Direct Democracy Initiatives

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) on securing this debate. It is fundamentally important that we consider ways to revive our moribund democracy. I would go so far as to say that, if one good thing came out of the previous, rotten Parliament, it was a recognition that there is something profoundly wrong with our democratic system and that we need change.

It is not surprising that our democratic system is not working, given that seven out of 10 constituencies are safe seats—one-party fiefdoms—which makes Members of Parliament inwardly accountable and inwardly responsive to party Whips, rather than outwardly responsive to the people. Direct democracy can help us change that in two or three key ways and I am pleased that the Government are toying with some ideas. However, with respect, I fear that Sir Humphrey Appleby and the powers that be in Whitehall fear the full implications of direct democracy and are already trying to water down some of the radical intentions of the coalition agenda.

Open primaries are the most significant way that we can make democracy outwardly accountable and responsive. Instead of leaving it to the party machines and hierarchies in London to decide who gets to be a Member of this legislature, we can have open primaries to throw open the question, particularly in safe seats. If Senator John McCain, a well-known national figure in the United States who has stood for the office of President, is forced to contest the nomination to be the Republican candidate in his home state, Tory, Labour and Liberal MPs in safe seats should be subject to the same process.

We must ensure that open primaries are not open caucuses. They must be full elections involving the entire constituency, rather than just matters of sectional, self-selecting self-interest. We must overcome the problem of the cost. In this country we have had three open primaries: in Totnes and Gosport, and for the Mayor of London. The cost was prohibitive in other constituencies. We must, without resorting to state subsidy, taxpayer-funded politics or, heaven forbid, giving the party chairman the power to decide where open primaries should be held, find a way of allowing people to have a say about who gets to be the candidate in their constituency. A simple way to do that is to piggyback primaries on to pre-existing local ballots and allow people to petition their returning officers to trigger the process.

I hope that the Government listen and get this right, because if they get it wrong it will mean strengthening the power of the big corporate party hierarchies in London, rather than opening up democracy to local people.

The Government need to get two other things right. People should be allowed a direct say in law-making. Rather than contracting out the process to a professional caste of politicians and a priesthood of party managers, we should allow people a direct say. I am delighted that the Government are toying with the idea of a great repeal Bill—a freedom Bill—written by the people. However, I fear that they are not running this project as a wiki Bill, like the wiki Bill on Wikiversity, which is run completely as a crowd-sourced, open-source project. Instead, they are running it as a Government-owned online consultation. The difference is that, if something is genuinely crowd-sourced and the people are allowed a say, it tends to be pretty optimistic and liberal and is not dominated by demands to legalise cannabis, for example. There tends to be a much more angry and illiberal exchange in respect of a project on a Government-owned website. I hope that the Government amend the online architecture of their freedom Bill proposal, replace it with what is available free on the Wikiversity site and try to introduce the latter to the House.

The Government talked about a right of popular initiative, meaning that, instead of leaving it to the Sir Humphrey Applebys and a few Ministers to decide the legislative agenda of the Commons, we should give the people a say. There was a wonderful proposal for a threshold mechanism, under which, if a proposal got a certain number of signatures it would be introduced or at least given time and MPs would be forced to debate and vote on it. I ask the architects of this proposal in Whitehall, again, to be cautious about allowing thresholds for this popular initiative. A far better way of ensuring that the outcome is liberal and inclusive—sunshine politics, rather than reactionary, angry and sectional politics—is to ensure that different proposals have to compete for Floor time in the House of Commons, rather than having to pass a certain threshold. If we allow the threshold mechanism to be used, we would be asking for proposals that, as a liberal, I would feel uncomfortable supporting.

I hope the Government listen to these concerns and ensure that, through the mechanisms they introduce, direct democracy means more liberalism, rather than reactionary illiberalism.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)]

I am grateful for your chairmanship of this debate, Mrs Brooke. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) for calling the debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) for chipping in with his thoughts on direct democracy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park correctly set out some of the problems that we face, including public engagement with Parliament. Some issues with the previous Parliament that my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton highlighted are well known, which is why political and constitutional reform is one of this Government’s central features. We need to ensure that people are properly engaged with Parliament and politics—those are not always the same thing—and that we do a much better job than the previous Government did.

Let me respond to the two things that my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park mentioned: recall and local referendums. I will come to the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton later. The prominence given to recall by all three major political parties at the general election reflected its importance. There was consensus among all those parties, particularly off the back of the expenses scandal, that we needed to do something to deal with that issue.

Under the Government’s proposal, which my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park does not think goes far enough, the recall mechanism would be set in motion only if there were, effectively, a trigger—if an MP were engaged in serious wrongdoing. At that point, if 10% of constituents signed a petition, a by-election would be triggered in which the individual would be able to stand and defend their record. Effectively, that would put the decision in the hands of the people.

We decided to do that to deal with specific issues in the previous Parliament, because members of the public were rightly saying, in respect of matters raised with an MP early in the Parliament, “We’ve got an MP who’s been judged to have fallen below the standards we expected, but they can continue sitting in Parliament, taking their salary for the rest of the Parliament and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

My hon. Friend thinks that we should go further. We balanced that right because we do not want this mechanism used as a political tool by political opponents, with Members of Parliament consistently being faced with a recall challenge based on nothing more than the fact that people disagree with them.

[Mr Carswell]

I respect the Minister’s statement that it is important that we should not have a system that allows vexatious attempts against good, legitimately elected MPs, but will he consider the example of Winchester in 1997, when a vexatious attempt was made by the Tories to trigger a judicially sanctioned recall election because they felt that they had lost, unfairly, by two votes? They went on to lose that election by more than 20,000 votes. Surely, we should trust the people, who have pretty good judgment to decide what is and is not a legitimate complaint against a Member of Parliament.

[Mr Harper]

I remember that well, as I suspect my hon. Friend does. I went tramping round the streets of Winchester in that rather thankless by-election.

In his article in the press, my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park mentioned the Californian recall system, through which every governor since Ronald Reagan in 1968 has faced a recall petition. Clearly, most of those petitions were not successful. The state of California is of a significant size, compared with the United Kingdom, and it takes a fair amount of organisation and initiative to even get a recall petition sorted out.

Given the size of a parliamentary constituency and that most hon. Members face significant blocks of Opposition voters, recall could easily turn into a tool used by our political opponents. I will explain in a moment why I think that that would be particularly bad, and I will try to do so in a way that my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton will find appealing.

[Mr Harper]

That is right. I hinted at that in my remarks. Let me mention one reason why recall would not be a good idea. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton wants legislators and those in positions of power to be fearless and to put forward bold ideas—to be able to come up with challenging ideas, demonstrate them and argue for them in public. I think that I have characterised some of his views correctly. Under the recall system that we are talking about, legislators could be subject to recall by their constituents at any moment. If that fact were held over MPs, it would drive away any opportunity to set out bold or challenging ideas that took a while to deliver.

If someone had an idea involving a tough and difficult period with a payback taking some time to come to fruition, and if there were a recall petition hanging over them that could be triggered for political reasons, I suspect that they would be off. People who wanted to bring forward bold and radical ideas would be deterred, and the proposal would have the opposite effect.

[Mr Carswell]

I do not wish to labour the point, but under our proposal, recall would be a two-stage process. The people, rather than a committee of grandees in this place, would decide in a vote whether there should be a recall, and there would then be a by-election. I would rather face the judgment of the good people of my constituency than a committee of grandees in Whitehall.

[Mr Harper]

I understand why my hon. Friend might think that, but Members of Parliament might feel constant pressure. There is always a challenge in politics when putting forward bold ideas and having time to allow them to come to fruition before facing people’s judgment.

Those of us in the business of putting forward such ideas, whether in Government or outside, must make a judgment, and the Government’s view is that it would not be sensible if a recall could be triggered at any time without there having been serious wrongdoing. We have set out what we want to do, and triggering a recall on serious wrongdoing was a policy proposed in the manifestos of all three major parties at the last election. My hon. Friends the Members for Richmond Park and for Clacton still have some way to go to persuade the Government to change position.

I turn to local government. Reference was made to whether recall should apply to other elected officials. Clearly, we want high standards of behaviour from local councillors, as well as from Members of Parliament. We have announced that we will replace the existing standards regime, which is centralist and leads to vexatious complaints. We are working closely with colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government and local colleagues to decide what sort of regime will replace that. My hon. Friends had a meeting with the Minister with responsibility for decentralisation earlier this week, and I know that he will welcome any ideas about what that regime should look like.