Peter Oborne For Watford?

It's a thought...

We need a ballot line system, so that voters would be able to indicate that they were voting for a given candidate specifically as endorsed by a smaller party or other campaigning organisation. Those organisations might be trade unions, co-operatives, peace and disarmament movements, civil liberties groups, or environmental campaigns. Or they might be fighting for Crown and Commonwealth, for national sovereignty, for the countryside, for traditional family life, for the Armed Forces, or against expensive and socially disruptive wars with no British strategic interest at stake. Among numerous other possibilities. Including both Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel.

The number of votes by ballot line would be recorded and published separately. If a candidate owed either success or failure to a particular campaigning organisation, whether national or local, then he would know it. And so would everyone else. Including the voter, who may not be altogether comfortable voting for a candidate endorsed by those dedicated to the overriding interest of a foreign state in general and of that state's violently anti-British minority in particular. Nor for a party, such as the Tories now are, eighty per cent of whose sitting MPs are so endorsed, which is to say bought and paid for. How is that not treason?

The Tories have not always been the party of national sovereignty; in office, they never have been since the War. But they certainly see themselves as such now. Even before Blair, Labour's record as the party of peace was patchy in practice; the Tories' was at least as good. But it certainly sees itself as such in principle. However, the truth is that if we want a body of parliamentarians who will moderate the whole process as much in the cause of national sovereignty as in those such as family values, and as much in the cause of peace as in those such as social justice, then we are going to have to contrive and confect those parliamentarians for ourselves. The existing parties are worse than a waste of time.