IT is increasingly evident that our politicians don’t do what we elected them for. True, the Tories were well and truly trounced for reneging on their principles and manifesto, but they have immediately been replaced by Labour who are eagerly introducing agendas that hardly anyone supported or voted for either.
Similarly, Parliament no longer seems in control of the executive arm of the government. For instance, novel agendas such as DEI, Net Zero, open borders and transgenderism are all imposed on us without our consent or support. Our MPs have become unaccountable to the voters.
The crux of the problem is the sheer size and scale of the modern electorate and the enormous range, scope and power of the central government.
In 1832 the electorate amounted to no more than 650,000 men voting for 658 MPs. We now have roughly the same number of MPs elected by 48.2million people. In 1832 an MP had to convince a majority of 1,000 people to vote for him, whereas today the average MP has a constituency of 74,000. This stark contrast means that no candidate has any hope of building any form of meaningful relationship with the vast majority of constituents. Instead, candidates rely heavily on the mass media to get them elected. In turn, the national party organisations have become the pivotal mechanism to orchestrate the media message and get their MPs elected. Hence, MPs are reduced in status to lobby fodder doing the bidding of Party HQ.
It gets worse.
Central party organisations require a lot of money to run. So the national party organisations have become prey to their big backers and national or international lobbyists. All in all, this is why they ignore the needs and wishes of the poor old voter.
As a management consultant, helping to turn around failing and struggling organisations, I have discovered five factors that make accountability effective. Essentially, accountability has to be Prompt, Frequent, Specific, Clear and Direct.
What I suggest is a double-decker system to reduce the size of the electorate that votes for an MP, thus enhancing mutual interaction and responsiveness.
One way to achieve this is to delegate the job of voting for an MP to local councillors. Naturally there would have to be safeguards to ensure that the double-decker system does not effectively disenfranchise the greater part of the population. But ironically with a double-decker system there are several measures that would enhance the accountability of the MP to the common voter. The result would be far more favourable than us being saddled with an unpopular, ideologically driven party having a 175-seat majority despite winning only 20 per cent of the vote.
Six safeguards to promote effective accountability to the voter
1. Increase the number of councillors so that they in turn are accountable to smaller electorates. With a councillor for every 1,000 voters, the public would get a chance to get to know the individual they are voting for without relying on the media and political activists to inform them of the personal qualities and policies of the candidates.
2. Make council elections an annual event, much like we already do for public company directors and charities.
3. Ban spending on council and Parliamentary electioneering with perhaps the exception of one two-sided A4 leaflet. If council candidates have only 1,000 people to get to know, they can knock on doors and hold public meetings where they can be questioned and challenged as well as promote their own views and character. The need for personal contact to get voted in and the higher frequency of elections would enable the electorate to hold their councillor to account on a regular basis. Importantly, local connection neatly curtails the influence of mass media propaganda and central government psyops. People will at last be in a position to vote for someone they know and trust, rather than a stranger controlled by a faceless party machine.
4. The councillors would hold a Parliamentary election meeting and vote for candidates on a show of hands. This openness is important to allow voters to know which candidate their councillor supported.
5. A further precaution to protect accountability would be that the body of councillors could elect the local MP at any time they so wished without having to wait for the PM to call a general election. In this way, the MPs would be a lot more responsive to the wishes of their voters. If enough people felt that the MP’s performance is lacking, they would have only to ask their councillor to let the MP know. Similarly, the dissatisfied constituent need wait only up to a year to vote a councillor out.
6. Lastly, perhaps it would be useful if the councillors decided on the MP’s pay and expenses. This would be preferable to abdicating the responsibility to some national formula that fails to distinguish between the disloyal or corrupt non-performers on the one hand and the productive conscientious types. Such an arrangement can also take into account the cost of living in different regions and also the aspirations the local electors have for their MP.
This could enable other reforms.
For instance, a double-decker voting system could be combined with a general devolution of central government control to local level. Why not let councillors control such aspects as the local social services, NHS facilities, emergency services, schools and so on without having to defer to national departments for policy and centralised regulations? This would cut out unresponsive and ideological central government departments and mountains of bureaucratic waste.
If this devolution were to happen, presumably it would be best to return to a cabinet style of local government rather than the current trend towards running the town through the mayor’s office. In other words, a majority of councillors collectively would vote on the creation of a cabinet which would then run the local government departments.
These ideas are largely based on my experience with unaccountable executives and employees, as well as long observations of the shenanigans of politicians and their civil servants. They must be better than the shambles we have now.
