Sep 24 2007
If you stop people voting on views the views do not go away
No wonder people are fed up with Uk party politics.
Today the Labour conference is expected to approve the Leader’s decision that members of the Labour party should no longer be able to table and vote on “contemporary resolutions” - topical matters that concern them. His reason - the members will probably have a different view from his and he has no intention of changing his view!
This is consistent with the Prime Minister’s scorn for the views of the rest of us, which has led him to cancel the promise of a referendum made by his party solemnly to help them win the last election. The reason he has cancelled this is he fears his view - in favour of the Constitutional treaty - is opposed by a majority of the electorate.
A few weeks ago when he came to power without a vote being cast by anyone to make him Prime Minister he told us he wanted to restore trust in politics, and would take the views of people seriously! We now know what he meant - he takes the electorate’s views, and the views of members of his own party, so seriously that he intends to do the opposite on the important things, and deny us a vote.
It all proves that Gordon Brown hasn’t understood why so many people hate modern party politics. It is because people feel their views are ignored. They see politicians spending a fortune on polling and focus groups, saying just what these black arts tell them people want to hear, whilst carrying on doing things (or not doing things) that people dislike.
Just look at all the nonsensical spinning about whether there will be an early election or not. I am a sufficient constitutional traditionalist to defend the right of the UK Prime Minister to decide when to hold an election, but I do not like to see a Prime Minister spin and dither endlessly on the subject in a way which blacks out more important news.
We were told firmly by spinners at the beginning of the Brown regime there was no need to hold an election. He has a majority inherited from the last election and the last leader.
Then we were told he might hold an early autumn election after such a “good start” this summer. We now know this is not going to happen.
We were then told he would announce an election if he wanted one in his speech at Labour conference.
Today, the day of the speech, we are told the speech will not be about the election date!
We are also told there could still be a late autumn election, but we are not even told when we will be told!
It’s pathetic. It either shows a complete inability by the Prime Minister himself to make up his mind, with his spinners and minions at a loss to know how to deal with enquiries - or it shows a deliberate attempt to use the power to call an election to keep down the questions and headlines about foot and mouth disease, crime on the streets, the state of our troops in the Middle East, the credit squeeze and other features of contemporary life worthy of contemporary motions people could vote on.
Whatever happened to the idea of leadership? Leaders used to go to their party conferences to argue against members who held different views, to persuade the majority they were right. Those conferences were better attended and better reported, because they were more important and more interesting. Leaders have to learn that the different views do not go away if they ignore them and prevent them being expressed - instead the people go away, deciding parties are not worth joining and their conferences not worth attending.
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
I think we know enough about Brown, after ten years as Chancellor, to understand that his desire for power is his overriding obsession. He has no real interest in views other than his own and is manipulating the media without difficulty. Most people take far less interest in politics than readers of this blog and Brown’s past mistakes and the dangers he poses to the future of democratic government in this country go unnoticed. This is where, I am afraid, I must again bring into question Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party. Because he has not provided an effective opposition or a credible and attractive alternative government-in-waiting he has made Brown’s task easier. Cameron’s honeymoon with the media ended long ago and Brown’s is in full flow. It is difficult to see how Cameron can recover, having “successfully” convinced people that his modern Conservative Party has changed but regrettably in ways that the electorate find unappealing.
The Labour conference is of little consequence this year, although at least the Lib Dems tried to get an agenda through in theirs. Gordon Brown wants to limit the power of the unions and Labour members, so why would he give a damn what the British public think?
He is a control freak, just like Blair.
Then why don’t opposition parties grasp the nettle and offer policies in the areas that people really want? I suppose there are several possible answers:
1. Politicians are scum and only interested in their own fortunes
2. Politicians are so divorced from the ‘Clapham Omnibus’ that they honestly have no conception what most people think
3. Voters are stupid and don’t vote they way they think or are too inherently tribalistic to countenance voting for the ‘other side’ even if the other side is offering policies more in line with their own views
4. Politicians actually have so little power that voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee will not change much - esp when 75% of our law comes out of Brussels.
Or maybe a challenge to you John: If what you say is true why doesn’t Cameron offer something concrete on school vouchers, public funding of private health care provision, quango wipe-out, police paperwork wipe-out, tax reductions, limiting immigration via rules based on the value an applicant brings to the UK, an English Parliament, a vote on continued membership of the EU, the death penalty, restoring cabinet government, the huge disparity between risk and reward of careers in the public vs private sectors, the BBC, etc, etc. There’s so much wrong with our country that people do feel strongly about that is entirely absent from the political agenda.
Maybe it’s just less difficult to copy Labour spending plans for 3 years and tax the parking spaces at Tescos instead! In the long run we’re all dead after all. Why bother trying to make the UK a better place?
Reply: I do want to offer the public something better and different - as I recorded in my recent Policy Review. We need to see which proposals the Conservatives are going to adopt. They party is signed up to a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, to controlled immigration, to better policing, to cancelling ID cards and sweeping aside regional assemblies and bureaucracy already, which is a start. It is not going to sign up to taxing people to go to Tescos!
And while Stalinist-Gordon continues with ‘Operation Control Freak’ the Tories continue to wring their hands and say nothing…. Meanwhile the people being sorely let down, democratically disenfranchised and financially penalised continue to look for someone, anyone to fight their corner, but none come -
Yes John, it is no wonder that people are totally fed up with politicians….
See this to find out why…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LEKTD8ECiI
Control freaks like Brown absolutely hate this sort of news to break on the day of the big speech:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7010233.stm
While this particular example is clearly internal Labour Party business, I am concerned at the steady erosion of democratic principles in this country.
Unless The Sun’s campaign is successful we will, no doubt, soon relinquish even more powers to the nascent European Superstate. Even if The Sun wins this time round, the treaty/constitution issue won’t go away. Ultimately I fully expect Brown to fudge and lie his way into eventually signing the damn thing.
This ‘contemporary resolutions’ vote is just further proof that silencing the opposition is a lot easier than winning the argument; I suppose we should expect no less from the leader of ZaNu-Labour.
I believe you have tapped into a very relevant issue, if not addressed it will certainly affect the results of the next general election. People do not vote because they see no reason to; they are not given options on issues they think are important. This does not mean you must vacate the middle ground
So very true. Gordon Brown is being bounced about by his own party, by public opinion, by the press and by his procrastination. Howcan this man call himself a leader, let alone a prime minister. The fact that Brown allowed Blair to take over the Labour party, purely for reasons of political expediency, tells us a lot about Gordon Brown’s character. A real conviction politican would have elbowed Blair out of the way and stamped his own authority on the Labour party.
“No wonder people are fed up with Uk party politics.” (JR)
We find ourselves in a strange political situation. In England the local government map is pretty much blue, 26% votes cast in favour of Labour in the May 2007 elections. Labour has lost Scotland to the SNP/Lib Dem coalition. Labour only has direct local control in Wales, traditional Labour heartlands and loony-left inner-city boroughs. All of these have their gripes with the war-mongering, big-business friendly new-Labour party too.
Labour’s solution? More legislation, more bureaucracy, more quangos. Replace the embarrassing unelected regional assemblies with unelected, but much more popular, regional development agencies that people are used to, and, more importantly, associate with more jobs, not more politicans and taxation.
Divert attention from the constitutional vandalism taking place over the
Mmmm….It seems that this is the first move towards a dictatorship….Mind you, Mr Cameron will not have any quetioning of his views either.
What I would like to know is what has happened to all the traditional Consevative thoughts that Conservative MPs used to have before the party became “Socially liberal and green” as stated by Mr Cameron when Quentin defected.
Mr Cameron is destroying the party and sadly politicians under the Conservative banner are letting him by going along with his crazy Blair type agenda. Is it to guarantee a nice little position in government should Mr Cameron ever become PM?
John, if you were ever elected to your rightful place as a true Conservative leader, would you continue with the reforms Mr Cameron have forced on the party or would you return to more traditional common sense Conservative policies?
Reply: I heard David Cameron speak at a dinner last night where he pledged a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, lower taxes over the first Conservative led Parliament, deregulation and more accountable less bureaucratic local policing. That sounded fine to me. Conservative MPs do not normally criticise the Leader because we wish our side to win to start to put right some of the wrongs in this country. Criticising the Leadership in public just makes it less likely we will win.
Isn’t there a very practical piece of politics at work here? By making an election a real threat, the PM is forcing the opposition parties to spend an awful lot of money on advertising. That’s money that otherwise would be available for the actual campaign.
Reply: Yes, of course the PM wants the Conservatives to spend too much too soon and to rush out policy statements. It’s a win win for him as he sees it - he wins if he wrong foots his opponents but does not have an election, and he hopes it’s a win if he moves the opinion polls so far in his favour that he thinks he can get away with an election. But it becomes a lose/lose if either he goes to the country and ends up losing the majority (the last ten weeks have shown huge volatility in opinion) or if he does not go the country and people become critical of the way he has played politics with the power to decide on election timing.