When David Cameron became prime minister in 2010, he promised to pursue “a new politics” of democracy and transparency, aimed at removing the stain left by the expenses scandal. A major feature of this would be constitutional reform. The Coalition Agreement committed the government to introducing a new power of recall, allowing voters to force a by-election when an MP was found to have engaged in “serious wrongdoing” (provided at least 10% of constituents signed a petition), to funding 200 open primaries, targeted at seats which had not changed hands for decades, to creating a “wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation”, and to introducing directly elected mayors in the 12 largest English cities.
Nearly four years on, not one of these promises has been met. The independent-mindedness of Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, selected by an open primary in Totnes in 2009, convinced Cameron to strangle the idea at birth; his recalcitrant backbenchers blocked House of Lords reform, and just one English city (Bristol) voted to create a directly-elected mayor after a notable failure by the PM to sell the benefits of the policy to the public. Now, as today’s Independent reports, he has abandoned plans to introduce a power of recall for MPs, despite promising to do so in both the Conservative manifesto and the Coalition Agreement. As Lib Dem party president Tim Farron said on Today this morning, there is no “good excuse” for this volte-face. The most likely explanation appears to be that it would serve as a distraction from the Tories’ core agenda (one of Lynton Crosby’s “barnacles”) and harm Cameron’s standing among those MPs in danger of falling victim to democracy.
The 2010 Conservative manifesto said:
Our People Power manifesto will give local people the direct power to recall MPs found guilty of wrongdoing without having to wait for a General Election. Conservatives will empower local people to cast a vote of no confidence in their elected representative and bring an end to the concept of the ‘safe seat’. This proposal will make MPs directly answerable to their constituents over the whole of a Parliament – not just every five years.
How the Right to Recall process will work:
The recall process will begin with the filling of a notice-of-intent-to-recall petition, to be signed by at least 100 constituents and submitted to the local returning officer.
Once registered, a recall petition can be circulated within the constituency, petitions for the recall of MPs must accumulate signatures equal to 10 per cent of the local electorate
Any petition that crosses the signature threshold within 90 days would trigger a by-election.
But as Farron commented, “the Conservatives appear to want to be protected from the electorate. It is about self-preservation. It sends a message to the electorate that ‘we don’t trust you. We think you might do things which we don’t like’. The only reason for blocking this is a lack of genuine commitment to democracy and a lack of trust in the electorate.”
Whatever ambition Cameron once had to be a tranformative prime minister, capable of restoring trust in the political system, is now unambiguously dead. And, as in the case of his crude abandonment of environmentalism, you are left to ask: did he ever believe in it to begin with?
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