Unrepresentative Democracy

The argument that Westminster party leadership contests should be limited to MPs, which was very much en vogue during the last decade, seems to have taken a holiday faced with the unedifying spectacle of Tory hopefuls competing to see who can come up with the most extravagant proposals on tax cuts and public sector austerity. To note that this places them well to the right not only of the population at large but even of the Conservative Party membership obviously calls into question the claim that MPs are representative, let alone that they consider the good of the whole nation. As the candidates commence the first online hustings with the membership, the tone of debate has shifted perceptibly from the performative to the pragmatic, with much talk of "realism" and "restoring trust". There is a topsy-turvy air to all this, at least in comparison with the framing of Labour leadership contests, in which the more sensible members are expected to moderate the flights of fancy of the parliamentary party. Of course this is just a trick of perspective: the Conservative membership, like the PLP, simply being closer in sympathy to our predominantly centre-right media.

The Conservative Party selection process places a premium on appealing to the Parliamentary party first. Whereas you could once argue that it was largely representative of conservative sentiment in the country, this has become less so as first economic and then nationalist zealots have routinely succeeded in becoming parliamentary candidates ahead of the traditional cohorts of liberal-conservative professionals and reactionary gentry. As a result, there is now a conscious acceptance that MPs must make different appeals to the two constituencies: one to their colleagures, focused on the material interests of the rich and notions of sovereignty; and another to the membership, employing the traditional imagery of national strength, economic competence and social authoritarianism. The problem is that the cost-of-living crisis is intruding into the consciousness of even staunch party members, with the result that the tensions between the two have become ever more apparent, hence perhaps the prominence of claims of tax avoidance in the negative briefing. The attempt to reconcile this through a focus on the "culture wars", notably around trans rights, has come to naught, essentially because these are issues with little resonance beyond newspapers.

But that attempt is still notable because it emphasises that the membership hustings play a poor second to the Telegraph, Times and Mail when it comes to the formation of party opinion. In other words, your route to the top in the Conservative Party now requires cleaving to a particular brand of zealotry that will garner both the support of a committed core of colleagues and the backing of the Tory newspapers. For Boris Johnson, this was his late conversion to the cause of Brexit as policy rather than just a lazy way to fill column inches. For the current field the expression of zeal comes down to renewed austerity to control public debt (Sunak) or urgent tax cuts (pretty much everyone else), neither of which make sense in terms of the demands of the moment (teetering on the edge of recession) or offer a credible strategy beyond the next general election. Despite this incoherence and the general air of hysteria, the media has shied clear of suggesting the Tories have run out of ideas and road, preferring to dwell on the bickering instead.

In contrast, the Labour hustings remain far more politically significant. This isn't simply because of the party's more democratic approach to policy formation. It also reflects the (justified) belief that the media are biased against the party generally and the left in particular. Consequently, there is little to be gained by winning over the Guardian and Mirror. This can produce upsets, such as Corbyn's election in 2015, but it can also lead to strategic lying, as in Starmer's now infamous campaign of 2020, though it's also worth recalling the gap between Blair's promises before 1997 and his "realism" thereafter. The purge of the Labour membership over the last two and a half years is not simply about kicking out the left, it also serves to bring the membership more in line with the party apparat sociologically: more middle managers committed to fiscal responsibility. It's a commonplace to note that the social background of MPs has narrowed across all parties in recent decades, and that candidates are increasingly drawn from the narrow world of politics itself, with little in the way of an "ordinary" hinterland, but this has been particularly acute in the case of the party of the people. 

The traditional excuse for the empowerment of the PLP - that it had to appeal past an unrealistic membership to the wider electorate - looks increasingly unconvincing as it deliberately diverges from actual Labour voters in both style and substance. The turn to appealing directly to Tory supporters, even when dressed up as winning back ex-Labour voters in the Red Wall, is less of an electoral strategy than a way of articulating the PLP's own preference for what are essentially conservative policies. Ironically, it is now finding itself to the right of much of the Conservative Party membership, notably on topics such as utility nationalisation and the need for wealth taxes. Having re-engineered the Labour membership more to its liking, the party leadership is now attempting to re-engineer the electorate, neglecting its support among the young, trade unionists and ethnic minorities in favour of elderly reactionaries who it believes will be the decisive bloc at the next general election. 

In other words, both of the major parties in Parliament are now unrepresentative and have morphed into self-perpetuating sub-cultures with their own arcane beliefs and strange habits. The expenses scandal of 2009 went some way to exposing this - notably in the genuine surprise of many MPs that anyone should begrudge them such largesse - while the bias towards the interests of the rich in the management of economic policy since 2010 has been flagrant, but perhaps the most obvious evidence, which in turn has produced the greatest voter cynicism, is the serial manoeuvring at Westminster since 2017 that has led to repeated parliamentary coups by both the executive and backbenchers, vocally supported by every single national newspaper on one occasion or another. The overall impression gained is that Westminster is increasingly ungovernable, and it is that, rather than speculation about the union with Scotland or embarrassment over sovereign immunity, that should worry the constitutionalists. Like a fish, the British political system is rotting from the head down.