Labour has confirmed that it’s now the stupid party

It may be seeking to distance itself from the idea of citizens’ assemblies. It’s revealing all the same

In 1794, the National Convention, a representative body designed to bypass the old governance of the Ancien Régime, voted to condemn one of its key founding members, Maximilien Robespierre, to death. A little later, the Convention itself had dissolved, broken down in a bloody spate of denunciation and counter denunciation.

There ought to be a picture of Robespierre – ideally post-execution – in the office of every policy wonk in the Western world. From the national convention of revolutionary France to the “Struggle sessions” of Mao’s cultural revolution, almost every single attempt to make an assembly of citizens that bypasses the normal constitutional modes of governance has been a disaster. Moreover, the people for whom it was most disastrous were often those most prominent in promoting the idiotic idea in the first place.

Which brings us to Sue Gray, the great Svengali of operational management, high on her own supply after an investigation into Labourites following the green policy-leaking debacle. In an interview with a new biographer of Sir Keir Starmer, Ms Gray said that Labour was considering establishing citizens’ assemblies to manage contentious decisions away from the constraints of parliamentary democracy. One thing immediately sticks out about the idea – its stupidity.

Already Sir Keir is backtracking hard, however the details reveal much about what’s going on in the heads of Labour’s would-be policy makers and are worth analysing. Citizens’ assemblies would debate topics pre-selected by technocrats; so presumably not Channel migrants, or law and order, for obvious reasons. The list of subjects Ms Gray mentions – Lords’ reform, devolution – is laughable. As if every man in the pub can’t stop banging on about the exclusion of the hereditary peers. No doubt if the public were given their actual choice of policies, paedophiles would be hanging from lamp posts within the first 20 minutes of an assembly being convened.

You can imagine these bodies being rammed with the kind of people with serious time on their hands, or zealots representing niche opinions. Ireland is often cited as a success story, though polls suggested that the public had already reached a consensus on abortion before the assembly on the issue met. It is not obvious that a similar body would be equipped to tackle genuinely polarising issues. And if a policy were to go wrong, who would be democratically accountable?

All this suggests an Opposition sitting in committee rooms, who, unable to devise solutions to the real problems facing Britain, have reached down the back of the sofa for policies that sound radical but are in fact simply dumb. It reeks of the wheezes that peppered the last Labour government, such as the attempt to force devolution on the North East, which led to a crushing defeat of nearly 78 per cent against in a referendum. It also suggests a particular mindset within the Civil Service, epitomised by Ms Gray (who could only be more “Blobby” if she was painted in pink with yellow spots), that has learnt nothing from previous experiments.

Within hours, Labour distanced itself from the idea. Something similar happened last year when the party proposed to fix the migrant crisis by striking an “Eu-wide returns agreement”. When it was pointed out that any such deal would probably involve taking in an annual quota of migrants, or why else would the EU agree to it, Labour reverse-ferreted and publicly trashed the scheme. While these ideas keep being abandoned, they still matter. Given the absence of other proposals, what else are we supposed to think they’ll do?

Consider some of Labour’s recent headline-grabbers. The countryside needs creative thinking; on everything from housing and rural crime to public transport and the challenges of an ageing population. You name it, there are endless issues that a party serious about changing the country could lead on. What does Labour do? Its rural strategy, put forward by shadow environment secretary Steve Reed (MP for the verdant pastures of Croydon North) majors on a proposal to “fully ban” fox hunting, even though it was outlawed 20 years ago. What they’re recycling aren’t even the greatest hits of New Labour. It’s like going to a Paul Mccartney concert expecting to hear Let It Be and instead getting a rendition of that weird song he did with the Frog Chorus.

Old Farmer Reed insists that going after drag and trail hunts “isn’t to do with urban people telling country people how to live their lives”, but you suspect that, if such pastimes were popular in, say, Rochdale, Labour might be less keen to revive this two decadesold culture war.

Even putting aside the U-turns, it’s the ideas themselves that grate. The focus on trivialities reads like a tacit admission that there’s little Labour can do to arrest national decline. These feel like the policies of a worn-out government, not people who are supposedly gagging to come into power to change the country for the better.

Any criticism of the Opposition inevitably prompts the refrain, “the Conservatives have been in charge for 14 years!”, as if the indisputable fact of Tory incompetence means that Labour deserves a free pass for its muddled thinking. In matters of substance, we may well get more of the same but with even more posturing. Get ready for Gray’s Anatomy: it’s set to be a Frankenstein’s monster of bad ideas.