Toby on Tuesday

 ‘I have a cunning plan….’

 

Devotees of the classic “Blackadder” television series will never forget the first episode of Series 3 when Rowan Atkinson’s Edmund Blackadder became involved in electoral politics. In this, Blackadder, on behalf of Hugh Laurie’s Prince Regent, tries to get Tony Robinson’s Baldrick elected to Parliament for the rotten borough of Dunny-on-the-Wold. Now, as Wikipedia tells us, “A rotten or pocket borough was a parliamentary borough or constituency…in existence prior to the Reform Act 1832 which had a very small electorate and could be used…to gain undue and unrepresentative influence.” Blackadder’s cunning plan was to get Baldrick to vote as an MP for more funds for the spendthrift Prince Regent – he would be his “rotten candidate for a rotten borough!”

The truth is that rotten or pocket boroughs did not cease to exist at the Reform Act of 1832. Many Labour-held seats operate like this and, here in Thirsk and Malton, our own Conservative Association is guilty of treating the constituency in precisely the same way. Although we differ strongly on the EU, of which she has always been a strong advocate and I have been a vigorous opponent, Anne McIntosh has for many years been an exemplary Member of Parliament. She is an outstanding chair of the Rural Affairs Select Committee, campaigning on two of the great issues of our time, food security and flood defences. Both of these causes have been shamefully neglected by our metropolitan-driven Government, but she has served Thirsk and Malton superbly on both of these. She also had the courage to vote against the Government on the divisive and vexed issue of same-sex marriage.

Her reward for all of this has been her humiliating ejection by the Thirsk and Malton Conservative Association, presumably because she refused to dance to its officers’ tune. Of course, the sensible and democratic solution would have been to put her case to an “Open Primary”, which every voter in the constituency would have been able to attend. Douglas Carswell, one of our new MP’s, has long been the great advocate of Open Primaries and indeed this course was even recommended by Conservative Party headquarters. But the local Conservative Association resisted this solution and instead treated Thirsk and Malton as its own Dunny-on-the-Wold. Having insulted an exceptional Member of Parliament, they used a closed meeting to select as her replacement a candidate with no political record at all other than pulling out of a constituency in West Yorkshire shortly before the last General Election. She very reasonably requested an Open Primary.

It is for others to decide whether the new Conservative candidate is a “rotten candidate for a rotten borough”, but what is the case is that the refusal to offer Anne Mcintosh the chance to put her case before an Open Primary, with all of her constituents having the right to attend, in favour of a closed meeting of Conservative activists has been profoundly anti-democratic. One of our few respected and capable Members of Parliament has been gratuitously insulted, her career terminated and the political process here degraded. Thirsk and Malton is not Dunny-on-the-Wold and next May voters will have their chance to pass judgment on this whole sorry saga.

Until next week!
Toby