Conservative MPs and candidates have spent the last four years campaigning against two connected evils of the Labour style of government. In innumerable speeches and press releases, they have stood up for local and national democracy, and against the tendency of the government to centralise power and to hand it over to quangocrats, bureaucrats and officials in Brussels. They have also launched countless philippics against Labour’s love of the target and the quota, and all manner of diktat from Whitehall.
It is quite incredible, therefore, that the Tory hierarchy is now proposing reforms of the party that are not only anti-democratic but which impose, for the first time in the history of British democracy, a series of demented Stalinist tick-box productivity targets on MPs. In so far as the changes announced on Tuesday are intelligible, they would seem to take away the last vestige of sovereignty and autonomy that has traditionally resided with local associations.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in