reporting that goes on.

You get into a position which you have now in some cases where even in broadcast news you have a journalist interviewing another journalist commentating on something a politician has said. There are that many filters coming through that you have got very little honest interaction between the politician and the public.

It's all mediated, an awful lot of that is mediated through comment, rather than reporting. I do think in the interests of selling papers there is an emphasis on celebrity culture, on gossip, on individuals. You can have a huge story on something which is a tiny issue and a major national news story which will hardly get covered at all.

Question: Do you think the New Labour brand makeover in the 1990s and culture of spin, in which you were prepared to accept some of those things and play the game, contributed to this spiral of declining trust?

Hazel Blears: I take issue with almost every word in that sentence. I don't think New Labour was a brand makeover. I think that is where we differ dramatically from what Cameron’s Tories are doing now.

Question: But you did change your name for a period. Is that not a brand makeover?

Hazel Blears: Yes, but we were far more than a brand makeover. If you look at what we did with policies like unilateral nuclear disarmament, trade union policies, a whole series of really quite fundamental policy reviews that were really tough, from Neil Kinnock to John Smith's one-member-one-vote to the Clause IV vote and debate those were real fundamental shifts in our policies and structure.

Where have you got Cameron? What's that statement of aims and values? 'Built to last', whatever its called. And then you've got policy reviews which are out there for 18 months. Will they ever report? Who knows.

Some of the people they have got on them are very strange. This is supposed to be a new Tory approach. You've got Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood, Hague, all of that going on. That is a brand makeover, or an attempt at it. Ours was not a brand makeover, so no, I don't accept that.

Blears on participation

Question: Turnout at elections is another problem facing British politics. What is the Labour Party's role in trying to tackle that?

Hazel Blears: More activism on the ground is really important. If we are going to get increased state support I think it will be quite interesting to see if there is a way in which that can incentivise more local activity.

We want more campaigning, more members, more support. We want to have supporters networks where you have got communities of interest. So if somebody is really interested in the environment, or health or education then they are able to participate in that way. We need a less hierarchical, purely geographic party and one that is more flexible.

People's lives are more busy now, they haven't necessarily got the time to go to meetings every night of every week. They should be able to take part in politics in different ways, with a menu of activities, with like-minded people that they share interests with. Political parties have got to think and work differently if they are going to get more people involved in the work they do.

Question: So supporters networks are not going to be a cheap substitute for the fact that Labour is not going to get its membership back towards its late-1990s peak?

Hazel Blears: Not at all. We have now got 200,000 members - 198,000 or so. That is broadly stable and has been since 2004.

If you look back before 1997, if you look back at 1994/95, we were around about that figure. We then had a massive increase of people who generally joined nationally. They didn't join the local party, they joined through a party political broadcast or a coupon in the paper.

We had a really big drop off post-97. Because people thought we've done the job, we've got the Tories out, they didn't get involved locally and maybe didn't necessarily get a good experience of local politics.

Our membership levels could be higher. But the 400,000 in '97 was a bit of an aberration, it was out of the ordinary.

Question: Do you hope to convert a lot of these supporters into full members? Have you got a target for that?

Hazel Blears: We will certainly get some of them. Some people will just want to stay supporters, help us at election time, maybe help us with fundraising, put up a poster, get involved in a forum, maybe have a telephone conference with a minister.

Some will then want to be school governors. And some will then hopefully want to be candidates at council elections. It is a matter of bringing them in.

Blears on constitutional reform

Question: There was a big flurry of constitutional change in Labour's first term that has fallen away since. Is there a role for a new round to re-engage voters and improve trust?

Hazel Blears: We've had devolution in Wales and Scotland, we've done some stuff on the House of Lords. There is a commission looking at its future. We had all those votes. We couldn't get a majority out of eight options. Unless you can get some agreement about the way forward, then it is difficult.

I think, personally, that there could have been some agreement around a greater regional input into your second chamber. That is something I would like to see worked on. Whether that is indirect elections, having a sense of different parts of the country contributing to that second chamber I think is important. Otherwise again it is London-centric, it is a very small political grouping. I think institutions are better for having a wider variety of voices in them.

Question: Where do you stand on proportional representation and 'fair votes'? Has that got any role to play?

Hazel Blears: I'm always torn on this. When I was a candidate in Tatton people always used to say to me: 'We're really good Labour people, we'll never win and our vote doesn't count'.

But equally the bit that I really dislike about PR is if you lose your constituency link. I know people have got some models where you can still have a constituency link. But if you look at a lot of PR systems, particularly in Europe, you end up again with a political elite who all live in London or Madrid or Paris because you are dependent for your place on the party list. You are dependent on patronage rather than what your constituents tell you.

The last thing I want – and I feel really passionately about this – is a group of politicians who are dependent on a political party rather than the people 'out there' in their constituency who come and support them.

Question: So should another round of constitutional change be part of Labour's policy renewal?

Hazel Blears: I think we should do something about the House of Lords. There are lots and lots of people in the party who do regard it as unfinished business.