If this policy had been applied in the past, Jeremy Corbyn would have been expelled from the Labour Party in the 1980s. A representative democracy must encompass a wide range of voices - and our appalling electoral system means that has to come from within the Big Two. [THREAD]
2. British politics is going through a deeply authoritarian phase. From Boris Johnson to Dawn Butler, the instinct is to expel dissidents, impose loyalty tests & concentrate power in The Leader. The effect is to disempower the electorate & shrink the range of voices in Parliament
3. A system based on First Past the Post, which locks out smaller parties and inflates the power of the Big Two, is *only* defensible if they are genuinely broad coalitions. Once they start to burn out dissenters & impose ideological conformity, we face a huge democratic deficit.
4. Unlike multi-party PR systems, First Past the Post cannot sustain separate parties for Tory Remainers, Labour Leavers, Christian Socialists, liberal tories & so on. If they're purged from the Big Two, large chunks of the electorate will simply be denied a voice in Parliament.
5. This is part of a larger shift in British politics. Britain is moving from a representative democracy to an elective oligarchy, in which voters simply pick between two bodies of MPs, whose job is not to represent their constituents but to obey the instructions of party members
6. In this model, the electorate is reduced to a veto player: permitted merely to accept or reject manifestos drawn up by the leadership, to which each MP must swear obedience. It leaves no room for the innumerable shades of opinion found in any healthy democracy of 45m voters.
7. It's no defence to say people vote for a party, not for individual MPs. Labour voters may want different things from the party in Blyth Valley, Oxford East & Islington. Some will vote Labour *because* of the leader, others *despite* him. The MPs they elect should reflect that.
8. Labour only has to look across the House of Commons to see what happens when a parliamentary party is purged of dissidents & made to pledge obedience to The Leader (& his unelected advisors). It is not democratic, it does not promote good govt & Lab should not follow its lead.
9. Like Richard Burgon, Butler is acting on an assumption that is now widespread in our politics: that MPs are the servants of party members, not of their constituents. If we want a democracy that is pluralist, open to dissent & accountable to the public, we need to push back.END
