Party Leader

[Darth Vader]

I listened to an interesting debate on Radio 4 today about the problems with the Conservative Party over who should pick the Party leader.

 

Before he goes Michael Howard wants the constitution of the party changed so that the MPs elect the leader and not the wider membership. The reason being it would supposedly be more workable.

 

What do the political animals in here think? Also can someone explain how the other parties elect their leaders?

[Rog]

The ‘Card Carrying Conservatives’ form only a small and unrepresentative proportion of the people who vote for the Conservatives come election day.

 

From my own experience the ‘Card Carriers’ tend to be ‘Little Englanders’ who yearn to get out of the EU and would like nothing better than to re-colonise the former Empire and to whom someone like Duncan Smith represented perfection.

 

Giving such people the choice as to who should lead the party is plainly dam silly as they are not only unrepresentative of the people who would vote Conservative but are actually unrepresentative of the many party supporters who are not Card Carrying party members.

 

A much better method of selecting the party leadership would be the election of a leader by the elected Conservative MP’s who are in a much better position to understand the realities of life as opposed to the narrow minded perspective, frequently distorted by ‘naice lace curtains and rose tinted spectacles’ of the grass roots party members.

 

It’s a dam shame in my opinion that so many people fail to see the root and branch changes that have taken place within the Conservative Party and what is now New Labour who still are seen by the majority as just plain Labour.

 

In the case of New Labour this misses the astonishing move away from traditional Labour values and in the case of The Conservatives it fails to give credit to the changes since the John Major period of gross mismanagement.

 

My own take is that the change of name to New Labour was a brilliant stroke by those who hijacked and destroyed the real labour party and created the monster that we have in place today.

 

What is now needed is for the same re-branding of the Conservative Party and a re-launch with a genuinely changed agenda that concentrates on the needs of today as opposed to the warmed up mixture as before that is (wrongly) seen as being the safe thing to offer .Emphasis needs to be placed on just a few key issues – issues that discriminate against the worst of the many disastrous policies being pursued by this awful shower presently in office – or as Bleah persistently puts it “in power”.

 

I would like to see the Conservatives making more of the shirt of responsibility for people to take care of themselves, of a move away from a state that provides not to peoples wants but to their needs, and a program of cuts in tax funded provisions that are simply gerrymandering by another route.

 

The trouble is that by the time the next General election comes around the nation will be such deep doo-doo as result of the staggeringly disastrous Brown-O-Nomics based on borrowing like an Irish Tinker who’s found a valid Amex card whoever gets elected will face a nightmare, or rather will face having to govern a country that is facing a nightmare.

[Darth Vader]

I spoke to a number of tourists today Rog and I got the impression that they think the Tory Party cannot be trusted even though they agree with some of their policies.

 

For that reason only they voted Nu labour back in to keep the tories out. They think Nu Labour is the lesser of two evils.

[Alias]

They are.

[simon]

They should give the job to Ken Clarke because he's nice and bright. No need for an election.

 

Not Boris - he's much too arch and deliberate.

 

the John Major period of gross mismanagement.

 

To be fair - John Major's government was brought to it's knees by Bill Cash and the idiot eurosceptics IMO. Continually voting against the government in knive - edged late night sittings which made news. Finally, the Major government seemed broken. If the eurosceptics had just stayed quiet then events would have gone their way. As time has shown. But they had big heads and a love of media attention.

 

And the mess with the ERM was a legacy of St Margaret.

 

Labour won in 1997 only because the Conservatives lost. They didn't seem decent or reliable. Mr Blair was elected because he made Labour seem sensible and bright. He seemed like a traditional (pre Thatcher) Conservative.

 

What is now needed is for the same re-branding of the Conservative Party and a re-launch with a genuinely changed agenda that concentrates on the needs of today as opposed to the warmed up mixture as before that is (wrongly) seen as being the safe thing to offer .

 

The notion of a conservative agenda is an oxymoron. At best it's a hangover of an idea from the Margaret Thatcher era of grand government and big ideas.

 

Britain instinctively believes in 'common sense' and the best fudge. Which is the best that anyone can ever expect from a fairly reasonable government. Good government is about finding decent and intelligent people who can make the best compromise in the face of conflicting points of view.

 

Very few people believe in ideologies or a grand agenda. Mrs Thatcher wasn't elected in 1979 because she spoke of a radical agenda. She didn't have a radical agenda in 1979. She was voted in by people who were p****d - off with a broken Labour government, the leftist ideologues and the unions. Even though most people liked Mr Callaghan - and despite the fact the Denis Healey, as Chencellor, was attempting exactly the free market reforms which the Thatcher government then implemented.

 

If the Conservative Party doesn't stand for anything - if it can't remember that Conservatism is about good compromise, reliability and decency - then it might as well be disbanded, stood down. If the ideologues want a party which isn't really conservative (if they propose a radical and alternative agenda) then they should write a manifesto and set up a different party.

 

Conservatives are conservative because they don't particularly believe in anything with any great certainty. Because, like most reasonable people, they don't actually have answers to everything.

 

The Conservative Party will win at some point in the future if they can seem like normal people. The party would need to represent itself as good natured, open minded and basically decent. Without too many fixed ideas. Rather like the old Liberal Party (the original freetraders).

 

The big issue (forget minor changes to taxation or attempts to tweak the NHS) - is what are we actually going to do? Given that the quality of cheap Chinese and Korean goods is now putting in jeopardy all other European maufacturing. We can't just carry on selling each other houses and pension plans. Unless we just exist as a market for Chinese goods and Russian fuel.

[ButterflyMaiden]

It is in the nature of party politics that parties will make their own rules for the election, or otherwise, of their leaders.

 

The global norm, in democratic nations, is for party members to elect leaders.

 

We should note, however, that one member one vote is not the norm. It is frequently the case that affiliated organisations are allowed block votes. Opinions differ as to whether this is reasonable or not.

 

Some people argue we are seeing the decline of traditional Party politics and Parties are not able to attract mass membership.

 

This is particulary true of the UK Tory party who, although able to attract affiliated support, in the shape of large donations, from various and sundry business organisations, have not been able to attract large numbers of party members. (Contrary to other posts in this thread, the reason for the business support is the distinct free market ideology consistently pursued by the Tories.)

 

In such a situation it is entirely predictable and reasonable that the Tory leadership would wish to redefine its policy making constituency. There is a small risk this may result in an extremist being elected to lead the party .. this is the reason William Hague expanded on the constituency ..but the increase in numbers of Tory MPs make this unlikely (in my opinion)

 

 

However, it is a matter of public interest, that the method of leader selection is open and transparent

 

to citizens. This allows people to make informed judgements about the parties at election times.

[ian rush]

I agree with Rog that the little englander Tory constituency parties hold too much power at the moment, in the same way that Trostkyites (sp.) / hard left held too much power over Labour in the 1980s with their control of union block votes and the national executive.

 

However, I don't agree with Rog on his theory about 'Brown-o-nomics', the likely state of the economy in 2009 (or as may be implicit from that part of his post prophesising that there will be a linkage between the two which can be divorced from the global situation).

 

More particularly given his trumpeting on certain Middle Eastern issues, I don't find his remark about Irish Tinkers amusing or particularly relevant in a relatively serious debate: a bit Vader-esque