In July 2009, as the open primary in Totnes was taking place, the Board of the Conservative Party was meeting to determine the rules for the future selection of parliamentary candidates.   It was a stormy meeting – the last stand in the battle to defend the rights of ordinary Party members – a battle that was lost.   The decisions taken will affect democracy in the United Kingdom for a generation.   So what happened?

Under the new rules the Party Chairman will decide whether a local Association should select its candidate by a Special General Meeting or by an Open Primary.

For each constituency a sifting meeting will be held at a place designated by the Party Chairman at which the Approved List of candidates will be reduced to six names, 50% of whom will be women.   At this meeting there will be six representatives of the local Association including its Chairman and two Deputy Chairmen.   The Party Chairman will have a veto on the six names to go forward to the next stage of Open Primary or Special General Meeting.

As from the 1^st January 2010 the Party Chairman will give an Association the names of three parliamentary candidates from which to choose their candidate.

The real impact of this is that the Party Chairman will determine Conservative candidates and consequently the Conservative Party composition in the House of Commons.   The Labour Party looks as though it is going down a similar route.   Many of the current members of the Cabinet were parachuted into their seats by the Labour Party hierarchy.   Peerage promises are seductive.   So a tiny number of people from our two main parties will determine who sits in the House of Commons and effectively form the government of this country.   Is this the way dictatorships are created without the need for bloody revolution?

So how are Open Primaries affected by these changes?   The model for Open Primaries is normally the United States.   How do Conservative Open Primaries compare?

In the United States anyone can stand.   As we have seen above, under the Conservatives, the Party Chairman decides who the candidates will be.   You can virtually guarantee that the only candidates allowed to stand are safe Conservatives.   After all they have to fight a General Election on the Conservative Party manifesto, which they have to sign up to, even though they will have no say in its composition.

In many States electors have to register support for a Party in order to vote.   With the Conservatives anyone on the Electoral Roll can vote in an Open Postal Primary or an Open Meeting Primary, even if they are members of another Party.

The candidates in the United States raise their own funds for campaigning in the primary.   The Conservative Party pays for a postal primary.   The costs in Totnes amounted to £38,000.   There are only half a dozen constituencies in the country that could afford this, so unless the Party at National level funds a postal primary it will not happen.

Campaigns in the United States are usually prolonged, giving everyone plenty of time to investigate the candidates.   The campaigns run by the Conservatives are strictly limited in time

Caucus meetings of registered voters are held in the United States at which the merits of the different candidates are debated and then voted upon.   These are banned by the Conservative Party.

A distinction should be drawn between Open Primaries where there is a postal ballot as in Totnes and Open Meeting Primaries, which are often lumped together and called Open Primaries.

The most common, because of costs, are the Open Meeting Primaries.   The Conservative Party imposes a number of restrictions on Open Meeting Primaries:

The meetings are advertised in the local paper so there is no guarantee that every elector is aware that the selection is taking place.

At the meeting no debate is allowed between the candidates – they are not even allowed to be on the platform together.

CVs of the candidates are only made available at the start of the meeting.

The elector must be present for the entire meeting and cannot leave for any reason.   Contrast this with a postal primary where the elector doesn’t have to hear any candidate before voting.

Limits are imposed by Central Office on the amount of money candidates can spend on their campaigns.

The vote on the final adoption of the selected candidate by Conservative Party members is done by a show of hands, rather than by a secret ballot, which can be intimidating, and which the Conservative government made illegal in the Trade Unions in the 1980s.

It can be seen from the above that there are major differences between what the Conservatives call Open Primaries and what in practice most people understand as Open Primaries.   The Conservative Open Primaries are a gimmick.   The media and the people have been hoodwinked by the Conservatives into believing that the process is totally open. It is not.   The process is controlled in detail by the Party hierarchy.   There is also the danger that the selection can be manipulated by the members of other parties, who can vote for the weakest candidate.   The Conservative Party does not care because it has vetted all the candidates.

There is much talk about electoral reform but when will the people “wake up and smell the coffee?”   Whatever the system of election, be it First Past The Post or Proportional Representation it becomes meaningless if the candidates are chosen by a few individuals.   Our two main political parties are wholly undemocratic organisations controlled by small oligarchies. In a democracy it is essential that the political parties are themselves democratic.   It is in a dictatorship that candidates are imposed.   “Once we had rotten boroughs, now we have a rotten parliament”.   Democracy R.I.P.

In the current climate who’d be a politician? And before you accuse me of exaggeration I’ve experienced all this and more in the last few months. And I have never been elected. Or received a penny in expenses.

Meeting the public and knocking on doors gives you a good idea of the raw anger that has been unleashed by the expenses scandal. The tiny minority who claimed that all politicians are in it for themselves are now a vocal majority. All politicians are tarred with the same brush. Politics is on the back foot. Some claim it is broken beyond repair.

Sadly there is no silver bullet when it comes to repairing the damage caused by the duck houses, dog food and phantom mortgages. But I believe if there is one measure which can help to heal this open wound it is open primaries.

Politicians are very good at talking about electoral reform but far less good at implementing it. There is no bill in the Queens speech to introduce reform of the voting system. Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposals will inevitably be watered down. The Speakers conference on parliamentary representation will be too little too late.

We need reform now which can help to rebuild the public’s trust in its elected representatives before it is too late. That means before the next election. That is why I think every politician who chooses to or is forced to stand down as a result of the expenses scandal should be replaced not by their constituency party or from a list but by an open primary.

The only really radical measure which has been adopted in recent years to change the face of the Commons is women only shortlists. And while this has resulted in a welcome increase in the number of women in Parliament it has not changed the type of politician who enters Parliament. Too many honourable members whether men or women are still career politicians or the usual suspects from the usual backgrounds.

If the Parliamentary authorities adopted open primaries we could see many more people from different backgrounds being elected to the green benches. More nurses, teachers, small business entrepreneurs, charity workers, environmental activists or soldiers. This would be good for democracy and good for our politics.

Being selected by an open primary would give a candidate a legitimacy that elected politicians now badly lack. As an environmental activist and former Greenpeace campaigner I would welcome standing in an open primary in the future. Why? Because I believe the public are far more likely to favour someone who has spent their life fighting against climate change than someone who has spend their life fighting in council meetings .

There are already encouraging signs that this may happen. In August the Tories announced the winner of the first ever open postal vote of an entire constituency in Totnes. The result was not a career politician or one of the usual suspects but a doctor, Sarah Wollaston. And if the Open Up campaign is successful others will follow.

Many big hitters in the Labour party have recently shown their support for open primaries. They include Ken Livingstone, who has backed them to elect the next mayor of London and the Tottenham MP David Lammy, who has called for them in every London borough. The foreign secretary, David Miliband and his brother Ed have also backed the cause, arguing the case in cabinet as part of the answer to the cynicism surrounding politics and falling party membership.

For open primaries to really engage with the electorate, political parties cannot just use them as convenient way of deflecting public anger, to be quietly dropped when the heat dies down. Primaries need to be built into our political system as one the surest ways of reconnecting the public with politicians. But they come at a cost. The open primary in Totnes cost the Tories about £40,000 to organise, good reason some critics claim why we can’t afford them.

But in the greater scheme of things this seems a small price to pay to regain the public’s trust and participation in politics. Building the cost of open primaries into future discussions about the state funding of political parties and election campaigns is the way forward in the longer term. In the shorter term why not fund them out of the expenditure saved from changes to the expenses system and from the money given back from those discredited by the scandal?

Think of the difference it could make.

Listened to. Actively engaged in the high street. Treated with respect on the doorstep.

www.kenilworthlabour.org

Baroness Helena Kennedy is a barrister, broadcaster, Chair of Power2010 and Labour member of the House of Lords.

“The only way to download power is by rebalancing the system towards the people. This is the agenda. Now we need the political will.”

I read back these words I wrote three years ago with mixed feelings. Back then, the idea that our greatest democratic institution, the Houses of Parliament, could be so publicly disgraced by something so base as the expenses scandal, could not have been further from my thoughts. And yet even now, after we have seen the dirty laundry bills of our supposed representatives so thoroughly aired in public, I sense there is still no political will for reform within Westminster. Sir Christopher Kelly’s report, published last week, only goes to show how far real change is from most of our elected representatives’ agendas. Hunker down, they mutter, take the flak, and it will be business as usual soon. I hope – and believe – they are wrong.

I wrote those words as a Foreword to the Power Inquiry into Britain’s democracy. As chair of the inquiry, I was privileged to travel the length and breadth of the country, listening to the views of ordinary people disengaged and distant from our democratic institutions. That inquiry exploded the myth of voter apathy. Britain’s citizens – who volunteer in their communities, who run marathons for charity, who regularly donate their savings to the world’s destitute, who take part in Red Nose days and Children in Need with ingenuity and aplomb – stay away from the ballot box not because they can’t be bothered to vote, but because they don’t see the point. Despite living in an era when choice is the dominant political mantra, when it comes to election day, most British people are offered no real choice at all.

True to form, the party leaders made a big show of welcoming the Inquiry’s recommendations to redistribute power before booting them into the long grass when they thought they could get away with it. Several years on, with our democracy in an even more perilous state, it is clear that we must look to the people, and not politicians, for the change that’s needed.

It’s with this in mind that we set up Power-2010, a campaign to take forward the spirit of the Power Inquiry and change the next Parliament using the strength of concerted public action. What is different about Power2010 is that there is no agenda. We’re not asking the public to back our goals. We’re asking the public to create them. Over the months before the general election we are going to build this public agenda for changing politics and stage a mass popular “vote” for the five reforms people most want to see the next Parliament carry through. This is the Power2010 Pledge; a public commitment that every candidate standing at the next election will be asked to make.

When we published the results of the Inquiry in 2006, we did not back open primaries. I still have concerns about them – that they may be hijacked by big media or big money if proper safeguards were not in place. But these are not insurmountable concerns, and over the past few months, I have come to believe that for the next general election, open primaries would serve an important cleansing purpose.

Open primaries would allow those MPs who feel they have been swept up unfairly into a scandal in which they played no role to obtain a refreshed and solid mandate from those whom they seek to represent. And open primaries would also allow constituents represented by those MPs who do have a case to answer to seek for themselves new voices to represent them.

The present crisis in our democracy has provoked a number of popular initiatives for reform and this is to be welcomed. From experience we know that politicians and party leaders can be counted upon to mount a furious resistance to anything which threatens their power and privileges.  This can be overcome. But only if all those who want a new politics work together for change.

If you back the Open Up campaign and think open primaries are the key to political renewal then you can submit them as your idea at Power2010 and then vote for them for the pledge. If there’s another reform you’d like to see happen you can suggest that too – it’s up to you.

Our society has changed dramatically since the two parties that continue to dominate British politics were originally conceived. Their policies – inasmuch as they can be distinguished from one another – no longer reflect the concerns of ordinary British people. What’s needed is space for new political alliances, new value systems to emerge.  But this won’t happen until the incumbent party managers loosen their grip on the British people. They will only do so if pushed by a movement of demanding citizens.

John Jackson is chairman of Mishcon de Reya

It is our political parties that have become a necessity in, but also the kidnappers of, our representative democracy. And it is they that are leading us headlong towards the collapse of public confidence in our parliamentary system. They are doing this, as they have for some time, in three main ways.

They exercise substantial control of parliamentary candidacy by deciding at central or local level who is allowed to put themselves up for election as representatives of constituencies.

They are the self-appointed guardians of the rule that all holders of ministerial positions sit in one of the two houses of Parliament and are members of (or, in rare cases, supporters of) “the party”.

They make clear to “their” MPs (via the whipping system and other more subtle pressures) that the realisation of any ambition to have a political career including ministerial office is dependent on supporting “their” government and not “rocking the boat”.

By these means the political parties have captured our freedoms and largely destroyed the notions that Government should be subject to the control of Parliament and that Parliament should consist of the people’s representatives freely elected. We are, in effect, forced to vote for a party which will create the next government with our MPs reduced substantially to cannon fodder in relation to national matters and encouraged to focus on “constituency matters”. Test this by asking your MP two questions, one relating to a purely local matter and the other to a national matter. You will get a prompt response to the former but, very likely, will have to wait for a response to the latter until someone on the MP’s staff has checked with “central office” what the party line is.

No wonder that Parliament has become a rather self important cosy club in which intelligent people, forced to engage in a ritualistic death dance with its own arcane rules, are exposed to the temptation of taking concealed reward for accepting a largely frustrating and intellectually sterile role in life. Hardly the centre of a people’s democracy! This is not what those who have fought for our liberty over the centuries, and particularly in the 17th century (not so long ago!), intended.

There is a little known event which started us on the path to domination by political parties and the mess they have got us into.

The Act of Settlement of 1701, best known for securing the occupancy of our throne in protestant hands, was also intended to be the final nail hammered into the coffin of royal executive supremacy by the parliamentarians. Following on from the thinking underlying our Bill of Rights – the expression of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – the Act of Settlement laid down the principle that no person with an office under the Crown (i.e. no minister) could be capable of serving as a member of the House of Commons. Since the House of Commons already had secured control of “supply” (money needed by government to carry out its policies) this principle was designed to ensure that Government was not only separate from Parliament but also controlled by a Parliament with the means of quickly and directly imposing its will.

That provision of the Act of Settlement was to come into force on the (protestant) Hanoverian succession but long before that happened it was changed in 1705 into a provision that only the holders of offices created after that year could be barred from being MPs. Since all the great offices of state already existed, this change neutered what the parliamentarians wanted.

Had the provision in the Act of 1701 stood, no ministers would have been in and able to manipulate the House of Commons. There would have been no party whips controlled by ministers and no members on the payroll of ministers and “expected” to vote with government – the payroll vote. What would have been the consequence of this? One possibility is that we would have moved to the structure adopted by the rebelling American colonies later in the century with the head (Mr President) of an appointed executive (the ministers) elected separately from the legislature. A true and democratic separation of the powers!

Who pushed for the change of 1705? Surprise! Surprise! It was the emerging political class already organising themselves into the political parties which were to become the Tories (the King’s party) and the Whigs (the large landowners’ party). Those politicians, with deeply undemocratic instincts, saw and seized the opportunity to take the power which the parliamentarians had wrenched from the Crown. And by ensuring that sufficient of them were embedded in the House of Commons they could claim that they had democratic legitimacy (”we have been elected”) and ensure that those with political ambition were required to become first a member of a House of Commons which they substantially controlled.

This was the essence of what they (in horse racing parlance “the nobblers”) did and was precisely contrary to what parliamentarians had fought and died for. It was a dreadful defeat and ensured both that Parliament, representing the people, would have a very limited control of Government and that we would only ever have a pale shadow of a truly representative democracy. The situation was made worse by the cynical use the Tories (the King’s Party) made of the remaining royal prerogative to create peers (who could be ministers also) and obtain control of the “upper house”. This eventually caused a series of constitutional crises culminating in the curbing of the Peers’ powers nearly one hundred years ago and a “promise”, still not kept, by the political parties to reform the House of Lords.

The political parties have not served the cause of democracy and “we the people” well. They could have done much better – and would have done – had their leaders been less interested in the power that goes with governing us and more interested in helping us to govern ourselves. The right thing for them – the parties and their leaders – to do is to support the cause of popular reform and start by liberating our elected representatives. The primaries route for which Open Up is campaigning is a very attractive way of doing just that.

It is my hope that Open Up, and other reforming campaigns such as Power 2010 which have derived much energy from the hugely successful Convention on Modern Liberty, will succeed. A truly reforming House of Commons consisting of independently minded members should consider carefully why the creators of our Glorious Revolution wanted Government separate and excluded from our Parliament – a Parliament with the last word. I believe that those creators were right and that we should fight for what they wanted. Whether the politicians and their parties like it or not it is time for us, we the people, to become parliamentarians again. This time we must win and make our victory permanent.

Professor Bogdanor is professor of government at Oxford University.

Question: Primaries sound good but I have a doubt. If in the general apathy of politics people are not moved to vote for anybody other than the major parties, why are they going to energise themselves to think about who they would vote for in a primary? People tend to complain about politicians but they do not find out enough about the non-aligned candidates to know who to vote for. Independents only ever get elected for niche reasons.

Professor Bogdanor: The evidence from the primary for the Conservative candidates for the London mayor and the Parliamentary candidate in Totnes is that sufficient people will turn out to vote to make the exercise worthwhile. As they come to be accepted, primaries could well increase interest and turnout when ordinary people appreciate that their votes will make a difference.

Question: Won’t open primaries vastly lengthen and increase the expense of the electoral process, and make life more difficult for minority parties, independents and candidates from disadvantaged circumstances? Won’t they increase the problems surrounding campaign funding, many of which are evident from the US system?

Professor Bogdanor: To avoid this outcome, I think there should be a spending cap administered by the Electoral Commission.

Question: Could open primaries lead to a further entrenched two-party system, where the largest parties become the easiest option for those seeking to enter politics, to the detriment of pluralism and diversity; and the smaller parties find it impossible to compete, having insufficient candidates to make primaries feasible?

Professor Bogdanor: The truth is that nobody knows. The most likely outcome is that it will increase enthusiasm for democracy and so help all parties.

Question: Open primaries are an American idea that was designed to solve specific issues with the political process in the USA. In the US they don’t have the same organised political structures that exist and campaign all year round. Instead they come together around elections and focus on candidates rather than parties. That’s partially because of the clear division in the US constitution between the executive, legislature and judiciary. In the UK we don’t have a written constitution that makes that split. We vote for the party that will form the government. Open primaries in the US were also partially a response to the graft and corruption associated with Tammany Hall politics. We don’t have the same issues in the UK, so the open primaries solution won’t fix it.

Professor Bogdanor: I agree with the excellent description of the American political system here. The problem in Britain is, admittedly, different: that of the safe seat e.g. Macclesfield, which has elected just two MPs since 1945, both Conservative. Open primaries can help to give voters a say in choosing candidates in safe seats. Otherwise, the MP is in effect chosen by a small party caucus.

Question: Wouldn’t it be better if we kept the shortlisting stage inside political parties, that way, we could make sure all candidates had at least signed up to the party’s manifesto and loyal voters could maintain their confidence that the candidate they eventually voted for was one who shared their values?

Professor Bogdanor: Surely, the wider the participation of ordinary voters the better? Voters are perfectly able to judge for themselves whether or not candidates share their values.

Question: How do we stop people gaming the system?

Professor Bogdanor: It was argued before the primary for the London mayor and for the Totnes Parliamentary candidature that voters would game the system. That did not happen. There will always be a few people who may try to do this. But most people will be grateful for the opportunity to help choose their Parliamentary candidate.

Question: Should there be a maximum set for how many people can stand in a primary?

Professor Bogdanor: Yes, perhaps.

Question: What about smaller parties? Should they have open primaries too? Won’t their comparative lack of funding put them at a disadvantage?

Professor Bogdanor: Yes, smaller parties should have open primaries too. The question of whether they will be at a disadvantage raises the whole issue of whether there should be state funding of political parties, on which views legitimately differ.

Question: Is there any evidence that open primaries will lead to better government?

Professor Bogdanor: “Better government” is in part a subjective matter. Open primaries will lead to more participation and therefore better democracy.

Heather Brooke won a High Court battle for the publication of MPs’ expense claims. She runs the blog www.yrtk.org

Democracy is made up of an informed electorate.

It sounds simple but let me deconstruct this. We need information to be informed and we need the ability to exercise our vote in a meaningful way to be a valid electorate. In the current set up we get neither and thus we cannot honestly call the UK a democracy.

Our public servants hoard information with a stubbornness last seen when Charlton Heston addressed the National Rifle Association saying the day he’d give up his gun was the day it was prised from his cold, dead hands. It was about that difficult prising from MPs their expense receipts.

Part of the reason I battled for the release of MPs’ expense claims was that I believed the public had every right to be informed about how their elected officials were spending public money in the course of their public duties. I wasn’t seeking state secrets, just expenses which can only be claimed “wholly, necessarily and exclusively in discharging their duties as Members”.  However, MPs and their civil servants thought such transparency was beyond the pale and they spent even more public money fighting for four years to stop me.

I remember sitting in an Information Tribunal hearing back in February 2008 listening to Andrew Walker the head of the Fees Office trying to explain to my lawyer how he thought constituents could in any way be making an informed voting decision about their MP when they lacked the most basic information about their MPs accountability.

“MPs should be allowed to carry on their duties free from interference,” he told us.   There you have it – you pesky constituents – in the world of Parliament you are an annoying interference getting in the way of the important business of being an MP. He honestly seemed to think that voting once every five years for someone pre-selected and without even the most basic information was enough.

It’s not. Not by a long shot. We need public bodies to understand they work for us and the information they collect in our name and at our expense belongs to us not them. Only then can we make any kind of informed decision.

Now that we’ve seen what lay behind MPs’ cries of ‘privacy’ and ‘security’ we are in a much better position when it comes time to casting our votes. That so many MPs have chosen to stand down reveals that what they’ve done will not stand up to public scrutiny.

But will we get the new kind of MPs we want to see: A new generation of technically savvy candidates committed to the people and not a political party? That’s unclear because unless the system of choosing political candidates is changed it’s just the same old favouritism and patronage that parachutes people from the strategy unit to a safe seat.

Currently candidates are selected not because they’ve built up a reputation as leaders in particular constituencies or proven themselves as sound leaders of merit, but because they’ve sucked up to the right politically powerful people. These people then give them the nod and the MP is put forward to be voted on by a tiny, totally unrepresentative party elite. As it was the party that put the MP in position, it is to the party to whom the MP is ultimately loyal. If we want MPs to work for us then it must be us who selects them. We need a role in the selection of candidates. That’s why I’m supporting the campaign to hold open primaries for all MPs.

I have one final suggestion for reform. Publish all party whips. These are the party’s instructions to all their MPs telling them how to vote. A one-line whip offers a suggestion on how to vote but a three-line whip is an outright threat and if the MP rebels his career will effectively be over.

Reform in a nutshell: freedom of information, open primaries and publishing the party whip. If we get that right then we might actually get MPs working for us and not political party bosses.