Calls for the two major parties to embrace primaries in candidate selection are more than a summer fad. The Tory selection procedure in Totnes and David Miliband’s suggestion that Labour should follow a similar path are prompted by the theory that party memberships are in decline and the appeal of powerful leadership groups to an individualised electorate is the future. This is positively Orwellian. While all citizens are equal, those at the top are deemed to be more equal than others.
The Labour and Tory leaderships seem to be working on the assumption that representative democracy is dead and an elected dictatorship is now the only show in town. In the era of celebrity politics, traditional membership-based parties have had their day. They should be replaced by professional party cadres with ranks of apparatchiks employed to have direct contact with the electorate.
The two main parties are now using a computer package called Mosaic, which has a billion bits of information on voters. Who needs canvassers when a machine can do their job? Nevertheless, no one dare say openly that computers can replace members.
In 1994, the rhetoric of Labour’s leaders concerned building a mass party with a million members. Initially, membership growth was impressive and by 1997 the number of Labour members topped 407,000. It has since halved as the party’s record in government has alienated more and more people and the promises of partnership in power turned out to be empty ones.
The Tories do not even pretend that increasing membership is a priority. Earlier this month, 200 Conservative associations reported that membership fell from 185,000 to 145,000 between December 2005 and December 2008.
In a close election, party activists could make the difference between victory and defeat. With Cameron well ahead in the opinion polls, this is not a big issue for the Tories. For Labour, the lack of members has become calamitous.
Under Tony Blair, Labour developed a network of professional apparatchiks around Westminster. This proved to be expensive. Blair left the Labour Party with a £24 million debt. And it was unsuccessful. Labour has been humiliated in recent elections. Sadly, the signs of impending disaster next year do not seem to affect the cadre running the party.
They used to pride themselves on their marketing skills. This claim to expertise has become risible with the lengthening list of public relations disasters. When the NSPCC attacks the Government’s child protection plans, you know that new depths of incompetence are being plumbed.
And yet the logic of centralism continues to dominate. Cameron has underlined this by proposing to cut Cabinet salaries to £124,581, while paying his director of communications £270,000. His advocacy of a Prime Ministerial pay cut prompted the knee-jerk response from Gordon Brown that he, too, was prepared to see his salary reduced.
The proposal to slash politicians’ pay is driven by short-term expediency and designed to pave the way for big cuts in the public sector. Cameron also wants to reduce the number of MPs. This goes beyond the immediate financial crisis. Together with the plan to limit political donations to £50,000, which constitutes an attack on trade union funding of the Labour Party, this raises serious constitutional issues.
In essence, Cameron wants bigger constituencies, which would increase the caseload of MPs. But this is marginal compared to the inability to work effectively at Westminster, which would be the consequence of having fewer MPs with much more work to do. Fewer MPs means fewer people on select committees and fewer people to take part in parliamentary debates. There would be an even smaller talent pool to draw on for ministerial appointments. The Cabinet would become even more the puppet of the Prime Minister. Cameron’s proposals would further reduce the capacity of MPs to exercise scrutiny over the executive.
It was already clear that the machine in Number 10 Downing Street had too much power when Alastair Campbell was one of most powerful people in the country. The principle of parliamentary democracy has been further eroded by Gordon Brown, notably with his appointment of Peter Mandelson as de facto Deputy Prime Minister. David Cameron’s plans would take us further towards a semi-dictatorship in which the House of Commons became no more than a house of rhetoric.
Over the past 30 years, political power has become increasingly transferred into the hands of people at the top and those who surround them. If the trend towards the concentration of power behind closed doors is to be reversed, this must done with a commitment to change via a dialogue with the people.
The populist attempt to create leader-dominated parties and professional political machines results in the centralisation of power, the abandonment of principle in favour of the big buck and an anti-democratic contempt for ordinary people. As the experience of the United States shows, that is what primaries would mean for Britain. This is one idea that must be resisted.
