Primary Colours To The Mast

Those who argue that primaries would be crashingly expensive, well, where is Lord Levy or the Lord Ashcroft when you need him? And anyway, these need not be postal ballots. Electoral registers are easy to obtain, and political parties already have them. These ballots could be conducted like other elections, with ballot boxes at polling stations. The main cost would then be room hire, assuming that the local party did not already own or have the use of anywhere suitable.

And Peter Hitchens, the solution to “welfare sponging” is full employment, mass benefit dependency being an invention of the Thatcher years, of which you are rightly a trenchant critic.

You also want primaries that could be won by supporters of traditional marriage and opponents of mass immigration. In that case, you should be advocating such elections for Labour in the North of England, the West of Scotland and South Wales, as well as for the Lib Dems in rural Scotland and elsewhere. You are right to place no hope in the super-cushioned Tories of the super-liberal South.