Some political blogging is insider gossip, designed to pre-empt the mainstream media with news of the shenanigans of our political class. It is not much better than the celebrity gossip pages and it confirms the illusion that participation in politics is being up to date with who is in and who is out.

An analogy might be with sports where there is a world of difference between a) playing for Arsenal, b) watching Arsenal on satellite TV and c) going out to play a game with your mates over at the local park. Only c) is real participation, a) is the real business and b) is just entertainment.

To give a flavour of the blogosphere, let's take a look at the treatment of just one story in two blogs - the appointment of David Pitt-Watson as General Secretary of the Labour Party. One is partisan and snide, one uses the occasion to give us some insight into what is happening where politics really matters in the long term - the grassroots.

I once knew Pitt-Watson (henceforth in this posting DP-W) well but not in recent years. We both held high office in the Labour Finance & Industry Group and, coincidentally, worked together on the Russian Mass Privatisation Programme in 1992 (an experience that has prejudiced me ever since in favour of Vladimir Putin's war on the thieving oligarchs).

I know, from private talks with senior party figures, that the NEC was faced with a fairly stark choice (in practice) between a trades union 'good old boy', a decent man but not one experienced in the highest reaches of administration, and DP-W who might called the quintessential technocrat. The Leadership wanted a safe pair of hands with a record of analytical competence.

I also know something of the scale of the challenge he faces - not only the funding crisis and a second-rate administrative structure, but the new determination of the organised labour movement to re-capture by stealth its control of the party's patronage system, the need to remain loyal to one of the most intellectually rigid governments in British history and a level of moribund disillusion amongst the ordinary membership that is far worse than reported.

He is very much an 'insider'. He was Assistant General Secretary in the mid-1990s, taking a fair hit to his salary, and, earlier, he made an unsuccessful attempt to become New Labour candidate in Corby, apparently, like many a technocrat, not really understanding how to work a constituency system that, even today, depends a great deal on glad-handing opinionated and self-important local worthies. 

He wrote often on party reform, broadly along New Labour rather than democratic lines, and was part of a circle of younger (then) radicals who wanted engagement with capitalism by using the state as regulator. In essence, he was and probably still is a modernising social liberal rather than anything that the past or the future would call a socialist.

My view, already expressed, is that the Party needed a strong outsider working within a clear brief and/or the disconnection of the Party from the traditional movement in order to Obama-fy it from below. This was never going to happen - and, to be fair, 'insiders' like DP-W do have the advantage of knowing how the system works. 

We can but wish him luck. If he succeeds, he will be a hero and if he fails, no-one will have expected otherwise (because of the situation, not the man) and he can be kicked upstairs to the Red Benches or perhaps get parachuted into some safe seat in the gift of a grateful Leader.

But back to the blogs. First, the snide and metropolitan. Guido Fawkes, from the libertarian right, concentrates on his 'capitalist' origins but the reference to the LFIG is especially interesting and questions may be raised for which DP-W will need to have ready answers. 

In this case, I also was an 'insider' and, though I may not know where the bodies are buried, under which section of the motorway or on which deserted moor, I do know that if you applied the standards of today to the practice of the past, then funding-related bodies are surely buried somewhere, possibly on the Red Benches themselves.

The LFIG was always a highly secretive group, owing its origins to private business networks that go all the way back to the Wilson-Callaghan era. It was part of the pre-Levy 'blind trust' system and we have written a memoire of it elsewhere [see Lobster 51, Summer 2006]

Above all, it was a coterie of leadership loyalists, with an unclear institutional and constitutional relationship to the party and (operating like non-Parliamentary funding to the Stuart dynasty) it was an alternative focus for policy advice and financial support to whoever was then-Leader of the day - although one suspects that Tony Benn would have got less than enthusiastic backing.

For the LFIG to have one of theirs in the General Secretary position is tantamount to saying that the Leader indirectly maintains and strengthens control of the Party bureaucracy at the expense of the trades unions and the membership. Of course, the nature of party power is always more complicated than this simple model might suggest.

Things have changed a great deal since I was drummed out of the LFIG in 1995 for proposing transparency and accountability reforms (yes, I have to admit an interest in the case) and it is interesting that Sir Sigmund Sternberg in particular is now a strong advocate of state funding. 

At the end of the day, state funding has become central to the political survival of the centralised command model of the bureaucratic right-wing party structure. Private Eye's satirical From the Desk of the Supreme Leader is not far wrong although its humour has become as leaden and deadly dull as the Government it satirises.

Sternberg, a major figure in the debate over party funding, is one of many who has long since seen the need for reform, but there is an inherent tension between fund-raising and the low membership fees expected by a mass membership.

There will be activist resentment of any plan to create differential membership dues with differing rights (which might privilege middle class members over working class members) and yet this is logical. Higher membership fees will reduce numbers but increase revenues, although how the Party is going to deliver the consequent increased demands for a  'say' under its current structure is hard to see.

Similarly, trades unions' determination to use their contributions to retain power over the working of the machine and in favour of their special interest policies works against the fact that there is no state funding deal with the other parties without some restriction on trades union contributions.

DP-W is going to have to cut costs (which must mean job losses which will upset the trades unions on principle), raise the standard of personnel (again, trades union resistance can be expected), persuade the members (and donors) to stump up more money and get the finances in order so that the banks can back the party while keeping a straight face.

But the long term problem is much deeper than this. All the theory of the 'young' radicals of the mid-1990s (of which DP-W was one) about a million member party has proved so much hokum. Its mass member recovery is not going to happen under the current rather dreary government, with an economic slowdown on the way and memories of Iraq still surprisingly fresh. The next phase is crisis management in order to create the foundation for an electoral defence in 2009.

In the longer run, New Labour cannot survive without a tripartite deal between itself, the trades unions and the Tories - an absurd proposition until you realise that all three have an interest in keeping the system from which they all benefit working much as before.

Getting the Party into shape through technocratic means is probably seen as only the first stage in a far more fundamental transformation in British politics over the heads of the membership and the electorate - a classic 'fix' or deal to get the taxpayer to pay for a political class it largely despises.

In this context, Cameron has the most interesting choice of all. He could collude in the preservation of the system by using his bargaining power to come to a deal that benefits his Party but retains a weakened Labour Party in preference to the chaos that might ensue from its collapse (and such things have happened in other democracies). 

But he could refuse to deal, gamble on a win in Parliament in 2009 and either alone or with the Liberal Democrats put in party funding rules that, in effect, destroy Labour's 'business model'. The irony would be that New Labour would then have to consider a proper mass membership strategy with a US-style primary system - and would be Obama-fied willy-nilly ....

Guido Fawkes allows all the nasty right-wingers to have a go at DP-W and to cast unjustified assertions on his integrity with that catty viciousness of which metropolitan Tories seem to be past masters but this negativity should not be countered with uncritical admiration. 

For a more considered and thoughtful view we should turn to Andy Howell, the Birmingham blogger, Labour activist and former Deputy Leader of Birmingham Council, a true Labour Party grassroots insider (and another old colleague from another campaign) whose Political Futures is the voice of someone who actually plays the game on the field and in the park.

His first posting and second contribution to the debate on the General Secretary are well worth reading because it is neither snide commentary from an opponent nor the considered but outsider opinion of someone like myself but the considered opinion of an insider.

What he raises is the growing irritation, albeit still low key, at the way the Party continues to conduct its affairs in its selection of officials. You should know that only six of the very large committee of the National Executive Committee are elected by the membership and each year the leadership puts inordinate effort into ensuring that at least half of those are loyalists.

Similarly, calls for the election of the Party Chairman have been systematically ignored and NEC members are kept in the dark about much of what goes on in their name. Many were surprised and shocked at the extent of the funding mess when it was revealed

Many NEC members still have no real idea about the extent of off-balance sheet financing of internal party campaigns carried out by those professional politicians who owe their jobs to the Party and for whom the NEC is supposed to take responsibility.

The independence of Parliament is sacrosanct but the freedom of manouevre of politicians with the Labour brand is becoming ridiculous. No corporation would permit such free use of its brand by small groups like its business lobby (LFIG) or its local managers. It is the conduct of these local managers (aka MPs) that have dragged the core brand through the mud in the eyes of its shareholders. The irony that DP-W has partly made his name in the City on shareholder activism is delicious to contemplate.

In the run-up to Christmas, officials clamped down on information about the legal and financial difficulties of the Party and some NEC members became genuinely and seriously alarmed at their personal liability if the NEC were to be judged on the same terms as a Board of Directors. 

The alarm subsided with the New Year when it was realised that there was no-one other than the police to make a complaint (and we wait on their opinion in due course) but it is clear that the subsequent silence from elected NEC members is a sign of their almost-feudal loyalties and the continued lack of information provided to them rather than any belief by anyone that the Party is not in fiscal and political crisis.

Younger members' concerns about the General Secretary selection, as reported by Andy, ties in with other concerns about lack of democracy. Some are looking with envious eyes at the American Primary system which, for all the slander thrown about, does give Democrats some real choices over the balance between idealism and electability before they place a candidate in front of the wider electorate.

But New Labour is a centralised command party and, short of the election of its own Gorbachev whose reforms might cause it to implode under the weight of volcanic democratic resentment, there is no way that either the new apparatchiki represented by DP-W or the closed-in circles of Brownites, Blairites and trades union, local and petty nationalist elites are going to permit anything that upsets the delicate balance of power created out of 100 years of federalism.

New Labour is culturally a Soviet-style bloc, sclerotic and in political decline. If General Secretary Andropov (sorry, DP-W) thinks he can reform it without fundamental change in favour of radical democracy and technical competence and by taking on the old elites, then he will be severely disappointed.

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