Power To The People, Or Power To Polly?

Polly Toynbee is exercised by Gordon Brown's latest offerings. I see that her Proportional Representation monomania has been dragged into this. At least its equally evil twin, State funding of political parties, has yet to be. State funding must entail some degree of State control, which can often be necessary and beneficial. But, for political parties, it would be lethal. Only parties that met the organisational and political requirements of some committee of Notting Hill and Primrose Hill diners would be able to afford to contest elections. No wonder Polly Toynbee and the BBC are so keen on the idea.

And the same is true of PR. For one thing, I simply cannot see how it would work in rural areas, either for Parliament or, even more so, for local government. Councillors, in particular, would do absolutely nothing except drive around their vast, unwieldy wards, arriving late for everything yet always leaving early in order to arrive late for the next engagement.

Instead, in the course of every Parliament without fail, the two candidates with the most nominations from a party's branches for Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (at constituency level) or for Leader (at national level), including branches of affiliated organisations where Labour or any of its successors is concerned, should be subjected to a binding ballot of every registered voter in the constituency or the country, as the case may be.

The sort of people favoured by central machines would struggle to get on the ballot at all, and certainly wouldn't be selected. And the same is true of each party's several lunatic fringes (including the single and indivisible one currently running both Labour and the Tories, and about to take over the Lib Dems as well). But they could always then put up under their own steam and see how far they got.

And either this, or PR, or indeed any change whatever to where MPs come from, would kill off the Lib Dems practically overnight. The above system would have historically industrial areas choose totally unreconstructed Social Democrats who were who were indistinguishable from the local right-wing Labour Establishment (and might well have been in it at one time), while agricultural areas would choose totally unreconstructed Liberals who were not only indistinguishable from, but multiply related to, the local "Faith, Flag, Family and Farming" Tory Establishment.

Finally, there should also be public participation in policy formulation. In the course of each Parliament, the 10 policies most popular with each party's branches should be put out to a ballot of the whole electorate, with each of us entitled to vote for up to two, and with the top seven guaranteed inclusion in the next General Election manifesto.

Put all of this together, and it would answer any perceived need for PR, thus safeguarding the vital constituency link into the bargain.

Indeed, it would make possible the re-creation of the movement that Labour was back when it used to believe in social democracy. It did so precisely because it had profoundly conservative social and moral values, not least a strong British (and therefore also Commonwealth) patriotism focused on the institution binding together each and both of the Union and the Commonwealth. All of this was, and remains, mainstream opinion in Scotland, Wales, the North, the Midlands, and the decidedly less chi-chi parts of the South. In some such constituencies, turnout last time was as low as one in three.

So there is a huge gap to be filled by the restored party of those Labour MPs who defended the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement. By a party tough on crime because most victims are poor.

By the party of the Attlee Government, which dismissed the European Coal and Steel Community as "the blueprint for a federal state", which "the Durham miners would never wear". Of Hugh Gaitskell calling the Common Market "the end of a thousand years of history" and a threat to the unity of the Commonwealth.

By the party of ardently Unionist Labour MPs from Scotland, Wales, and their adjacent areas. Of Roy Hattersley sending British troops into Northern Ireland in order to defend the grateful Catholics there precisely as British subjects defined by their liberties under the Crown (whereas citizens are defined by their obligations to the State and to the government of the day). Of Roy Mason running Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom, with terrorism treated as a plain and simple security problem. Of Harold Wilson guaranteeing the Anguillan people’s right to be British, explicitly outside the American hegemony that had wanted to re-create there the brothels and drug dens of old Havana.

By the party of those Labour MPs (mostly Methodists) who resisted relaxation of the laws on drinking and gambling. Of those (mostly Catholics) who fought against abortion and easier divorce. Of those who voted in favour only after warning against exactly what has come to pass: abortion more common than having a tooth pulled, and one in three marriages ending in divorce.

That was the party in favour of the Welfare State, workers' rights, progressive taxation, and full employment. It dissuaded Truman from dropping an atom bomb on Korea, and it refused to send British forces to Vietnam. It opposed the Soviet Union and wider Stalinism on the same grounds, and with the same ferocity, as it opposed Fascism in the Iberian world and elsewhere, as well as apartheid South Africa and its Rhodesian satellite. It won elections on enormous turnouts and in the face of serious opposition.

Britain is crying out for just such a party today. So let's get on and build it.