Seats in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are not hereditary peerages. No one has a right to walk into them.There were many more applicants than places in Scotland and in Wales. It would never have occurred to him to jump the queue or claim he should have special treatment because he was an MP. It was the Scottish party that chose the majority of members on the selection panel. It was the same in Wales.Donald may have proposed it, he may have been in the Cabinet, but he was interviewed by the panel just like everyone else. It is a measure of how important we believe these bodies are.The Scottish and Welsh parties decided to use a selection panel to vet potential candidates, a process used successfully to choose every single one of our by-election candidates for the last decade and for our 8,000 council candidates for years before that – including, incidentally, candidates for the GLC.But it was the Scottish and Welsh parties that decided to use these systems and run them Not me, not Millbank In Scotland, it was Donald Dewar who proposed it It was the Scottish executive that approved it.

The PR system used in the Euro elections will mean fewer Labour MPs than under a first- past-the-post system and more seats for our political opponents. It is a funny way for me to exercise more control.On the selection of candidates, I won’t apologise for our party wanting the best possible candidates to represent us in the elections for the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly. It means you will no longer be voting for a single-constituency Euro MP but on a regional basis.The real answer to the control-freak charge is, however, that our party would almost certainly be giving away seats under this system, just as we will be in the Welsh and Scottish elections next year. It is a new system here because, as promised in our manifesto, we want to introduce PR for Euro elections. But for hereditary peers, we would have won on each of the five occasions the Lords, with their three-to-one inbuilt majority, have defeated us.On the closed-list system itself, this is not some Stalinist voting procedure I invented but one used already by two-thirds of EU citizens in these elections and piloted first by the Tory government in Northern Ireland.

The real issue here is not, of course, the voting system but the right of Tory hereditary peers to frustrate the will of the elected Commons. But let’s examine the specific issues on the control-freak charge sheet.First, there is the Lords and voting in the European elections. The real losers were not the politicians denied office but the millions of people who depend upon our party to protect them and to promote their interests, as this Government is now doing.Nor do I apologise for giving strong leadership to the party I like everyone to know where I stand. They, too, are determined that our party won’t return to the factionalism, navel-gazing or feuding of the Seventies and Eighties, no matter how much a few people long for those heady days of electoral disaster.Our members know that this ill discipline allowed us to be painted as extremist, out of touch and divided It helped keep us out of power for 18 years. And if that means wanting us to be a modern, disciplined party with a strong centre, I’d like that offence to be taken into account as well.But if I’m found guilty, then so would the overwhelming majority of Labour party members. If the charge is wanting our party to be successful and our Government to continue concentrating all its energy on delivering our promises, then I plead guilty. Our opponents have had some help from a small minority in our party who either never signed up to the New Labour programme on which we fought and won the election or can’t manage to shake off the culture of opposition.Let me make something clear at the start.

Hardly surprising, when this Government is devolving power to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and restoring to London a capital-wide authority headed by an elected mayor.So the line of attack has been subtly changed in recent weeks from arrogance to control freakery. Even the Tories have realised the incompetence charge won’t stick Hospital waiting lists and infant class sizes are falling. An extra pounds 40bn has been found to modernise schools and hospitals. Inflation is on target, borrowing cut, the New Deal has helped slash youth unemployment to the lowest level since 1976; all this – and more – in our first 18 months of power, in just one full Parliamentary session, which ended yesterday.
And they don’t have much more luck with arrogance. THERE WERE always two criticisms likely to be levelled at the new Labour Government: incompetence or arrogance.