* You are viewing the archive for October, 2005
Welcome Once More readers! A pleasure to be included in the Conservative Bloggers Roundup.
If you came and read about Daniel Hannan and open primaries you may be interested in a discussion of the importance of primaries to democracy - not just the party - and why we don’t need to worry about voter saboteurs.
And if you’re a blogging supporter of David Cameron, which I sort of am, you might like to download a logo to show it.
If this isn’t the whole point of David Cameron, I don’t know what is:
A very intelligent, but politically non-commital, lady told me yesterday that when Blair is gone, she’ll vote for Cameron because he’s nice.
(from GavPolitics)
So, the AUN!’s discussion of my Anglosphere constitution makes some good points.
We now have two competing constitutions. Mine and theirs, one much more comprehensive than the other :-).
AUN! has amended my constitution here and here. It is now much more comprehensive on the details, and has too many other small improvements to note here.
The big problem is, we have such differing ideas about what this should look like I don’t think we can really compare them and certainly not integrate them. AUN! would like it to be a unified state, I would like it to be a set of international organisations like NATO with sovereign states underpinning them.
If we were going for a state, I would like AUN!’s constitution. But I am very much against creating a new state. First, what’s wrong with the ones we’ve got? And second, let’s not create another EU, please.
There is another place in which our ideas diverge, and that’s the likelihood of getting the US on board. AUN!’s Union doesn’t seem to include the US, and that’s probably understandable given the powers he transfers to the monarch and the granting of control of nuclear weapons to the new state.
The Americans are never going to go for involvement in a international organisation that grants power to the Queen. So this new ‘Mediator’ can’t be included in the constitution if we want the US to be involved. Additionally, although I applaud the introduction of the individual rights passage to the draft, the Americans aren’t going to go for it since they already have a bill of rights that they seem quite happy with. If we were going to include a bill of rights as a sort of membership criteria, it would have to be far more limited and vague than the one given.
So given that the constitutions are so different, I think that there’s no point in trying to integrate them. I would suggest we could (in this mad, fantasy, anything-is-possible world) view mine as the first step in creating more associations between the Anglosphere, and AUN!’s as an ultimate possibility for re-uniting the Anglosphere.
I am also gestating further comments. This amendment process is so hard to do in a blog, maybe we should set up a CVS repository somewhere!
Blimpish has kindly pointed out some back-up for my tagline. Everyone knows the Empire are way, way cooler than the Rebellion right? Well, now we can root for them with a clear conscience.
[It currently reads: "you know you're conservative when ... you watch Star Wars thinking the Empire has a point of view", in case I should ever change it.]
My goodness, I’ve been invited to contribute to Once More. I shall have to get serious.
Thanks guys!
I’d just like to apologise to Anglosphere Union Now! for taking so long to comment on their comments on my comments of their constitution.
I will talk further on this tomorrow.
Iranian president causes storm over call to wipe out Israel.
Why does this make me think of a little song:
I see your true coloooouuuuuurs, shiiiiining through, I see your truuuue colours….
How to halt the drive towards further integration? A question that haunts Eurosceptics everywhere. Blair has found the answer: be really crap at holding the presidency. Well done Blair, you’re an example for European governments everywhere.
Now some would say, given his goals of repatriating power to capitals and creating a more open europe, we should hope he would succeed.
Not so much. His goals - expressed in a speech to the European Parliament yesterday - turn out to include:
Why oh why couldn’t have brought number 4 up before the general election? He wants to harmonise university standards when Britain is the only country in Europe to have any universities in the top 20 in the world, and we have two. He wants to harmonise the energy grids, when French energy firms are given huge subsidies and protected from foreign takeover.
This is just another example of the Prime Minister wanting to “be at the centre of Europe”, and willing to give up on key national interests to do it. Keep on failing Blair.
Daniel Hannan gave a very good account of why open primaries would be good for the Conservative Party. But let’s not forget what we’re here for, open primaries are good for democracy too.
To recap the benefits for the party, open primaries would help ensure a diversity a diversity of candidates without candidate ‘parachuting’. They would make sure that our candidates were in tune with the entire electorate and not just the top-tier Conservative activists. They would give voters a longer look at our guys, and perhaps give them proprietary feelings about the candidate - if they helped select them they’ll be more likely to vote for them.
But what of benefits for our country too? Some people believe that proportional representation (P.R.) is the only way to fix our democracy and ensure that all have a say. Well, maybe. But the Conservative Party isn’t in a position to implement P.R. and we have other problems with it anyway. In the meantime there is something we can do, and open primaries do a lot for fixing the problems that PR is supposed to fix.
For a start - the classic argument for P.R. - in safe Tory seats there are many voters who don’t have a say in their representation. They might as well not exist, when it comes to selecting their representative. A primary gives them that say, and ends this semi-oligarchy of top-tier activists choosing a representative for an entire constituency.
But what about a safe Labour seat, what’s the point then? In a safe Labour seat the point about the benefits to the party apply even more so, but there is a point for everyone else as well. Voter’s would use a primary to choose a candidate that will most effectively hold their Labour representative to account on the issues they care about.
I believe this has important implications for restoring the link between representation and the voting in Parliament. Imagine if an MP knew that when he got back to his consituency for an election he would face an opponent selected in part by the same people who are supposed to be voting for him! There’s a good chance he would respect the wishes of the local voters more if he knew he would be facing a centrist candidate rather than a Thatcherite.
At the moment we are debating whether or not to move for the centre in the leadership election. But it’s a crude and unwieldy choice. Far better would be to fine tune our candidates for each constituency to fight the right fight. A candidate who can’t engage with the debate, wherever on the issues that debate will take place, cannot influence it and represents a wasted candidate as far as genuine democracy goes.
Voter sabotage?
There has been a lot of discussion on conservativehome about ’saboteurs’ who vote for loser candidates to ensure their own party wins, and there are a variety of safeguards we can put in place. But I think it’s telling that for a reform that is supposed to be about trusting voters, we’ve let out just how little we actually do trust them.
The voter saboteur issue is not important in my opinion. For all the reasons above voters do have an incentive to cast their vote for the candidate that they genuinely prefer. In anything but the safest Labour seats, casting a vote for an unreconstructed right-wing candidate in order that he should lose, carries the deathly danger of him winning, and so is it’s own disincentive.
Other measures, such as paying a pound for the right to register as a supporter and vote will mean that if there are 10,000 vote saboteurs, there will be £10,000 more in the bank to contest the election, and that’s almost a third of the candidate’s entire allowance. Vote sabotuers are the last thing we should be worried about.