Douglas Carswell's Blog

Restore faith in politics? Only direct democracy can do it

A few years ago, we Conservatives were feeling our way towards a new open politics agenda. 

First we allowed every Londoner - regardless of any party affiliation - to have a say over who should be our candidate as mayor.  Boris won that first primary contest and went on to win the election that followed.  He has remained consistently more popular in London than his party.

Next we used the primary process to select Parliamentary candidates in two Parliamentary seats, Totnes and then Gosport*.  Allowing thousands of ordinary folk to decide who should be our candidates paid off.  They selected two extraordinarily impressive people, Sarah Wollaston and then Caroline Dinenage.  With a mandate from local people, both enjoyed a massive head start over their non-Conservative competition and won convincingly.

Then something strange happened.

A little clique of advisers, with no real grasp of the direct democracy agenda, was put in charge of making it all happen.  So it never has.

Rather than opening up the political system, the kind of open primary scheme they then devised morphed into a system of taxpayer-funded candidate selection.  No longer triggered by local people, these faux primaries would have been triggered by the party elites in London.  Instead of "piggy-backing" primary ballots onto pre-existing local ballots (thus reducing the cost from thousands of pounds to a few hundred), the clique of advisers were fixated by the idea that primaries had to mean postal ballots, and thus devised a scheme that would have cost the taxpayer millions. 

The proposal for "open primaries" that the clique came up with was so daft, so ridiculous, it came as a relief when the whole idea was quietly dropped.

Alas, it has been pretty much the same story with much of the rest of the direct democracy agenda.  Only when it came to the direct election of Police Commissioners - where much of the detail had been worked out in opposition - have things actually happened.    

Coalition plans for recall ballots contain everything apart from a recall vote.  The Great Repeal Bill seeks to ban things.  Popular initiative?  Just so long as the people don't try to initiative anything that SW1 folk find objectionable.

If the Conservatives have dropped the whole direct democracy / open politics thing, interestingly there are now some on the Left coming round to it.  Read Peter Watt's brilliant article on this theme over at Dale and Co.

(* - Many other local associations used open caucus meetings to select candidates, sometime wrongly described as open primaries.  But only Gosport and Totnes have ever used primary contests for the selection of Parliamentary candidates)

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