The usual result of a general election was that the winning party would command just under a half of seats but would take overall control by coming to terms with parties from Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland. Sometimes a government had a clear majority, but not often. A winning party generally gained between forty and forty five percent of the overall vote, which was itself about sixty five percent of the electoral roll. This meant, of course, that any government of whatever colour was only directly supported by about thirty percent of the electorate. The opposition parties, owing to the mysteries of the system, could even sometimes claim to have a greater support in the country than the government of the day.
You know that, over the next four years, you are going to be asked to contribute on an almost daily basis to the proper running of our country. Imagine, though, that you had been elected on the losing side of the old system. What was your role? how were you going to contribute? You could sit on the odd cross-party committee and nibble around the edges of power but you could never really influence the important decisions. Most of your time was going to be spent opposing, for the sake of it, the other party’s government. As far as you were concerned, if your leader told you black was red and green was blue and you had to vote for it, you would vote for it.
If half the MPs of that day were completely powerless then that also meant that more than half of the electorate had been disenfranchised. Their vote had been wasted for another four or five years.
Even worse, in some respects, was the effect of ministerial government, whereby MPs of the ruling party elected a leader, or had a standing leader already, and he appointed a select group of like minded MPs to be responsible for particular management roles. Because all MPs thought they would always be an MP, their single-minded desire was to climb the greasy pole to the heady heights of cabinet, as it was called, to share in the power, influence and financial rewards that would come with it. All he or she had to do to ensure their chance at this great prize was to look intelligent and show undying alliegence to the party bosses.
This meant, if you apply a critical analysis to the subject, that of the six hundred and thirty elected members perhaps only two dozen, or even fewer, had a direct influence on policy and actions taken. The country was, effectively, ruled by a self-appointed elite.
In those days, if you wrote to your constituency MP about a truly local thing, say, asking why the light at the corner of your road hadn’t been working for the last six months, despite your calling up the council about it six times, there was a very good chance that the light would be working two days later. You will find yourselves that you have great influence locally. But, if you wrote to your MP suggesting a change of policy in some department of government, you would receive, some months later, an anodyne non-specific thank-you for your letter which had been ‘passed on to the department’ of whatever. As a constituent, because of the structure of government, it would be impossible for you to either have your voice heard or, if it were heard, respected.
I’ll tell you about my own experiences at that time, and the events that led to the formation of CTD.
Back in 2008 or so the country was just entering yet another recession. This time it was caused by the astonishing behaviour of the world banking industry backed up with some truly eye-watering government borrowing and spending. Although it was obvious that the huge financial losses and the need to repay public debt must have a significant effect, in the main everybody went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. While many observers felt that the writing on the wall was going to be huge new unemployment the government appeared to do nothing to address the situation. What policies they had just nibbled around the edges but, whenever a senior politician was interviewed about economic matters, and particularly about unemployment, the same old mantra was, ‘We are confident that we are heading in the right direction and we are doing all we can to promote jobs.’
It took no genius to know that, if an economy shrank in size by ten percent, then the overall effect on employment would be far greater than that, given that the only real option for any business whose profit margin was three or four percent would be to reduce the only cost that it could easily control - the workforce.
Against this background I came up with a scheme that I felt could be useful for employment, particularly employment in manufacture.
Whether or not my ideas were good ones is a discussion that we could have another day. That is not what I want to address. What I want to talk about is the difficulty in getting heard. I was just an ordinary guy. I didn’t have any influence or connections and I wasn’t involved in any special interest group. The same as most of you sitting here. All I had was an idea and an absolute certain belief in it. My idea was well documented and a model and business plan well developed. All I needed was an audience with government and, I felt sure, the overpowering logic of what I had to say would be absorbed and reflected into an exciting opportunity.
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’