 At last, in a Labour leadership race which was threatening to snooze us all to death, something at least adjacent to exciting has happened. This week, Rebecca Long-Bailey announced her support for open selection, aka mandatory reselection, and perhaps the first big bid to separate herself from the field of contenders, cure chorus of spluttering and scoffing from the self-appointed custodians of sensible politics. So, what is open selection and why has it got everyone's big boy panties in a twist? Open selection is basically a primary system, a bit like what they have in the US. It means that sitting MPs would no longer have the automatic right to contest the next general election, which in safe seats can basically amount to a job for life. Instead, they would have to stand against a field of other would-be candidates and secure the backing of their constituency Labour Party. The idea is that this would provide an avenue for local activists and councillors to find a way into Parliament without having first to sully themselves with negative campaigning to trigger the incumbent for a full selection process. And in practice, it means that more people would participate in candidate selections which are currently sketchy procedures at best, and that MPs would be more accountable to their local parties. Alright, so why is something so boring so contentious? Open selection has long been associated with attempts by the left of the Labour movement to build factional power in the parliamentary Labour Party. Back in 1981, supporters of Tony Ben managed to introduce mandatory re-selection at party conference, and comrades, the proverbial scat hit the fan. Supporters of the move were denounced by MPs as career assassins, and the Daily Express predicted that the purges could begin at once and some 60 MPs are in danger. Mandatory re-selection was cited as one of the key reasons behind the split and formation of the Social Democratic Party, and ultimately was killed off in the 1990s by Neil Kinnock and John Smith. Because of this history, open selection has often been castigated as a flimsy veneer for a momentum-led Stalinist purging of the moderates. Needless to say, this isn't quite true. Despite the brouhaha accompanying the 2018 reform to the trigger ballot process, I know, please stay awake. Momentan didn't manage to deselect even a single sitting MP. No, not even Angela Smith. So for all the talk of icepick-wielding hardliners, there isn't much evidence to suggest that there's a great deal of appetite to deselect even the most right-wing of Labour MPs. What's more, the parliamentary Labour Party are actually kind of outliers for their lack of an open selection process, not just in terms of political parties. The Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and the SNP all have an open selection process, but in their own organisation too. Labour councillors are subject to mandatory reselection and it's all been kind of chill. So, the problem isn't the process in itself. The problem is the principle of democratising the nomination's process, the means by which small factions, unrepresentative perhaps of their membership as a whole, are able to tightly control who gets to join the cohort of sitting MPs. So why is this also urgent now? Rebecca Longbailey's argument is that you can't promise to democratise the country if you can't even democratise your own party and I'm sure that's true, but perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that Jeremy Corbyn has just demonstrated that you can't merely capture the top of the Labour Party and inspire the grassroots, you have this whole middle section of MPs willing to kick your ass day in, day out on national media and no real means to hold them individually accountable. And it's not just a left versus right factional battle, the irony is that left-wing MPs like Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn who themselves enjoy super majorities in their own constituencies could find themselves more accountable to their local constituency parties than they have been for decades. So yeah, open selection is hella boring, but it's a battle really that cuts the heart of the party's soul. The party of Labour have a decision to make, whether or not it will essentially allow some of its MPs to continue enjoying a job for life.