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If Theresa May falls tonight, the leadership contest that follows will be one of the most important elections in British history. It will also be one of the least democratic. We are about to discover how much damage the two main parties have done to our democracy. [THREAD]
2. At a critical moment in British history, the UK will have its first directly elected prime minister. They will be placed in Number Ten, not by Parliament, not by the electorate, but by Conservative party members: a privileged class of voters who have paid for the privilege.
3. Not since the days of the rotten boroughs have a few thousand people held such extraordinary, undemocratic power. Unlike MPs, activists are not answerable to a wider public. We don't know who they are. They vote in secret. We cannot hold them to account for their choices.
4. That leadership election will not be a personality contest: it will be fought on fundamental questions of policy. Do we leave with no deal? Do we suspend Article 50? Do we have a second referendum? It will set the direction of government for as long as the govt is in power.
5. In the name of "internal democracy" our parties have done something deeply *undemocratic*. They have handed over decisions that are fundamental to our democracy to a group of people who stand outside it: who are not responsible to the public for choices that shape their lives.
6. The combined membership of the four biggest parties makes up less than 2% of the electorate. Yet they exert a gravitational pull on our entire political system that is grotesquely disproportionate to their numbers, and which is distorting the whole nature of our public debate.
7. Nick Clegg recently urged voters who want a say on Brexit to join Labour or the Tories: a sobering admission, by a Lib Dem, that the power to bring about change now lies outside Parliament: not among the public as a whole, but in the pay-for-access democracies of the Big Two.
8. Leave.EU has been acting on this advice, mobilising its supporters to take over constituency Tory parties ahead of a leadership contest. It recognises that highly organised minorities can now take control of Downing Street itself.
9. In short: we may soon have to sit & watch while a tiny group of people, over whom we have no democratic control, set the course of Brexit. By handing extravagant powers to their members, our parties have done serious damage to our democracy. We are about to pay the price.[END]
