Douglas Carswell

Recall - it should be local voters, not MPs, who trigger it

In her speech today, Her Majesty the Queen announced a recall Bill. This could have been the most significant change in decades to the way that Britain does politics.

For far too long, politics in Westminster has been done for us by a clique of career MPs, most of who come from "safe seats". Secure in the knowledge they can only be sacked if they lose the party whip, most MPs tend to answer primarily to other MPs. Politics in SW1 has thus become a game played by politicians and pundits, without much reference to the people.

Recall ought to overturn this cosy way of doing things. It's wildly popular: over 150,000 people signed up to 38 Degrees' superb campaign within the first two days. (Please add your name here.)

Recall could make the customer – rather than the whips' office – king. But will it?

I suspect that when we see the small print, it won't actually mean more direct democracy.

The SW1 gang, terrified of the implications of letting the people back into politics, will ensure that the trigger for any recall mechanism remains safely in their hands. Local people will only be allowed to vote to confirm what political insiders have decided.

Done properly, recall must be triggered by local voters, not a committee of Westminster grandees. And it must also involve an actual recall ballot – should your local MP be recalled, yes or no?

We trust juries to decide if someone has broken the law, rather than pass a verdict on whether they agree with the law. Similarly, recall means trusting local constituents to decide if the behaviour and conduct of their own MP is acceptable, not if they happened to vote for them last time round.

It is a sad reflection of our political system today that so many in Westminster balk at the very idea of allowing their electorate to make that kind of decision. I suspect most MPs would get a fairer hearing from their constituents than they ever would from a committee stuffed full of whips'-office placemen, under pressure from the lobby pack in full hunt mode.

Giving local people the power to recall their representatives, it is sometimes said, would lead to vexatious attempts to unseat MPs. What makes you think SW1 insiders cannot be vexatious?

Local people would be far better at deciding what was and what was not a legitimate complaint about their local MP. When the Tories triggered a judicially sanctioned recall ballot in Winchester in 1997, it backfired spectacularly. Seen as sore losers, they managed to turn a Lib Dem majority of almost zero into a Lib Dem majority of over 20,000.

"I can't see the point of recall," scoff some pundits who have rarely spotted a swing voter in a marginal seat either. "What we should really be focusing on is whether Boodle will be promoted in the reshuffle rather than Doodle. And what was on the menu when the PM and the German Chancellor met for lunch?"

We Conservatives have long understood the importance of choice and competition in business. I fear we have missed a chance to extend that same principle to politics. 

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