Another voice
Bashing Bill Boaks
Auberon Waugh
Only the Observer so far has drawn attention to another little piece of nastiness proposed by Mr Leon Brittan, our unattractive 44-year-old Home Secretary, which seems to strike at one of the very few wholesome trends apparent in our evolving democracy. The proposal to raise candi- dates' deposits from £150 to £1,000 can easily be justified in terms of the reduced value of money since they were first intro- duced; in fact it reverses the trend over these years. Mr Brittan's measure will strengthen the hold of the two main parties at exactly the moment when it has, become apparent that they have been infiltrated and captured by people who are profoundly obnoxious to most of the voters: in the case of Labour, by hysterical and in some cases evil-minded fanatics; in the case of the Con- servative Party, by deeply unattractive and probably untrustworthy lower-class power maniacs and Leon Brittan clones.
It is true that as a sop to the Liberal and SDP alliance Mr Britian proposes to reduce the percentage of votes required to retain the deposit from 121/2 per cent to five per cent. Since the retirement of Jeremy Thorpe one has had no occasion to investigate the sort of people attracted to the Liberal Par- ty, and apart from recoiling at the sight of Mrs Shirley Williams, one has only the faintest idea of what sort of people are drawn to involve themselves in the day-to- day organisation and candidate selection of the SDP. But a study of the two biggest par- ties is quite enough to convince anyone that only the nastiest people in the country are attracted into serious politics. The other great tendency of our times, towards greater democracy within the parties, places more and more power into the hands of these people. As a result of their control of candidate selection, we are left with a parliament of Trotskyist runts and Phillip (sic) Oppenheims.
It may seem unlikely that the former will ever come to power, but my point is that Conservatives are scarcely better off with the latter. Oppenheim, it will be remem- bered, is the beardless youth of 27 who recently tried to prevent anyone in Britain from eating foie gras. Any Conservative un- fortunate enough to be living in somewhere called Amber Valley at the last election — and there were apparently 21,502 of them — was required to put a cross against the name of this odious pest, who should, by rights, have been trying his luck as can- didate for the Uninformed Goose-Fanciers' Party.
More dangerously, since the new race of professional Conservative MPs is interested only in retaining power, and since they are aware that their natural supporters, the better-off, are liable to be in a slight minority, there is the tendency to ignore the interests of their supporters and suck up to any other minority in sight, whether animal sentimentalists or the poor. They reckon that we, their natural supporters, will be so terrified of Labour, or of Mrs Shirley Williams, that we will always vote Conser- vative. So it is, as I wrote last week, that Mr Lawson sits down to his Budget meditations with every intention of continuing his punitive capital taxes, his higher rates of tax on better workers and his prohibitive sup- plement on 'unearned' income while round- ly declaring that the poor are paying too much income tax. What in the name of heaven does this superannuated Good King Wenceslas imagine that we pay?
Yet this latest development will ensure that disgruntled minorities who feel themselves disenfranchised by the party system have fewer opportunities to. test their grievances democratically. It is typical of our times that as people grow more dissatisfied with the political parties, the political parties grow more and more satisfied with themselves. The only people with genuine cause to complain about the proliferation of frivolous, exhibitionist or otherwise hopeless candidates in a general election are a handful of lazy or pompous election returning officers. In fact, although these wretched people talk of an explosion of hopeless candidates, if the National Front and Communist Party are included among the hopeless cases their numbers have actually reduced — from 648 'other' candidates in the 1979 election to 570 last year.
Nor is it true that these hopeless can- didates cost the country anything, since practically none of them is sufficiently organised to use the free postal facilities on offer. The objection that the system might be abused for purposes of cheap publicity applies only to by-elections, where the nation's attention is briefly focused. But is expensive publicity any less objectionable, except to a party of advertisement brokers and public relations advisers? The forth- coming Chesterfield by-election may seem to reduce the present system to absurdity, but then so does the Labour candidate. Both absurdities could be avoided by a sim- ple rule that candidates in a by-election should already be on the electoral roll of that constituency.
But once you start tampering with exist- ing arrangements, as the unpleasant Mr Brittan threatens to do, you invite people to take a hard look at the workings of the pre- sent system. When the Observer examined
the case of these desperate 'other' can- didates it concluded, in its nannyish wa.Y' that £1,000 was a reasonable enough price for their pleasures. But then it proceeded to demand a 'proper enquiry into the way our electoral system works' — in other words, a resurrection of the 1970s Bore of the Decade, Proportional Representation. , Nobody who is tempted by Greater Br!t" tan's Bill Boaks Bashing Bill to look agalti at last year's election results can fail to notice that the House of Commons is now a travesty of democracy. Since we are discuss- ing these 'other' candidates (i.e. all those candidates who did not represent the Con- servative, Labour or Alliance parties) We might confine ourselves to England and t.g. fore those Celtic fringes where nationalist and Orange enthusiasms muddy the water' In the last general election in England 432 Bill Boakses received 183,412 votes to secure no seats in Parliament at all. Nobody is complaining about that. TheY represented only 0.7 per cent of votes cast' and obviously had no common platform, receiving slightly under 425 votes each 011 average. But if that tiny number of votes had been transferred to the Alliance Part); (as I suspect most of them would have been) they would have been enough to give Alliance more votes than Labour. In England, Labour received 6,862,622 votes and returned 148 MPs. The Alliance, Party received 6,714,908 votes and return 13 MPs. Anybody who looks at those figures must decide that democracy in England has been reduced to a bad joke. There is indeed a case for a 'winner takes all' system where the government of the country is concerned, but we are not talking about the government of the country. We are talking about how the parliamentarY opposition is composed, and how well it represents the wishes of the voters. The answer is that parliamentary opposition -- and the psychological pressures of Mr Lawson to put on his idiotic Good King Wenceslas beard — are distorted by a fa' tor of some 560 per cent from the knows' preference of the votes.
As I argued recently, it seems to me that the political parties are too sunk in corruP- tion for there to be any hope of salvation from them. If the Alliance ever succeeds to overtaking Labour, it will seek to establish the Shirley Williams Millennium with its own equally corrupt system of proportions] representation, or government-by-second" choice. When we have finally stirred ourselves to hang them all, I hope our next step will be to outlaw political parties out- side Parliament on the grounds that, like amusement arcades, they attract all the east desirable members of society. Parliamen- tary government, after a free vote to choose Prime Minister and Cabinet, will be run bY a system of barter, bribery and ad hoc alliances. Elections will be held annually on a five-year rotation basis, and the resulting assembly composed of as many Bill Boakses as can convince the voters that they talk more sense than their rivals.
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