So sorry, I’ve been distracted today and I need to talk about it. The link to local government might feel a bit tenuous at first, but bear with me.
Today Danny Kruger switched parties. Just in case you missed it: Danny was the Conservative MP for East Wiltshire, elected last year with 35.7% of the vote (down 30.2% on his 2019 result). Today he announced he was defecting to Reform UK, who came fourth in that seat at the general election. So the question is: will there be a by-election?
Danny Kruger says no!
And here’s the thing, the choice is entirely up to him. WHAT?! It turns out that when we vote in a general election we are not actually voting for a party, but for a person.
And that just seems like madness. Oxymoronic, even.
Because if we really were voting for a person, not a party, we’d surely see a lot more independents standing, and winning. But we don’t, because independents have almost no chance of entering Cabinet, and the Cabinet is where the big decisions are made. How much impact can a “party of one” have in a Parliament of 650?
Whips?
Then comes the next problem: whips. We vote for an MP to represent us, but the party whip tells them how to vote. If they defy it, even to reflect their constituency’s wishes, they risk being kicked out of the party, losing its backing, and almost certainly losing their seat at the next election.
So just think about that. The electorate votes for a person, not a party. But if that person votes against the party to honour the electorate, the party can eject them… and then the electorate is unlikely to re-elect them. No wonder people are disillusioned, feeling their vote doesn’t count.
And the Catch-22 doesn’t stop there. Ever since I could vote, it’s felt like a trap. I couldn’t vote for the party I actually wanted, because if I did, the party I most didn’t want might win. So instead, I had to vote for someone else, someone I didn’t fully believe in, just to stop the worst outcome. Every election felt like this relentless cycle of choosing against rather than for, and the whole system just seems absurdly designed to make you compromise your principles every single time.
I stopped listening in the last election. I want my children (now both voters themselves) to grow up in a democracy where they can vote for, not just against. And I feel that real change will only come if enough of us vote with our hearts, forcing the big parties to rethink the system.
A 650 people brouhaha
I do understand the counter-argument. If there were 650 independents in Parliament, how would a government form? Without a whip how would they come to decisions? Everyone wants lower taxes and lower bills, but someone has to face the realities of government. Purely localised voting could lead to gridlock.
But still, our current system is fundamentally flawed. It hasn’t really changed in over a century. Shouldn’t we at least be open to improvements?
And that brings me back to local government. Maybe reform has to start from the ground up. Parish and town councils, where party politics often doesn’t dominate, could be the place to test new approaches. They’re not perfect, and the framework they work within (hello again, 1972 Local Government Act) badly needs modernising. But precisely because they’re small-scale and more community; focused, they might be the right place to experiment, to pilot more transparent, responsive, people-first ways of doing politics.
So the real question is: how do we build better connections between parish councillors, Cornwall Councillors, and MPs? How do we create more collaboration across all levels of government, so that communities are represented as people first, not just party votes enforced by a whip?
Because surely democracy should be more than choosing between a rock and a hard place, especially when either choice leaves people worse off.
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