This sums things up perfectly IMO
Tory members are hijacking democracy
Jenni RussellMay 30 2019, 12:01am,
A tiny and unrepresentative group of voters should not be allowed to select a prime minister
Few sentences have so infuriated me recently as Theresa Villiers’ concluding words on Radio 4’s The World at One on Tuesday. Asked who she would be backing in the Tory leadership election, the former Northern Ireland secretary refused to commit, adding in a reverential tone: “It is a huge decision to be part of picking the next prime minister of our country”.
Yes. Indeed it is. Especially when that prime minister is about to decide the most crucial issue facing the country since 1940. And yet 99.66 per cent of the electorate are denied a vote. At its heart the whole Brexit question has been about people feeling powerless and wanting more of a voice in the critical issues deciding their lives. Just as that process reaches its peak, the vast majority of us have simply been cut out.
The Tory candidates only have one electorate to win over; the completely unrepresentative sect that is today’s Conservative Party. The rest of us have been reduced to impotent spectators. We are witnessing the most staggeringly undemocratic political takeover of my lifetime.
For those arguing that this choice is no different from the earlier replacements of sitting prime ministers by their parties: it is. When Callaghan replaced Wilson, Major took over from Thatcher and Brown from Blair, those were all changes of personnel rather than policy. None of them proposed dramatically different policies from their predecessors, let alone pursued a momentous decision which would reverberate for decades and which they were too frightened to put to the public for ratification.
It is starkly different now. There is no majority in the country for a no-deal Brexit, and no mandate for it from either a referendum or election. Theresa May was never prepared to pursue it, despite her destructive reiteration of “no deal is better than a bad deal”. Yet that is what is being entertained by the leading Tory contenders, such as Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab.
If their unicorn promises of a fresh deal fail, as they will, they say they are willing to let Britain crash out of the EU at the end of October, breaking our financial commitments and wreaking extraordinary damage on jobs, trade, investment and international credibility. They can ignore the electorate because the only one that counts in the immediate future is the tiny radicalised minority within their party.
We are allowing 160,000 people who in no way reflect the country’s wishes to choose a prime minister who bows to their own extreme views. It is impossible to know exactly who those voters are, since the party guards that information jealously and refuses to release it. We know more about the makeup of the Chinese Politburo than we do of these powerbrokers.
What we do know, from research by the Economic and Social Research Council, is how unlike most voters they are in their views, age, sex and location. Three quarters are men, unlike even Tory voters as a whole, who split 50:50; 44 per cent are over 65, compared with 18 per cent of all voters; almost 60 per cent live in the south and east.
Critically they are complete outliers in their backing for no-deal. Only 35 per cent of voters in last week’s European elections backed parties explicitly pursuing no-deal. Yet almost two thirds of Tory members are thought to prefer no-deal to the withdrawal agreement. That’s why in this election the successful contestants are being driven to a political extreme. The one who opposes it on principle, Rory Stewart, knows he is running against the Tory tide.
No-deal would be a disaster. It does not mean an end to the Brexit dispute and the start of a proud independent existence, as supporters claim. It means instant turmoil and a sudden catastrophic end to the invisible arrangements that underpin our lives, as ports are blocked because free movement of goods stops, medicines run short, supermarket shelves empty of fresh goods, and the legal basis for almost two thirds of our trade collapses.
It would have us begging Brussels to agree new arrangements as businesses folded. The EU would hold all the power, and since we would have reneged on everything the UK had ever promised or negotiated, we’d have killed off every remnant of trust and goodwill.
Johnson, Raab, Esther McVey and the rest know voters don’t want this, but to triumph as PM they must ignore that fact. They are pushing the question of party electability to the back of their minds; that’s a problem far in the future. They are fighting only to maximise their individual chances of power now.
When Jeremy Hunt warned urgently this week that no-deal would be “electoral suicide” he was telling the truth. It was reported as a gaffe, because coming from a leadership contender, it is. He immediately lost some support among MPs for daring to say so. Only lies and liars, it appears, are going to triumph in this contest now.
The public are trapped by this horror show, left only with the hope that parliament and its speaker can do the job of representing the nation and find a way to block the possible imposition of a catastrophic departure. Every tool they can use to redress this undemocratic coup should be seized. But in future we the voters must demand a change in parliament’s laws, requiring that a replacement prime minister hold a general election within three months. That would force all leadership candidates to appeal to the country too. Our democracy is being hijacked. Never again.
