Friday, May 12, 2023

Why the Tories should be wary of consulting their grassroots

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Tomorrow the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is gathering in Bournemouth. 

This new party group was set up after the party's MPs decided they could no longer stomach supporting Boris Johnson as leader and prime minister. 

A report in the Guardian says its organisers deny it's a 'Johnson revivalist group', but that report also says almost every speaker at the event is a noted Johnson supporter.

The CDO website gives the group's aim:

Our mission is to strengthen party democracy by ensuring the Conservative Party is representative of the membership and fairly represents their views.

And says its vision is to:

Re-enfranchise Conservative Party members to be the masters of their own democratic destiny.

If I wanted the Conservatives to stay in power, I would be worried about this.

And not just because the Conservative membership are the people who elected Iain Duncan Smith as the party's leader and Liz Truss as the nation's prime minster.

I would be worried because even consulting the party's councillors was enough to finish Margaret Thatcher.

Her original proposal was to phase in the Poll Tax over 10 years. I saw what happened at my first full council meeting here in Harborough when we agreed our response to the government consultation.

As I later recalled on the Guardian website:

Conservative members didn't want it phased in over 10 years: they wanted it at once. You could see the pound signs in their eyes as they calculated how much they and their neighbours would save.

So, like Tory-run councils across the country, we told Whitehall we wanted the Poll Tax brought in at once.

Which it was. With hilarious consequences.

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