Working hard or hardly working?

‘MPs should work harder,’ has been the mantra of the Class of 2010. Avoiding any expenses query at all costs and being as amendable and listening for as long as possible to everyone in order to attempt to restore faith in the political process.

They should reach out to more people says some; engage with disaffected voters say others and represent more than just their loyal base. Great sentiment, can’t really disagree with that, and we’d be foolish to try. But it’d be wrong to presume that MPs don’t work incredibly hard. Most sacrifice the relaxation and family time that we all take for granted to be able to effectively help us constituents. Of course there are some that work for longer hours or respond to more e-mails but, generally speaking, being an MP is not an easy-ride.

So why do they appear to be being criticised for not working hard enough? A lack of buy-in from constituents, I believe, could lie at the heart of the issue.

The behaviour and attitude of prospective candidates, however, is something that needs to be looked at and the filtering process by which this occurs is not down to the method of counting ballots but with something much earlier on: the selection process.

Currently the majority of British parliamentary candidates start life as devoted local party activists. They rise up the ranks and gain favour amongst fellow activists. When a vacancy pops up, applications are sought to fill the post. A panel of the local ‘party elders’ is then summoned and they interview the applicants. The candidate is then selected off the back of this. This person then fights for the party in that constituency. If they win, and are a canny political operator, then this same person could govern as Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister is decided by other MPs when the leader is (usually) in opposition; but it is the original local party elders that decide the pool of candidates from which they make their choice. These unaccountable few hold a huge sway of power over the constituencies and, by association, the country. How are they to know what the best candidate for the constituency is? What impact on the country well-being is considered by these few king-makers? The truth is we just don’t know. The prejudices and careful discrimination offered by these people is entirely their private purview. They decide our candidates; they shape our government and they determine the future of British democracy. This is wrong.

For the system to strengthen and engagement to be at its best we must look to adopt open primaries for candidates, where the total constituency party members vote for whom they want to represent them as a PPC. More members involved in the selection process equates to a more diverse body of concern; more questioning and scrutiny; more representative power and, god willing, more rhetorically inspirational candidates. This would generate terrifically engaging political battles between candidates, ones that all members could say they had a stake in supporting.

The system can and must do better; but true reform will only come from the groundswell of support for the candidate fighting for us.

Richard Angell, Deputy Director of Progress, makes some strong arguments in a recent post for the unavoidable future insurgence of open primaries but suggests that they should only be held if the ‘constituency party has not ensured that at least one per cent of the Labour vote at the last election are party members, and the candidate selection takes place within a year of the general election, then the decision is thrown open to a primary.’

But why just for Labour? Substitute any political party into the formula and battles lines will begin to be drawn between candidates that have a huge level of local support. The American style passion for advocating a candidate will begin to emerge as more citizens feel that they have a direct responsibility to help the guy or gal they selected to win.

We must give the power back to the majority. The time of the oligarchy is dead, true democracy must have its day.

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4. The defeated London left found liberal Conservatism so hard to handle