More wiki-politics - the Totnes Open Primary

At 12:30 tomorrow, we'll hear who is going to be the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Totnes in the first every proper open primary contest in Britain. 

Allowing everybody who lives in Totnes to decide who gets to be the Conservative party candidate is a major step towards open source politics and direct democracy.

You mean non-Conservatives and people who don't even vote Tory get to decide the Tory candidate?  Yep - everyone.

Won't that allow anti-Conservatives to sabotage the result?  Not at all.  The party still decides who gets to be on the short-list.  And if lots of non-Conservative voters turn out to vote for the winner during the primary, all the evidence is that they're then far more likely to back that person in the General Election.

But why join a party if everyone has a say?  Party members still do get a say.  And evidence suggests that democratic selection contests actually draw new people into party politics and re energises the grass roots. 

So who loses out?  Rival party candiates selected by only a tiny number of people.  Old-style party politics.  And, best of all, the all-powerful Westminster whipping system.  

With around 7 out of 10 MPs coming from "safe seats", at present Westminster Whips can have a greater impact on an MPs career trajectory than local voters.  But introduce open primary contests to decide who gets to be the candidate in the first place, and local voters will start to count for more. 

Open primaries will mean more independent-minded citizen law-makers, and fewer professional politicians and party yes-men.

UPDATE:  Newsnight's Michael Crick is suggesting over 10,000 voters may have taken part in the open primary ballot.  If true, that is a stonking result - and a victory for direct democracy!

Posted on 3 August 2009 by Douglas Carswell

Comments

It would be better if the people of Totnes could choose who they wanted not from a shortlist but from a list of people that wanted to stand and that there were votes for and against and then a final shortlist and the final primary.

Then everyone could have a go.

as it is you have to vote for the alternatives put before you which isnt much of a choice....

Posted on 3 August 2009 16:32 by Rohen Kapur

Up to a point Mr. C. But, as I understand it, the list of candidates at the open primary is drawn up by Central Office. Surely the local party should be able to nominate a couple of candidates without outside interference.

Posted on 3 August 2009 17:26 by wonderfulforhisage

Primaries for sitting MPs too then? That could be trickier. Maybe on an MP's blog it would be tactless to give examples.

Posted on 3 August 2009 19:15 by John Page

@ wonderfulforhisage

Nah, too dangerous they may pick someone who belongs to BOO, or who doesn't believe in scamming the public over global warming, or won't support the 50p tax rate.

They want "Tories" not democratic, free market, libertarian, freedom lovers

Posted on 3 August 2009 20:12 by Paul

Have just read a story on coffeehouse about North Yorkshire police dressing up in burkas and pretending to be muslim women, supposedly to understand what muslim women feel like....
left a comment to the effect that what is needed is directly elected police chiefs, so that the people of North Yorkshire can tell these police exactly what they think of this total waste of police time and taxpayers' money.
Keep up the good work, Mr. C.
ps how's that baby doing?

Posted on 3 August 2009 20:23 by Elizabeth Elliot-Pyle

wfha points out a basic flaw, and I suspect that we haven't seen the fall-out from Dudley North yet.
By the way, I'm looking forward to the very open primary for Buckingham. I do hope that they're all working away at that;)

Posted on 3 August 2009 20:50 by Mike Spilligan

Shouldn't open primaries logically be the end of deliberately single sex shortlists, as the voters will be able to choose? Or will the prim doctrinaire misses want to subvert democracy?

Posted on 4 August 2009 10:53 by John Page

This is a carefully culcated choice for Totnes, which is subject to boundary changes and incldes parts of Torbay, where UKIP had it's best vote share in the Euro - Elections:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/table/2009/jun/09/european-elections-elections-2009

There are other issues:

http://quietzapple-musing.blogspot.com/

This was a tactical decision, and the back room boys who work for Ashcroft, who reputedly has a larger office at Tory HQ than Cameron may well have been involved in the decision to go for the primary.

It may well be a moot point whether the £40,000 initiates the campaign from the point of view of Tory expenditures, which must be kept within the legal limits and declared after the election.

Posted on 4 August 2009 22:36 by Quietzapple

Douglas wrote: "Open primaries will mean more independent-minded citizen law-makers, and fewer professional politicians and party yes-men."

Not sure this would be true. In the Totnes Constituency your party shredded appx 97 applications before leaving the leaders of the two local Councils to fight it out with the obvious shoe in from such a list of 3.

How this was done is not explicit, and obviously critical.

Should the Executive Committee of any party wish to run a primary as successfully as yours in marginal and confused Totnes then they should ensure lots of early applicants, to include a couple of almost invariably loathed local government geeks/ex RSMs, and a lovely lady/young turk who says she/he knows little about politics but will give the voters what they want, and put the latter on the selection ballot with 2 of the former.

No particular reason to believe the third candidate really, but by comparison with the others . . ?

Bingo!

http://quietzapple-musing.blogspot.com/

Posted on 6 August 2009 11:07 by Quietzapple

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