“is the 14th person to be picked to fill one of the safe seats that have just come vacant (with eight more currently to go)”.

As noted by Glover, 38%  of these new candidates are women, three are doctors (one chosen just ahead of a teacher) and the final two run businesses. Only one of the new influx of Tory candidates went to Eton. Has the stereotypical upper-class, very wealthy, aloof Tory been replaced by:

“ local, middle income, probably state educated and quite possibly employed in the public sector, with a record of voluntary work and a deep-seated distrust of the central state and the European Union”?

As the Conservatives seek to win a solid majority in the General Election, open primaries are proving to provide a breath of fresh air, not only to the Conservative party, but also to the state of British politics

Glover endorses the Conservative policy of directing candidate selection as being responsible for the “change” of future MPs.

“The 38-year-old mother-of-two secured 4,892 votes, or 38.6%. James Bethell, a venture capitalist based in London, came second with 2,965 votes. Sam Gyimah, an entrepreneur, came third with 2,867 votes, and Julia Manning, an eye specialist in the NHS, came fourth, polling 1,935.“

The selection process was first used in Totnes, in July earlier on this year where local GP, Dr Sarah Wollaston replaced expenses row MP, Anthony Steen.

 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.

This morning, Conservative Home reported that Gosport – home to Sir Peter Viggers and his ducks – would be the next constituency to run an “all-postal” primary to select the Conservative candidate for the next general election.

Conservative party chairman Eric Pickles has now confirmed the news, stating:

“I hope this will build on the success of Totnes. It’s vital that we continue to empower local people and allow them to have the final say. I hope this will encourage people in Gosport not previously interested in politics to get involved and get their voice heard.”

Sir Peter announced he would be stepping down at the next general election at the height of the expenses scandal in May. We’re delighted that his party has chosen to put the issue of his replacement to the people of Gosport.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Look at him. He looks pretty confident he’s right. I suspect it’s not just the certainty of youth that’s driving him, either.

In any case, the national press were convinced. The report prompted stories in the weekend papers about how after the general election, more MPs would come from privately educated backgrounds, and from private sector professions like management consultancy and political communications.

None of the reports I’ve read questioned the notion of discussing election results in such detail before citizens have been to the polls.

If you’d like to read those newspaper reports, you can click here, and here.

If, however, the idea of pre-destined election results reminds you of something that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, I’d suggest you click here instead, and sign the Open Up petition for Open Primaries.

My favourite line from the Madano press release:

“Although the report does not cover the latest wave of future resignations from Parliament, the number of likely winnable candidates still to be selected still only amounts to around 10% of the overall number. It is apparent that these selections will take many months to be confirmed. It is not expected that these future additions will radically change the overall characteristics of this new generation.”

Let’s just see about that, shall we?

Later today, the Open Up blog is revealing its first guest blogger, campaigner and journalist Heather Brooke. Heather was the woman responsible for kicking off the expenses scandal way back in 2004 when she filed what she thought would be a routine Freedom of Information request to see how MPs were spending taxpayers’ money. You can read more about Heather’s campaigning work here.

To stay in touch with all the happenings on the Open Up blog, just grab the RSS feed. You can also follow the campaign on Twitter and Facebook, and watch the campaign videos on Youtube.