Defending Tory Party Democracy

We've gone through a Tory leadership contest that has been a foregone conclusion since it was whittled down to the final two candidates. Tedious but necessary viewing for Tory watchers and professional commentators, something to dip in and out of for party members themselves, and an unexciting but occasionally noticeable spectacle for everyone else. Occasionally because the awful numbers reported for Liz Truss haven't come out of nowhere. Her dismal prospectus and significant silences have crept into popular consciousness, and they're unimpressed so far.

But thanks a bunch John Rentoul for making me defend the indefensible - the Conservative Party membership. In The Indy, he argues Tory party members shouldn't be allowed to choose their leader, and therefore the next Prime Minister. Others on the left have been making similar arguments, saying the replacement of one occupant of Number 10 by another is a matter for a general election. But this is not Rentoul's position: he believes members should have no say whatsoever.

He dresses this up as a long-held position stemming from the change in Labour's rules in 1981 that gave members a vote on determining party leadership. He argues it was a factional move by the Bennites to make it easier for a left wing candidate to get the top job - because it could not possibly be a means by which the party better reflects the aspirations of its support base. He then goes on to moan about Ed Miliband's decision to sweep away the electoral college in favour of one member, one vote. Assorted right wingers naively believed it would encourage a mass of ordinary people to join and choose leaders on the basis of the centrist politics they believed were the default commonsense of the British public. We know what happened next. Therefore, MPs should determine who gets the top job.

Undemocratic? Actually, Rentoul says giving members a vote fundamentally departs from parliamentary democracy. He points to the constitutional principle that the Prime Minister is the one who commands the confidence of the Commons. I.e. Who has a majority. Giving members a say dilutes this principle, allowing the opposition to make mischief about the number of MPs sitting behind them who do (or don't) back them - problems Iain Duncan Smith and Jeremy Corbyn encountered when their respective memberships backed them, but the parliamentary parties did not. This isn't to say members don't have a role, conceding that Tony Benn was right about mandatory reselection - a position few making similar arguments to Rentoul would keep with.

I disagree. This argument is about process and rarefied principles that, ultimately, defends an elitist approach to politics. On the contrary, all political parties - yes, even the Tories - should be democratic and as participatory as possible. First, there's the assumption MPs know more and have better judgement than party members about who's best to lead. This does make some sense. They inhabit the Westminster system and live and die by the rules of the game. They know about the demands and pressures of the job, what the stakes at play are, and how to play to the parliamentary gallery. As constituency representatives they occupy a privileged bird's eye position to know what's happening in their patch, and their surgeries are often parades of misery (which makes a mockery of claims that Tories (particularly) are unaware of the consequences of their policies). However, that doesn't mean they're in touch - seeing isn't experiencing, and the rarefied world of politics, its privileges, and its salaries become, for a lot of MPs, a block on empathising and understanding. As the wretched careers of many left wingers turned right wingers in Labour shows.

Tory party members are not representative of the public at large. They're older, whiter, maler, straighter, more retired and more propertied than the electorate. They have peculiar peccadilloes, such as making speed limits advisory and the awful policies Truss and Rish! Sunak pandered to and encouraged. And yet, as oddball as they are, when all is said and done they're more representative and closer to "ordinary people" than MPs. They are not insulated by official politics, no matter how much they assume the parliamentary party's point of view, and are mostly subject to the same cost of living pressures as everyone else. The Don't Pay UK campaign, for example, got a very sympathetic hearing among Tory activists on Conservative Home before it reached mainstream attention. These pressures have reflected in the constant questioning of both candidates about their plans to deal with the energy crisis, but the hustings format (as opposed to the earlier debates) have allowed them, and Truss in particular, to side step detailed answers.

In mainstream political science, parties are linkage devices. They are a medium transmitting preferences from a given constituency to a cosseted party elite. From Labour's point of view, more party democracy allows for a better performance of linkage. It is a means for aligning the party, its policy generation process, and its elites with what's happening in every day life. Despite the reams of the Labour right's self-interested drivel, the Labour Party membership is probably the most representative party out of all this country's mainstream parties, save perhaps the SNP. More democracy are the best conditions for left wing, working class politics to flourish inside the party. But more democracy in the Tory party also suits the labour movement. Not because it allows for entryism or some such, but because it opens up the party to more mass pressure and makes it more difficult and politically damaging for party elites to pursue pro-oligarchy schemes and wheezes.

And this is precisely why establishment commentators are using the tedium of the leadership contest to call the process into question. They would like both main party leaderships to be MP-only affairs because it dampens the acuity of mass pressure, and coincidentally secures them their careers as gossip merchants who forecast and explain what's happening - something that has got harder since masses of people rudely trespassed onto their domain and upended politics. Defending what there is of Tory party democracy doesn't mean abandoning an analysis in which the party is recognised as the key political lynchpin for organising ruling class politics. But more democracy introduces an element of uncertainty that might interfere with, disrupt, and derail madcap schemes, some of which we've seen of late. And as the tempo of struggle rises, and/or the deeper the crisis gets, the more of a hindrance party democracy could become. A dysfunctional organisation permanently divided and hamstrung by its base, and therefore the onslaughts its launched in the past become harder to pull off. Mightn't a Tory party made weaker by democracy be a better opponent?

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