Engineering The Vote
Despite the title this article does not concern the ongoing elections saga throughout Zimbabwe in which President Robert Mugabe may attempt to rig the result in a desperate effort to cling onto power for another consecutive term.
No, unfortunately this post once again concerns the Conservative MEP selections and the continuing discontent being voiced by party members over its rules and procedure.
This dissatisfaction has rumbled on for over a year since the central party hierarchy proclaimed that incumbent MEPs would automatically top any selection list and the top ranking woman in any vote would automatically receive preferential treatment.
Since the selection count on Friday the Conservative party has bowed to pressure and publicly released the figures by which candidates were ranked and selected. The results show that despite a number of women receiving fewer votes than their equivalent male candidates, they were still ranked more highly in the final process. Unfair? Yes. Unexpected? No.
Yet, in a few regions female candidates such as Jacqueline Foster and Anthea McIntyre topped their respective ballots on their own merit without it would seem any required or unwanted intervention. These results therefore prove that women, regardless of their gender, can outperform male candidates in a vote if they are deserving.
The Conservative MEP selections process is in many ways an insult to decent female candidates because it automatically treats them as inferior and suggests that the only way in which they will succeed is if their ranking is artificially raised.
However, to my mind the most disgraceful aspect of these MEP selections has been the way in which incumbent MEPs have been protected from any form of democratic scrutiny. Being an MEP should be about (if it is about being anything at all) serving the voting electorate. It should not be a job for life, or at least until you feel the need to retire safe in the knowledge that you have secured yourself a nice fat pension and stashed away a sizeable lump sum in the bank.
Yet, under the current selections process, being a Conservative MEP has pretty much become just that: a job for life. Once you are elected and safely off on the Euro Star to Brussels, under the current rules you cannot be kicked out. Not by the members and certainly not by the electorate. This is because under the list system the electorate vote for a party and not individual candidates.
The Conservative party specifically designed the new selection rules with certain targets in mind. One, as already mentioned, was to increase the number of elected female Conservative MEPs. Another was to placate rebellious europhile MEPs within the Conservative grouping, who, through fear of being exposed and deselected by an organised eurosceptic party membership, had made plain that they would cause considerable trouble over the party leaving the EPP-ED grouping in the EU Parliament.
The party leadership, not wishing any negative publicity on that old issue of ‘Europe’ (you know, that issue that nobody really cares about but affects just about everything in this country) caved in very quickly to these MEPs demands, making quite sure in the process that their positions were not open to anything even resembling fair, open and democratic competition.
Until the most recent selections this month, incumbent MEPs did have to go through the small and slightly democratic process of a vote by party members. Now even that one partial check on their position has gone, and that is clearly unacceptable.
