Mark Seddon: Down in the valleys is a machine that snuffs out signs of political life

'"This is a secret ballot", a member was told. "But you have to write your names down on the paper"'

"Ogmore? Where is Ogmore?" asked the young BBC researcher. What lies beyond Offa's Dyke may have been something of a mystery to her, but a by-election is shortly to take place in one of Labour's safest seats in South Wales.

Here are some of the spicy ingredients that have gone in to making the Ogmore Labour Party Welsh cawl – or broth. I hope that the party's new standard bearer in the constituency has an appetite for it, or better still, pours the stinking broth down the sink. (That candidate is not me – I was excluded from the party's short-list at the eleventh hour.)

Ogmore, which comprises three former mining valleys in South-west Wales has been Labour for as long as anyone can remember. Locals claim that the last proper canvass of voters took place shortly after the General Strike in 1926, when the Communist Party posed something of a threat. The area suffers multiple social deprivation, the top end of the valleys are now probably poorer than they were 20 years ago.

Local Labour Party members – truly some of the most long-suffering people that it is possible to imagine – know the ingredients. They wouldn't recommend it to anyone. For Ogmore is often thought of as a rotten borough, presided over by two warring clans for more than two decades.

In one corner are the supporters of the late MP, Sir Ray Powell, including members of his extended family. At one time around a dozen "Powellistas" had positions of one kind or another in the local Labour Party. Unkind souls have likened the clan to the Kim Il Sung dynasty in North Korea.

In the other corner, looming menacingly, is the leader of one of the local authorities in the area, Councillor Jeff Jones. This splenetic figure drives the Wales Labour Party to distraction, and while his targets are not always misplaced, personal animosities are so entrenched and bitter as to make the 1984/5 miners' strike a tea party.

Councillor Jones has now transferred his hostilities to Sir Ray's chosen successor, the capable and ambitious Mayor of Cardiff, Russell Goodway. Locals fear a bloodbath – or the near imminent expulsion from the party of Councillor Jones, for his attacks on Mr Goodway.

Some of those who preside over the Ogmore selection do not like new members of the Labour Party either. They would prefer them to stay away. One young woman took a day off during the general election and offered to help the party she had recently joined. "Not needed today" was the brusque reply.

Other veterans recall the moribund trade union branches that were once mustered to save Sir Ray from being de-selected. Others laugh wearily as they recall the ancient, but revered practice of "signing up dead members" in order to preserve near defunct branches. Folk memory, once tapped, produces a line of one-liners designed to cheer the old Soviet politburo. My favourites are; "Don't you know, comrade, that democracy means to conform?" Or this; "Comrade. Sometimes democracy can go too far!"

On Tuesday evening, as one local Labour branch finally wearied of the Powell dynasty and voted to de-select his daughter, the local Wales Assembly member, another branch gathered to vote a few miles down the road. "This is a secret ballot," a member was told. "But you have to write down your names at the bottom of the ballot paper".

"South Wales radicalism?" said an MP from an adjoining constituency. "It's a myth!" One of the questions to Labour hopefuls from the party's selection panel on Monday night in Cardiff was; "How to do you propose to interest young people in the Labour Party and politics?" How indeed, when a combination of old right-wing Labour machine politics and New Labour control freakery have produced an all-embracing hybrid which snuffs out most signs of political life?

In retrospect I was naive to imagine that it might be possible to gather enough support from local members to win the Labour nomination, without being scrubbed out by machine politicians in the Spartan surroundings of a committee room in Transport House, Cardiff.

The man that Tony Blair made chairman of the Labour Party, Charles Clarke, announced to colleagues and the press that my performance in front of the panel was "very poor" and that this was the reason for the banning order. As a result I would not be able to go and make my case to the long-suffering members of the Ogmore Labour Party at the final selection meeting. But as Mandy Rice Davies might have said of those who doubted her claim of an affair with John Profumo, Charles Clarke would say that, wouldn't he?

In fact the tom-tom drums in the Valleys had been drumming out a distinct message almost immediately that I had thrown my hat into the Ogmore cawl. I had cause to telephone Charles Clarke to tell him that a leading councillor was telling members "not to bother with Seddon because he won't be on the short-list".

Neil Kinnock – once a valleys firebrand, now a European Commissioner, has been backing long-serving assistant Jan Royall for the nomination in Ogmore. Others reported that one candidate had been told by a senior Government minister: "We want a safe pair of hands who is 100 per cent New Labour".

Naively, I believed that being a member of Labour's National Executive Committee and the party's candidate selection committee would deter any outbreak of control freakery. Had not the Rhodri Morgan and Ken Livingstone debacles brought an end to the culture of the political fix? I did not reckon on another stock-in phrase, namely that I had "no local connections". In other words, I was not Welsh. Hilariously, a couple of days later, I received an invitation from an official of Plaid Cymru to join them.

Ogmore – and other areas that are similar to it that have been treated as private fiefdoms – deserve better from Labour. The party's new standard bearer in the constituency will need a good deal of luck and fortitude if the old mould is to be broken.

seddonzq1@aol.com

The author is editor of Tribune and a member of Labour's National Executive Committee