LEFT-wing Labour MPs yesterday claimed plans to introduce a central list of approved candidates for the next General Election would kill the party's tradition of dissent.
Allowing Labour's ruling national executive committee to vet Parliamentary hopefuls would weed out anyone asking difficult questions and produce a generation of obedient yes-men, they said.
Dissident MPs condemned the Labour leadership's latest moves to centralise control over selecting party candidates for all elections as part of a ''modernisation'' drive.
There was also criticism of a move, endorsed yesterday by the party's ruling national executive committee, to send all MPs' voting records from Westminster to their local parties. It is intended to expose honourable members who do not support the Government faithfully enough in the division lobbies.
Great Grimsby MP Austin Mitchell warned that: ''There has to be a public ferment of ideas or it's dead. We're not a party that can naturally be led from the top down.
''To try and treat us in that fashion is to under-estimate our intelligence. Discussion and debate makes for better policy.''
Speaking out against growing central control, he continued: ''Unquestioned obedience to a policy handed down from on high is always a dangerous symptom.''
Once the plan approved by the NEC is backed by Labour's annual conference in October, the committee will start drawing up a central list of approved candidates who can stand in seats which Labour does not currently hold or where the sitting Labour MP is retiring.
The new procedure will also apply in seats where the NEC refuses to endorse the reselection of a sitting MP, most likely on disciplinary grounds, or where the current MP has lost a reselection ballot and thus triggered a new, open reselection ballot.
Critics claim the proposals will produce a generation of Blairite toadies and end Labour's long tradition of free thought, radical ideas and open discussion.
Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn, a leading left-winger, said they were aimed at stopping ''radical voices emerging in Parliament, which is damaging to democracy and also very damaging for the Labour Party''.
However, the party insisted there would be ''no big purge'' of left-wingers as a result. Chief Whip Nick Brown told yesterday's NEC that releasing MPs' voting records was designed to draw attention to those ''who don't pull their weight in Parliament''.
The one MP mentioned at the meeting was Bob Marshall-Andrews, the defiantly off-message MP for Medway. He has irked colleagues by regularly attacking the Government and party leadership and also missing a fair number of votes in the Commons.
Scottish Labour MPs were divided over the two-pronged plan.
Dundee East MP John McAllion, a leading left-winger, did not object to the release of an MP's voting record to their constituency secretary. But he opposed the central list because ''it deprives the constituency Labour party of the right to choose candidates of their choice because they have to choose from an already-selected list that has been determined at the centre. That's already happening for the Holyrood elections.''
However Jim Murphy, the Blairite loyalist MP for Eastwood, welcomed the plans. ''It's important that Labour has the highest quality of candidates, and also policies, at the next General Election and these proposals are an important step to delivering that''.
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