The French Socialist Party's presidential primary takes place today. Every registered elector may vote, and one of the candidates, Senator Jean-Michel Baylet, is not even a member of the Socialist Party, being the Leader of the Radical Party of the Left. Do not be confused by that name, it is only the more left-wing of the two successors to the old Radical Party, and it is therefore heavily concentrated in the old Radical heartlands of the South West. (What is it with South Wests and this sort of thing?)
That strikes even me as taking these things a bit too far. But in the course of each Parliament, each party should submit to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate its locally, internally determined shortlist of two for Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, just as each should submit to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate its internally determined shortlist of two for Leader.
Many a stalwart of the Council or of other aspects of the local Big Society (trade unions, co-operatives, and so on) would then beat many a Westminster Village boy or his girlfriend. And our Parliament would be infinitely better for those victories. If one party made these changes, then they would all have to.
Ed Miliband, over to you.
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Going a bit too far? But it would have suited you down to the ground.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, we do not have a presidential system in this country. Both a party's national Leader and its constituency PPC obviously do need to be party members.
ReplyDeleteI don't see why they need necessarily be party members. On the local level, think of "Lieberman for Connecticut" of which Joe Lieberman was not a member; he remained a member of the party which had rejected him in its primary and against which he was running in the general.
ReplyDeleteNationally speaking, too, the leader surely needs only to be someone whose leadership the party MPs will accept. That needn't be someone who is technically a member of the party. Arguably David Lloyd George was de facto leader of a de facto Conservative government in 1918-22, with the events of 1922 signifying the end of Conservative acceptance of that fact. Plausibly his son could have gone on to be Prime Minister instead of Macmillan, never having been a Conservative MP. He might have been more acceptable to the right than Mac, too.
Conservative Party membership used to be a much more fluid concept. But it's not now. British membership is much more clearly defined than American membership.
ReplyDeleteThe final ballot should be of all registered voters. But the shortlist of two needs to be produced by the constituency party system to which we are accustomed, of branches by ward made up of paid up members and kept going by commited activists.
We need to get back to when there were far, far more of those. But that is a different matter.