Douglas Carswell's Blog

Direct democracy Conservatism? Proof it'd be popular

The Mail on Sunday has run an opinion poll looking at how popular “direct democracy” Conservatism might be.  Interestingly they didn’t merely ask their readers, but a representative sample of the whole electorate.

The results are stark.

Were the Conservatives were to make open primaries happen – thereby giving every voter a say over who got to be their MP – they’d be backed by 57 percent to 43 percent. Give people – not Westminster grandees – the power to trigger recall votes to sack useless MPs? They’d have the support of the electorate by two to one.

Allowing those we elected to hold the Sir Humphrey mandarinate to account?  Popular by 64 percent to 36 percent.  And the idea of giving people a direct say on our EU membership? 69 percent would support us on that, a mere 31 percent against.

None of these proposals can be brushed aside as old school, reactionary Toryism. Indeed, in opposition the Cameroons, magpie-like, picked up many of these ideas and cut-and-pasted them into speeches.

Many of these ideas even found their way into the manifesto and then the Coalition agreement. It just seems that in office the Sir Humphrey-factor is preventing a lot of it actually happening.

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