I will not be exterminated by the Daleks from Millbank

BY THE time you read this, the London Labour Party executive will have decided how to select their candidate for Mayor of London. As I write, all the indications are that they will establish a vetting panel to judge ideological suitability, thus opening the prospect of a long and damaging row.

Oddly enough, I believe that at yesterday's Downing Street briefing Alastair Campbell told journalists that Tony Blair was opposed to any attempt to blackball myself as a candidate. Although some wicked journalists have been implying that this is an attempt to provide a little cover in a difficult week, I can only proceed on the basis that my leader is telling the truth. He is, after all, "a pretty straightforward kind of guy". Perhaps, then, problems come from lower down the food chain.

The internal life of the Labour Party has been transformed. Discontent has slowly rolled around the country over the selection of our candidates for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Authority, and the European Parliament.

Most could have been avoided if it had not been for the Dalek faction of Labour's Millbank Tendency, whose self-appointed job it is to wage war on the ordinary party members. We have got to sort these nutters out before they undermine our attempts to actually win any of the devolved bodies over the next 18 months.

The central question for many party activists is that of why the system of One Member One Vote (OMOV) has been quietly dropped by the Labour Party, with barely a murmur from the very people who pushed for it. From the late Eighties onwards OMOV was used by the "modernisers" against the trade unions' role in the Labour Party, and against the supposedly undemocratic influence of the activists. The Davros of Labour's Daleks is the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, once a left-wing organisation, now a front for lobbyists and apparatchiks, which tells us on its website that: "The principle of OMOV by postal ballot should be extended to elections for constituency officers, delegates to conferences and local government candidates."

Where are these advocates of OMOV now? The system for selecting the Euro- candidates meant that the selection of who will be on the list - and, crucially, at what place they were to be on the list - was done at the second stage by a joint panel of NEC members and regional representatives. Dennis Skinner and I proposed as an amendment to these proposals at an NEC meeting several months ago that there should be an OMOV ballot to decide the ranking of the candidates at the final stage. No one else voted for it. Regardless of the rhetoric about giving power to the members instead of a "small activist- and union-dominated committee", the NEC gave the decision to... a small activist-dominated committee.

At one of the last NEC meetings I attended before I was sent into exile, the outcome of this process was finally revealed. The bizarre selection system has led to a series of inexplicable decisions and genuine exasperation among party members. As The Independent pointed out yesterday, Christine Oddy MEP, a sitting Labour member in the West Midlands, has been placed in seventh place on a list of eight in her region. Under the closed list system, voters will have no chance to put her higher on the list, and unless Labour experiences its biggest ever landslide, she has no chance of finding her way back into the European Parliament.

Christine Oddy has been done over because she does not conform to the prescriptions of a few people sitting in a smoke-filled room. She is a left-winger . To add insult to injury, she will almost certainly go down to defeat while watching Michael Cashman, who has been parachuted into the region and straight into number two on the list, sail to victory. Why were the members not able to choose?

These manoeuvres are not merely designed to stifle the left. Take the example of Carole Tongue MEP, a senior and very popular member of Labour's European team, who was ranked by an NEC-London Labour Party panel in fifth place for the closed list system of election - again a position the party may struggle to win. The NEC insists that the final ranking was determined purely on the basis of a four-minute presentation and interview. The idea of relegating a senior and influential MEP on such a basis is frankly irresponsible. One member of the Greater London Labour Party regional board tried to pretend that this was not a demotion. The problem with that argument is that we can never know, because it was all done secretly.

If the situation with the European elections has not yet etched itself into the public's consciousness, the same cannot be said of the problems the control freaks are creating for themselves in Scotland, Wales and London. The paradox is that the Government seems willing to devolve power, but the party is not. Scottish MPs have been deemed unsuitable for the Scottish Parliament. Furthermore, the panel imposed to weed out candidates put just one ethnic minority candidate on the shortlist, and excluded prominent and well-respected women activists, giving the lie to the idea that only a centralised party can ensure the proper representation of women and black people.

The Scottish Commission for Racial Equality raised question marks over the poor representation of the black communities, and the Scottish National Party had an easy time exploiting the whole process.

This is all just dreadful politics. Labour's election strategists must be able to see that this is not popular with the electorate. According to the polls, Rhodri Morgan is popular with the electorate, a situation reflected inside the party, where he would win under a One Member One Vote ballot to lead Labour in Wales.

A similar process has taken place in London. Under the PR system we are proposing for the London Assembly elections, Labour would have won 13 seats out of the 25 on the basis of the votes cast at the general election. Had Assembly votes been cast in the same proportions as at this May's local elections, Labour would have won 11 seats to the Tories' nine and the Liberals' five.

Personally I am in favour of Labour winning elections, which means selecting candidates from the widest and most representative pool, and taking the troops with you. It also means fighting your enemies and not constantly sowing the seeds of poor morale within your own ranks. I just wonder whether there are some extremists who would rather see Labour lose these elections than fight them with an ideologically impure candidate. Just for their information, I for one will not be exterminated easily. Just for your information, contrary to what disinformation may be spread in coming days, I will not be leaving Labour to stand as an independent. If I am carved up, I will stay inside the Labour Party and fight to reclaim it.