OK, so I was an idiot.
In the four years that I spent writing letters and sending emails, many hundreds of both, I never once had certain knowledge that my missive had been read by the intended recipient.
You’re all looking confused now, and I can understand why. You’re used to a system that demands and requires that members, whether they be in Parliament like you are now, or serving in local government as others are, take proper account of the needs and ideas of the electorate. Your secretariat has standing orders to bring to your attention any matter raised by a constituent that could be put into an ‘ideas’ basket, and you are required to either read , agree with and sign the secretarial reply, or write and sign your own reply.
The reason for this is at the very heart of our modern system. It is this - If we do not accept that someone else can be just as intelligent, or more intelligent, than us, and what he or she or they have to say could be valuable to our society then we dishonour the foundation of our system which has been rooted in the right of every individual to be part of government.
You are not here to serve yourselves. It’s never going to be your career. You’re never going to get rich from being here. While you are here you are Miss East Suffolk or Mrs Dagenham and the energy that you have should be used to ensure, as a priority, that your constituents have their voices heard.
I digress. But you’ll all understand that, for me, these are the building blocks of society and, therefore, paramount.
So, there I was, four years of disinterest behind me when, out of the blue the first Ten Times petition arrived. It was written by a chap called Joe Hickey, the Chairman of a small help-the-homeless charity in Birmingham. He was another ordinary guy, like me, but he had the advantage of being extremely savvy in communication technology. His database had been built to include the electronic contact details of many hundreds of thousands of people around the country and he chose exactly the right time to send out his petition.
I know you’ve already gone down this route with John this morning, so I won’t flog it again except to say that this single action, and the sudden awareness of how truly powerful the people could be when they spoke with one voice was awe-inspiring for me.
It set me to look a bit further down the road, to begin to understand that if the nation could react so effectively to a certain stimulus once, then it could carry on doing so in the future.
I had often spoken with friends and family before that time about what I thought would be the perfect democracy. It involved putting a pin in a random page of every local phone book to find that area’s representative. The advantage of this idea was that, at a stroke, it removed ‘politician’ for a career option and also ‘party politics’ from Westminster. The disadvantages were all about implementation. What structure would six hundred random individuals need, to work effectively? In my argument I had no concern about the essential machinery of government, only with its abuse. The civil servants, at whatever level, were doing a proper job. The judiciary was doing a proper job. The police and other services were doing proper jobs. All that was needed, I proposed, was a way to make an effective connection between the new ‘MPs’ picked out from a phone book, and the existing system of national administration.
At that time I had a number of quite wealthy and influential friends, one of whom had, not long before, been subject to what he felt was a gross abuse of power. He had lost out in his bid to renew a long term government administered franchise in a manner which, he felt, raised a number of questions. Whether he was right or wrong is irrelevant for this discussion, but he was furious. Foaming at the mouth would be an understatement. Another was a regional newspaper publisher with very strident views about politicians and their lifestyles. There were a number of others.
I rang around my friends and arranged an informal meeting to discuss the idea which was beginning to take shape in my head.
Six of us met in the summer of 2014. My proposition was that, with the financial and organisational muscle round the table we could have a go at altering the political system. I proposed a two stage attack. The first would be to facilitate the registration of candidates for the 2015 election under one general non-political banner. The second stage would be to get each of these candidates to sign up to an unpublished future course of action, should the project be substantially successful. This second was to ensure that we didn’t just replace one set of self-serving career politicians with another. Our discussions went on for some weeks of late night meetings and, finally, we all agreed to a plan. Those that could, contributed substantial funds into our war-chest. The budget was some millions of pounds. We established an office and started recruiting a small admin team from within our existing staff numbers. It was all very low key.
By the Autumn of 2014 we were ready to go public and, soon after the recruiting of the first candidates commenced.
As you know already, the qualifying candidates were to be non-political in the party sense of the word. Their social politics were relatively unimportant to us, within limits. We were never going to accept those who expressed extreme views, either to the right or to the left, but did want our ‘party’ to be representative of the more general spread of ideas through the population. The thing most important to us was that each candidate understood that they were, in our perfect scenario, only going to serve for a very short time and that any vision of a long term political career should be forgotten.
John Parminter has already taken you through what happened next, so I won’t labour on too much. Suffice to say that we more more successful than we had thought possible and were able to enact our ‘unspoken’ strategy far more quickly than we had ever imagined.
The only major sticking point we had was, at least partly, due to this rapid success. However careful we were in our selection we still managed to end up with a group of new members who, once they had been let into the system decided that they didn’t need to ally themselves with CTD or our programme. At that point we published the agreements all candidates had signed up to and most were bought back into line by their constituents. Those that weren’t were just treated like sitting MPs and ignored, in the full and certain knowledge that they wouldn’t be able to make any difference to the plan.
After the election of 2015, CTD had its first, and last, conference. Over a few days the new members thrashed out the electoral system that has bought you all to Parliament. At the end of the conference CTD was disbanded in favour of the new House Rules, the introduction of which, to law, was the first act of the Modern Parliament.
From this point all decisions taken in the House became subject to certain levels of vote and certain levels of consultation, dependent on their potential effect. You will already know, for example, that there are referenda now and again that require a certain level of voter attendance and a certain level of voter agreement in order for the proposed subject of each referendum to be passed into law. Not that it has happened but, should there be a proposal to send us to war in a third country for example, that would require a seventy percent approval from an eighty percent ballot. A structural change in some level of social security payment would require a sixty percent approval from a seventy percent ballot, and so on. As you know, responding to a referundum is now obligatory. You’ll find out more about the background to these figures as you go
