I could see the sense of local selection at a time when communities were more stable and rooted. However in modern Britain where the workforce is incredibly mobile and people don’t stay in one city let alone one borough for all their lives,

So, getting this straight, one of your principle arguments against the current system is that it’s localised and local selection isn’t relevent due to mobility? Notwithstanding the fact that I’ve moved constituency, 5 times, county three times and end of the country twice in the last 5 years, I think that argument is flawed—I’ve settled in quickly and got involved with each community I’ve moved to, local issues matter a lot to most people, even transients, and sometimes the least likely to take a problem into account are those that have been there the longest.

But taking this supposed problem into account, your solution is to replace local selection with, um, local selection? Have I missed something or is this point completely irrelevent?

it is anachronistic and more importantly undemocratic

You also seem to show no understanding whatsoever of how primaries work in the US, nor of how parties in the UK actually select.

In the US, party membership isn’t as important as it is over here, the large parties receive federal funding to cover their running costs (but not campaigning costs), thus instead of being membership organisations anyone is entitled to register as a party member. Over here, the parties are reliant on money from members to cover basic costs, thus are constituented and run as membership organisations.

In the US, most primaries only allow you to vote if you’re registered for that party (ie a party ‘member’). In the UK, parties have different systems, but the Tories use a primary system of sorts, or alternatively a membership ballot, the Lib Dems ballot all local members (cost of joining a whole £10 per year, less if you’re a claimant) and Labour use a mixture of full members and union members and combining the ballots in some way I’ve never really bothered to learn.

, that a small band of essentially unaccountable people wield so much power.

Um, you mean the local members of the party vote in a ballot—who should they be accountable to? Anyone can join their local party, and I don’t want to have to justify who I vote for in a ballot if I don’t want to.

If you want better choice of candidates and a more representative Parlt, looking to the US for inspiration really isn’t the way I’d choose, they’re worse than us on that score. The best way to give voters better choice would be to bad the Irish system of multi-member STV, as now used in Scottish local elections, where parties are encouraged to put up more than one candidate each and a diverse range of candidates rewards the party.

This answers each of your 4 points better than primaries do.

How was it a split within the Labour Party.

Galloway had been expelled 2 years earlier.

The blue rinse brigade favoured the country gentleman from Shropshire, but I and hundreds of other residents overwhelmingly voted in Paul Uppal, who made the best speech (and answers to questions on the night) will make an excellent MP – and Wolverhampton’s first South Asian MP. Had it not been for the open primary, we would have ended up with the country gentleman!

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