Events | 2009.08.24
This anti-politics merely opens the door to millionaires and careerists | John Harris
The Tories are pushing election primaries as a cure-all for a rotten democracy, but they will lead to a takeover by cash
After voicing the kind of Conservatism that makes Labour\'s PR department\'s job a cinch, the inestimable Daniel Hannan might have forced David Cameron to malign his opinions as "eccentric" ; but in one area at least, he, the Tory leadership and an increasing number of Westminster high-ups are in happy agreement. By the autumn, there may well be no stopping them — and while Hannan\'s friends in the US will still be fretting about the importation of crypto-communist British ideas about healthcare, we could be on the way to adopting a very American way of running our politics.
Primaries are the summer\'s big political thing , as proved by the Tories\' transformation of a once-unremarkable Devon town into the People\'s Republic of Totnes. Notwithstanding Hannan\'s excitement about local developments (as a paid-up primaries anorak, he thinks events there changed British politics "utterly, permanently and benignly"), the T word is now a signifier for the Cameroons\' progressive affectations, and two weeks after the local Conservatives announced the result of their hyped open primary, one other after-effect is obvious: plenty of non-Tory voices hailing such wheezes as the definitive answer to the expenses controversy, and much more besides.
Among Labour people, those who have advocated primaries in the past – including David Miliband, and the higher education minister David Lammy – are speaking out again. Now, the inevitable has happened: echoing a proposal first put forward in 2006 by that adventurous outrider Stephen Byers, the little-known but vociferous Labour MP Tom Harris wants to use some kind of mass national primary to select the party\'s next leader.
How did we get here? Essentially, the expenses crisis has sparked two broad responses, neither of which will go away. First, there is that overheated kind of anti-politics whereby Westminster is portrayed as rotten to the core, and an untainted cavalry is imagined, arriving to make everything OK. Meanwhile, there are revived calls for constitutional change, and electoral reform in particular. For the Tory leadership and their allies, as well as some Labour people, the latter obviously represents dangerous talk – better by far to somehow direct the great anti-political hurricane in an advantageous direction. The result: a theatrical rubbishing of standard-issue politics, awash with cant, that will actually leave the essential features of the political class unchanged.
My favourite example is a recent piece in the Times by the venerable William Rees-Mogg, which looked forward to what the headline called "a new political army" marching on Westminster. With so many MPs standing down, he reckoned, the mood crystallised in Totnes would lead a new generation of MPs to kick over "the altar of undue deference". He should know – among the roll-call of suitably iconoclastic Tory candidates are two of the Rees-Mogg children: Eton-educated Jacob; and Annunziata, who was selected in a low-key primary that was barely reported, perhaps because it attracted only 250 people.
For the Conservative leadership, the Totnes effect allows Cameron and his allies to pull off a magical sleight-of-hand. Even if there are more Tory primaries, a rule change agreed in late July means that in newly vacated seats the choice of candidate will be from a shortlist decided at Tory HQ in a process weighted in favour of party managers. Moreover, as of the new year, byelection rules will kick in, and the maximum number of centrally-imposed candidates will be three. The details of all this are inevitably arcane, but their upshot was recently bemoaned by the co-editor of the website Conservative Home, who wrote of power being grabbed by "the party at the centre, ironically enough at a time when the party is talking in national policy terms about localism and decentralisation". Evidently, the New Labour manual still has its uses.
Such chicanery aside, the case against British primaries is easier to argue than it seems. The Totnes model, we hear, is grassroots democracy in action – a cover, surely, for the fact that no national politicians have any convincing plans for the revival of local government. In Westminster, strangulated parliamentary discipline will remain, meaning that even if local mavericks do make the grade, they will still be endlessly cattle-prodded through the lobbies.
Who wouldn\'t enjoy great national and local democratic carnivals, enlivened by the idea that everyone has a real say? That\'s actually what our existing elections should provide, but our creaking voting system sucks the air out of them. Take the pro-primaries crowd seriously when they accept all these failings, and one other democratic deficit: the fact that as the wider world has embraced online pluralism, non-hierarchical organisation and the rest, British political parties have either failed to keep up (the Tories) or moved in the exact opposite direction (witness the Soviet-esque emasculation of the Labour party). As a result, they have emptied out: now, the political class decides the only option is to kill them.
If primaries are pushed from Westminster constituencies, through mayoral contests and up to the election of national leaders, the importance of money will grow and grow. To reverse the terms of the current transatlantic shouting match over healthcare, look at the US. The primary system at least partly explains why, at the last count, at least 40 of America\'s 100 senators were millionaires. Donation-heavy incumbents are the sole candidates in the vast majority of congressional primaries – and if they are challenged, lobbyist-funded war chests of $500,000 plus are not uncommon (this, needless to say, is one of the reasons why Barack Obama\'s health reforms are in such a mess). Even if British queasiness about mixing politics and cash led to some spending and donation caps, we would still move into an expensive new age of cold-calling, multiple mail-outs and unprecedented political advertising.
Aside from that, courting the more reactionary parts of the press would often be crucial, and debate would always be in danger of being reduced to the currency of name and face recognition: as one British academic recently told me, "it\'s big money, or it\'s Arnold Schwarzenegger" (or rather, Esther Rantzen).
Obama-mania is one of the devices used by pro-primaries advocates in the UK, but he was an imperfect exception to an otherwise depressing rule. For all the fabled small donations and refusal to take money from registered federal lobbyists, his campaign was helped by the usual largesse of big players in pharmaceuticals, finance, oil and the rest – though the key point is illustrated by the kind of candidates primaries will always favour. On the Democratic side, an archetypal winner was the timid and extremely well-off John Kerry; when it comes to the Republicans, look at any number of former wealthy hopefuls (in their different ways, both John McCain and Mitt Romney fit the bill).
Here, surely, is the great weakness at the heart of the case for British primaries, highlighted by the moment at which some people have chosen to pipe up. If they have their way, the irony will be truly surreal: if you think parliament is stuffed with middle-of-the-road careerists driven by either money or their own egos, you ain\'t seen nothing yet.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ral-reform-totnes-primary-tory
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