How Tory Party Members were Misled!

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Did the members get a vote on the election of William Hague as leader?

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 It may surprise some, but a confirmation vote was held.   

Tory Democracy - Is the Establishment starting to fight back?

 Article published on conservativehome.com:

The Conservative Democratic Organisation. Sensible reformers – or rightist Bennites?

 December 12, 2022 | Henry Hill |Tory Diary

Constitutional debates are difficult things to conduct in the proper spirit, for a couple of reasons.

First, the stakes are almost always high. You are, after all, talking about the very rules by which the game is played. Opportunities to tilt the playing field abound.

Second, it can be very difficult to maintain the proper differentiation between questions of means, the proper stuff of a constitution, and questions of ends. Bloodless discussions about the best mechanisms for collective decision-making and governance can get short-circuited by more interesting debates about how to get the specific outcomes you want.

As Zachary Spiro recently outlined this is most obvious in Gordon Brown’s proposals for overhauling the United Kingdom, which would simply bake Labour’s principles and policy objectives into constitutional rights, with all sorts of woeful implications.

But the tendency is just as obvious in the internal disputes of political parties. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, an enthusiastic participant in the Opposition’s debilitating civil war in the 1980s, made no secret that its various demands for changes to the Party Constitution were entirely in aid of bringing the whole organisation under left-wing control.

No doubt Peter Cruddas and Priti Patel would resent their new outfit, the Conservative Democratic Organisation, being compared to the Bennites of yesteryear.

But whatever high-minded concerns about the internal mechanisms of the party may have spurred them to action, there hasn’t been any effort to hide the fact that it is also animated by a distaste for the left of the Party (which apparently includes Rishi Sunak now) in general, and enduring loyalty to Boris Johnson in particular.

There’s nothing wrong with being a Hiroo Onoda in a good cause, if you think the former Prime Minister’s is such. But such a spirit of the enterprise is unlikely to build the sort of broad consensus needed to actually secure the changes the CDO is seeking, which would require a two-thirds vote of the National Convention.

(I obviously write as someone who was extremely critical of Cruddas’ effort to shoehorn Johnson onto the leadership ballot. But it is worth the CDO remembering, before they cite the toppling of Truss as evidence of the Party’s “contempt” for members, that our survey suggests the grassroots thought she was right to resign – and would have then backed Sunak. 

This divisive stance is a shame, because there is a strong case for overhauling the Party’s internal procedures. John Strafford, the founder of the long-standing Campaign for Conservative Democracy – the existence of which lends the CDO a slightly People’s Front of Judea-ish edge –  wrote on this site how the members’ vote for the leader was a consolation prize after the grassroots surrendered meaningful control over the organisation at large in the late 1990s.

There is plenty of scope for disagreement on what those changes should be. William Atkinson suggested letting members elect the Chair of the Board, which controls Party funds and could ensure long-term investment in building the membership and developing promising seats, rather than throwing everything at this cycle’s marginals. (Our panellists weren’t keen.)

 Cruddas instead wants them to elect the Party Chairman, who’s main role is setting election strategy. The utility of this is less obvious – the imperative of winning the next election dominates CCHQ’s thinking as it is, and members seem unlikely to ever elect a candidate who doesn’t make that their priority.

As for more local control over candidate selections, it would certainly be good to see the end of CCHQ imposing one-member shortlists or expecting a local association to select a candidate they only just met.

But there would likely still need to be some capacity for the centre to find space for candidates who are, for want of a better term, government-minded; the accelerating tendency for hyper-local candidates and MPs who act like councillors has not, so far, turned out to be a recipe for effective use of public office at a national level.

We should also be wary of moves to replace representative with direct democracy inside the Party. CDO’s proposal to replace the national convention with a general meeting could easily end up favouring the time-rich and highly engaged few over the general membership.

Finally, we should make sure that any changes are not conducted in the Bennite spirit. As I argued during the leadership contests, there are hard limits to the proper role of “party democracy” in a representative democracy.

A party exercising democratic control over who it nominates for Parliament is all very well. But once elected those people are representatives, not delegates. The idea that members should be able to overrule Conservative MPs on the question on questions of confidence in the prime minister, previously floated by some now involved in the CDO, should be rejected in the strongest possible terms.

Alas, the CDO website lists amongst their aims “Retaining and Reinforcing the Party Membership’s democratic right to choose the Party Leader” (my emphasis, their capitals). For those who would defend MPs proper independence in a parliamentary democracy, it may be time to do a little reading.

 

Launch of the Conservative Democratic Organisation - Complete Article.

 The complete article as published in the Sunday Express Online 11 December 2022

22:00, Sat, Dec 10, 2022, | UPDATED: 10:16, Sun, Dec 11, 2022

The coronation of Sunak as PM ended faith in the Tory MPs - members must take back control

The appointment, or ‘coronation', of Rishi Sunak as British Prime Minister, without a vote being cast by Conservative Party members, and just a month after Sunak was rejected in a comprehensive member voting process has finally ended members' faith in any party democracy existing within the Conservative Party.

By LORD CRUDDAS, AND DAVID CAMPBELL BANNERMAN

As one member aptly put it: “There’s a deficit in party democracy, what they’ve said is we want your money, your time, and resources but we don’t want your opinion. After 40 years, I’m out. I won’t vote and I won’t forgive.”

The members’ vote led to many MPs rigging the voting process so that neither candidate was put to members for a vote – Boris had 102 and Mordaunt 98 – with media reports of threats and incentives to MPs supporting non-Sunak candidates to switch taking place all weekend before the vote.

Some of these MPs are reported even to be crowing over how successfully they blocked party members from having any say.

It is extraordinary to agree with the Daily Mirror when its front page asks: ‘Who Voted For You?’ and the Scottish Daily Record concluding this was the ‘Death of Democracy’.

It is the influence of these MPs that has robbed members of a vote on the Leader – which is hailed in membership literature as a right: saying ‘choosing candidates and vote in leadership elections - you can choose the people you want to represent you.’ This for an unwise hike in membership fees of 55% - to £39.

With the loss of a real say over MP selections, and now the Party Leader, and Party Conferences losing the ability to meet Ministers and influence policy through debates and resolutions, the ‘product offering’ of party membership is fast dying out.  

Membership has fallen from 500,000 when the new 1998 Constitution was introduced to 172,000 members who voted in the 2022 Leadership election.

That figure itself had been boosted when Boris Johnson became Leader and is now falling fast.

The 56 percent rise in the cost of membership announced earlier this week will undoubtedly reduce membership numbers even further.  

Members are overwhelmingly feeling ignored, steamrollered, and held in utter contempt by party leaders – feeling that their views count for nothing; and yet MPs expect them to do most of the work at elections.

This is a natural consequence of the demolition by CCHQ (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) of lines of communication between the members and the Parliamentary Party since that 1998 Party Constitution was enacted by William Hague. All the checks and balances which existed prior to 1998 were abolished.

It is little wonder now that a huge number of resignations have followed – the Telegraph suggesting at least one fifth of members left.

The member cancelling page on the Party’s website crashed. Comment groups are still alive with angry members resigning and attacking the lack of democracy.  

The constitutional expert and party democracy campaigner John Strafford helped draft the 1998 Constitution, but saw the democratic elements subsequently removed. He also wrote the Conservative Women’s Organisation (CWO) constitution.

A dismayed Mr Strafford explains that the situation today is that “the Chairman and Treasurer of the Party are appointed by the Leader so are unaccountable to the membership; there is no Annual General Meeting of members, so there is no formal forum for members to raise questions about the Party’s organisation, and the annual accounts are not tabled for approval at an AGM.”

“Selection of parliamentary candidates is controlled centrally, and the Party Board can take control of any constituency association which does not toe the line – and has done so. Basically, the Conservative Party is now a self-perpetuating oligarchy.”

But the solution is not for party members to create yet another new party, in an increasingly crowded field; especially when in a first-past-the-post system such parties are lucky to reach one per cent or two per cent vote share; and tend to win no seats.  

Instead, loyal Conservative Party members should come together to create – or indeed recreate – a truly democratic Conservative Party.

This is best done by a return to the successful pre-1998 model of a National Union of independent democratic Conservative Associations, to whom a smaller Central Office reports, and the end of the centralising 1998 Party Constitution, which has brought in excessive centralised control and social engineering at the expense of merit and democracy.

It is time for ordinary Conservative Party members to ‘take back control’. That is why we are establishing the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), a new membership organisation to revitalise the current Conservative Party, shape its future values and structure and, crucially, eliminate its serious democratic failings.  

Over the next few months, we will begin the formation of independent CDO Conservative associations across the UK and launch a new Party Constitution to propose to the Conservative Party.

David Campbell Bannerman is the Chairman of The Freedom Association

Our proposals include:  

Directly electing the roles of Conservative Party Chairman, Deputy Chairman, Treasurer, Chairman of the Candidates Committee and Chairman of the Policy Forum.

Giving constituency associations the right to determine who their Conservative parliamentary candidate is with minimum interference by CCHQ. This includes both selecting and deselecting candidates.  

Scrapping the National Convention and replacing it with a General Meeting of the Party. This will stop the Party hierarchy from rubber stamping decisions.

The Spring Conference becoming a Policy Conference, located in a more affordable place, where Ministers would listen to members’ ideas on policies in their subject area, selected by motions submitted through local associations, as used to be standard.

The full October Party Conferences should be restored to their original glory, with the membership back in control, including motions for debates and votes.  

The Conservative Party is the most successful political party in the world. We do not need to replace it with a new centre-right party.

We need to revitalise it and reposition it back where it belongs - representing core conservative values. This is only possible by long overdue, serious, revolutionary reform of the way the Party functions.

Danger Signs for the Tory Party

 Daily Telegraph 9 December 2022

Tory MPs - Prospects not looking good!

Click on BBC 5 December 2022

Tory MPs weigh up prospects of another five years in Parliament.

Tory Democracy Episode 2: The Major Years - the rot sets in!

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As the Tory party moved towards a Party Constitution democracy was under threat.