Removing Legislators Without Using Gunpowder

Marco Rubio for President? Come on, he would be an Affirmative Action candidate. But do the Republicans really want to become, as they have long shown signs of wanting to become, the party of illegal immigration amnesties and of the erosion of the status of English? If so, then the Democrats would doubtless be delighted both at the massive black turnout against such things and at the mass defections of blue-collar whites against them.

The Republicans seem to think that their partial success in attracting Italians who found that their local Democratic Parties were already being run by and for the Irish can be repeated with Hispanics who find that their local Democratic Parties are already being run by and for the blacks. Well, they know what they have to do. Oh, and Rubio does not come from a "refugee" community. The Cubans in Miami are economic migrants, as well as supporters of the restoration of Cuba as she existed before 1959, a drug den and brothel for the American super-rich, run by the Mafia. "Conservative"?

About as "conservative", in fact, as the thoroughly unsuccessful Tea Party, now reduced to claiming as its own successful candidates whom it had previously disowned. One of its few genuine successes was in Utah, and even there Bob Bennett would have been re-elected, and thus returned to considerable prominence in the Republican Caucus, if he had run as an Independent. Bennett, a former Mormon chaplain in the Army National Guard and married into LDS royalty, was not "conservative" enough for the Tea Party, which has also indicated its intention to go after Orrin Hatch, a Mormon bishop, in 2012.

The Tea Party's only definition of a "conservative" is a supporter of some undefined combination of zero taxation with lavish military spending, the continuation of Medicare, and the continuation of Social Security. Moral issues, conventionally defined, have nothing to do with it. For all the faults of those who put both the "Grand" and the "Old" into "Grand Old Party", thank goodness that their Tea Party enemies did so much worse than predicted or presupposed by Fox and by its London talking heads.

Closed primaries are a considerable part of the problem, as is the ban on voting in more than one open primary. We must have none of that here. Instead, each party submitted to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate its locally determined internal shortlist of two for Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. That should happen in the course of each Parliament, as a matter of routine. As should each party's submission to a binding ballot of the whole national electorate of its nationally determined internal shortlist of two for Leader.

And as should each party's submission to such a ballot of 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. We also 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.

The first of these reforms could and should be pioneered in Oldham East & Saddleworth, even if today's ruling does boggle the mind of anyone who has ever been politically active, and even if the hypocrisy of the Lib Dems, of all people, is best treated as hilarious. As to the other two parties, one has always had at constituency level a culture of deference so complete that the deselection of a sitting MP was almost always literally unthinkable, while the other, as hardly anyone seems to have noticed, has quietly reverted to the situation that obtained before the early 1980s, in which it was and is procedurally as good as impossible to deselect a sitting MP.

A safe Conservative seat has always been a meal ticket for life, while a safe Labour seat also used to be, and now is again. What is proposed here would rectify that without giving any ground to those who have been and are loudest in protesting, namely Bennites and Trotskyist entryists in the Labour Party, and Conservative Party members more than a little like the Tea Partiers who have turned out to be only marginally more electable than the Trots even in America, never mind in Britain.