People Power

Jon Cruddas is not going to stand after all. His is now the most sought after endorsement. What will be its price? But his clout would have been even greater if David Lammy's much-maligned plan to give the electorate at large one quarter of the votes in the Electoral College had been in place, where it cannot be put in time for this contest.

However, why stop there? In the course of each Parliament, each of the new parties that electoral reform will thankfully call into being in place of the twentieth century's leftovers will need to submit to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate its locally determined internal shortlist of two for Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. And it will need to submit to a binding ballot of the whole national electorate its nationally determined internal shortlist of two for Leader.

Each of those parties should also submit to such a national ballot the 10 policies proposed by the most of its branches, with each voter entitled to vote for up to two, and with the top seven guaranteed inclusion in the subsequent General Election manifesto. And we need a ballot line system, such 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, with the number of votes by ballot line recorded and published separately.

Where these ideas for candidate selection and for Leadership Elections were concerned, the Lib Dems, who will be the first to go as a result of the abandonment of First Past The Post, would probably argue that they could not afford to hold them, although that argument does not really stand up, whether from them or from anyone else. But it is striking, and not a little baffling, that the loudest objections on the Labour side come from the strongest supporters of trade union links, even though by no means all trade unionists are or ever have been Labour supporters, while the loudest objections on the Conservative side come from those who, whether or not one might happen to agree with them, would argue most keenly that theirs was the party of the national interest rather than of any narrower sectional interest.

As a swansong both for their parties and for the House of Lords, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are each planning to create around one hundred new Peers. In each of the 99 units that are the English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh preserved counties and the Northern Irish counties (the Lib Dems could hook up with the Alliance Party for this purpose), they should compile a shortlist of two candidates chosen by and from among local members, present it to a ballot of the whole electorate, and secure the ennoblement of the 198 successful candidates.