The campaign to be leader of the Conservative party — and hence Britain’s next prime minister — offers up a bizarre simulacrum of mass democracy. Millions of people have watched presidential-style TV debates where candidates have laid out policies on vital issues ranging from Brexit to taxation. Yet only about 160,000 Conservative party members — 0.35 per cent of the 45.8m national electorate — will get to vote. Opposition leaders have been chosen this way before but never, until now, a new prime minister. It is an experiment that ought not to be repeated.
On the face of it, rank-and-file votes seem preferable to MPs’ conclaves in smoke-filled rooms. Before 1981 and 1998 respectively, Labour and Conservative leaders were elected by their party’s MPs. The shift to membership-wide leadership polls was said to enhance internal party democracy and encourage new members. Labour’s adoption of an entirely one-member-one-vote system in 2014 did remove the disproportionate weight trade unions enjoyed under its previous electoral college model.
The process is, however, painfully slow. For the Tories to spend more than six weeks choosing a leader — longer than the 25 working days stipulated for a general election — during a grave political crisis is an insult to the wider public. (Conservative MPs, to be fair, took just 11 days to whittle down 10 initial candidates to the final two.)
Party members are not just a tiny portion of the total voter base, moreover, but highly unrepresentative — in the Conservatives’ case, older, richer, and more male than average. As seen in frontrunner Boris Johnson’s tax plans and hardening Brexit stance, candidates can be tempted to pander irresponsibly to narrow member interests.
The aim of widening party membership is admirable. Yet opening up leadership elections did little to reverse both parties’ long, post-1940s decline — until the bounce in Labour numbers before its 2015 leadership poll brought Jeremy Corbyn to office. The Labour experience highlighted the risks of “entryism” by special-interest groups seeking to sway leadership votes as a fast-track way to influence policy.
More broadly, membership votes for the big parties’ leaders are, like the Scottish-independence and Brexit referendums, part of an experiment in grafting elements of more direct democracy on to Britain’s system of representative democracy. This has led to conflicts. The discomfort of a majority of MPs with the 2016 vote to leave the EU is a root cause of today’s political paralysis. Labour’s election of a leader at odds with many of its MPs has hobbled it as an effective opposition.
In the British model, MPs are elected by their constituents — not just party members — to take decisions on voters’ behalf; the majority party forms the government. For parties with more than a small number of parliamentarians, it is right and consistent with this model for party MPs to elect the leader. Conservatives and Labour might now struggle to reverse things and put the genie of membership votes back in the bottle, though they could make it mandatory instead for MPs to consult local associations during leadership polls.
Either way, a desirable safeguard would be to require any prime minister elected midterm to be confirmed by a parliamentary vote of confidence — with a general election triggered if he or she lost. A review due next year of the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which introduced fixed five-year parliaments and new but ill-defined procedures for confidence votes, could be a chance to adopt such a measure. It would be a valuable first step in repairing Britain’s damaged democracy.
