Two Into One Won't Go

Heaven protect us from party lists. The Alternative Vote is no solution. And STV for multimember constituencies may be deadly to the Lib Dems (its introduction for local government in Scotland caused their number of councillors there to go down), but it can only really work in very urban areas, and the usual claims made for it are totally false.

Are there no seats for life in the Irish Republic? Are there no dynasts? Does every party fight - not just contest, but really fight - every seat? Never mind the absurd claim that voters would be given the choice among candidates from the same party who represented that party's various wings, factions and tendencies. As if that would happen in Britain today. All the candidates from all three main parties would be exactly the same, not just in the same constituency, but in every constituency.

Yet we urgently need electoral reform such as will, among other things, revive the destroyed one of the Two Labour Parties, and save the one of the Two Conservative Parties that is on the brink of being destroyed, both victims of the centralised candidate selection process and of the fact that most seats only ever really become vacant due to death or retirement. At least until the expenses furore, when, exactly, did you last hear of a sitting MP's deselection? I am not suggesting that it should be routine. But it really should happen a bit more often than never, or than only when there is the biggest financial scandal in living memory.

Once upon a time, there were the Two Labour Parties. One was Marxist, indeed probably the single broadest Marxist party in the world. The other was Old Labour, an expression of the Methodist social conscience and of Catholic Social Teaching, powerfully open to mutualism from one of those streams and to Distributism from the other.

In its redemption of the legacy of Keynes and Beveridge, Old Labour saw nothing wrong in strong support for the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy.

On that basis, it really did deliver the Welfare State, workers' rights, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation (not environmentalism), fair taxation, full employment, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and, albeit up to an insufficient point, a base of real property from which every household could resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. The Marxists duly hated it.

And there were the Two Conservative Parties. One was Tory: agrarian, socially conservative, staunchly Christian (especially Protestant, and most especially Anglican in England and Wales, Presbyterian in Scotland), patriotic, highly cautious about intervention abroad, at least sceptical about American influence, pro-Commonwealth, and Arabist if anything in relation to the Middle East.

The other was Whig: capitalist, libertarian, broadly or strongly secular, globalist, committed to making the world anew even at the barrel of a gun, uncritically supportive of America when defined in those terms, scornful of the Commonwealth, and ferociously Zionist in the original sense of secular Ashkenazi nationalist.

The Tories supported exactly as much State action as was necessary in their preferred causes. So did the Whigs. But the Tories made no bones about it, whereas the Whigs insisted that they were anti-State. They therefore had very different attitudes towards those who worked in or otherwise depended on State action. Other than, of course, State action that benefited Whigs.

The Two Labour Parties and the Two Conservative Parties were both marriages of convenience in circumstances long since vanished. But most people thought of them as old-fashioned marriages, in that they might one day end in murder, but never divorce. Such has indeed turned out to have been the case.

Following academic Marxism in changing the means while leaving the ends intact, the Marxist Labour Party has overthrown the Old Labour Party, excluding it from parliamentary selection and disenfranchising its huge electorate. Meanwhile, the Whigs have done the same to the Tories. To cut several long stories short, there is little or no political difference between the two monolithic parties thus created, but very little popular support for their shared principles and policies.

Whereas there is huge popular support for the many principles and policies common to Old Labour and the Tories, and perhaps considerable popular support for the principles and policies particular to each of them, although I sincerely struggle to see what those are or might be. Yet there is no way of voting accordingly.

For the time being, we must organise candidates of our own within the system as it exists. But what system would best serve the re-emergence of real voter choice on a permanently guaranteed basis, and why?