The following was printed as a pamphlet by the Reform Foundation:
Political
Parties and Democracy.
By
John
E. Strafford
Political parties play a major role in our
democracy. At a General Election they
issue a manifesto showing their policies and use it to persuade the electorate
to vote for them. The parties choose
the candidates who will stand for election.
From those candidates Members of Parliament will be decided by the
electorate. Members of Parliament from
the Party capable of obtaining a majority in Parliament then form the
Government, sometimes in conjunction with other parties - which have been
through the same process - as happened
in 2010, or sometimes alone.
The political parties choose their Leaders and one of
them will become the Prime Minister.
This is all very well if our political parties are democratic
organisations open to all, but what if they are undemocratic organisations? Who exercises power in our political
parties? Does it matter if they are oligarchies of
the political elite? In such a case a
small group of people will determine who governs our country and hence the
policies by which we are governed.
Political parties are part of the democratic process in
the United Kingdom. Their role is
recognised by Parliament. In the
current financial year nearly £7 million of public money, known as “Short”
money, will be paid to the opposition political parties. During the period that the Conservative
Party was in opposition, 1997-2010, it received over £40 million of public
funding. In Government the gravy train
does not stop. £8.4 million was paid
last year to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats for 103 political special
advisers. All this money is supposed to
be given to enhance our democracy: it does no such thing. All it does is perpetuate the power of the
oligarchs who run our parties. Whilst
ever the parties are able to rely on the State and/or big donors like
businessmen or trade unions they can ignore their party members.
Both of our main political parties – Labour and
Conservative, are undemocratic organisations run and controlled by oligarchies. Who are these oligarchs? They start with the Party Leaders, who are
elected by the Party memberships but then effectively cease to be accountable
to the members. The Leader appoints the
Cabinet and other Ministers when in Government. He or she exercises a great deal of
patronage by creating Peers and giving out Honours. The oligarchs include businessmen who advise
the Conservatives, and Trade Unionists who advise Labour. All are totally unaccountable to Party
members. The net is spread wide. If the Parties had been successful in
retaining the trust of the people, perhaps one could understand their desire to
maintain the status quo, but the
reality is that they are failed organisations whose membership has suffered long
term catastrophic decline, and public confidence is in free fall. Soon, as membership organisations they will
cease to exist. The recent increase in
the Labour Party’s membership since the General Election is due to the
Leadership contest on which they are embarking. Leadership contests always bring an increase
in membership because it is the one time when members know that their vote
counts.
William Hague said that the Conservative Party “was like an absolute monarchy moderated by
regicide. The Nation abolished absolute
monarchy and regicide 350 years ago. It
is time for all parties to follow suit and examine the powers exercised by their
Party Leaders. For too long our Party
Leaders have behaved like absolute monarchs.
Membership
A major factor in the reduction in turnout at
General Elections is the long term decline in the membership of our traditional
three main political parties. Correlated
with the lesser satisfaction which the people have with the political process,
we have a toxic mix. Party activists
represent approximately 10% of members.
With the decline in membership there has been a decline in
activists. It is the activists who work
to get the electorate out to vote.
Critically it is feet on the ground that gets that last marginal voter
to the polling station.
At the end of World War II the membership of the
Conservative Party was about 250,000.
As a result of the efforts of Lord Woolton membership had risen by 1952
to 2.8 million. Since then the decline
has been continuous. By 1979 membership
had fallen to 1,350,000 and during the 1980s and 1990s it declined further to
400,000 by 1997. When David Cameron became
Leader of the Conservative Party in 2005 there were 258,239 members of the
Party. By the beginning of 2010
membership had fallen to 177,000 and in the three years to the end of 2012
membership fell a further 43,000 to 134,000.
So we can see from this that in 1950 when turnout at the
General Election was 83.9% there were approximately 280,000 party members
working to get out the Conservative vote.
By the 2015 General Election when turnout was 66%, there were 13,400
members trying to do the same. The
activist members of the Conservative Party are now primarily local Councillors
and their families. After the elections
of 2014 there were 8,296 Conservative Councillors in the United Kingdom
Individual Labour Party membership in 1951 was about 1
million. At the time of the 2015
General Election it was less than 200,000, so activists have declined from
100,000 in 1951 to 20,000 today. The
Labour Party gets significant help from Trade Unionists but we have seen a
decline in the membership of Trade Unions also from some 12 million to 6.5
million. Some 70% of Labour MPs are
linked with the Trade Unions.
Liberal Party membership was some 300,000 at the end of
World War II. At the time of the 2015
General Election it had fallen to less than 50,000 under the Liberal Democrats.
So from a party activist base for the main parties of
over 400,000 in 1950 it has declined to 38,400 today. In view of these figures it is surprising
that turnout has not collapsed further!
Why has this happened?
What effect will it have and can anything be done to change this
disastrous trend?
The number of people not correctly registered to vote has
risen substantially from 3.9 million in 2000 to 7.5 million in 2012 per the
Electoral Commission. A major factor
that affects voter registration is the decline in membership of the political
parties. The origin of political
parties was as registration societies which were set up in the 1830s after the
passing of the 1832 Reform Act. Their
function was to ensure that all those entitled to vote were registered and did
vote. Today this function has almost
ceased, except in some marginal constituencies, because there are no longer the
activists to do the work.
Let me
expand on this point from my own experience.
I was Chairman of the Gerrards Cross branch of the Beaconsfield
Constituency Association from 1977 to 1980. Gerrards Cross was the largest
Conservative branch in the country with a membership of over 2,000. It was one of some twenty branches in the
Beaconsfield Association. The
Beaconsfield Association today, in total, has about half the number of members
of the Gerrards Cross branch in 1980, and yet today it is one of the largest
Constituency Associations in the country.
In 1980 the Gerrards Cross branch had a committee of 38
people for which elections were held annually.
It was a requirement of standing for the committee that you had to take on a road in the town in which
you would do the canvassing and membership subscription collecting. The membership was approximately 40% of the
electorate. Each year when the
Electoral Register was published one of the prime functions of the branch was to check that all members
were on the Register and also that all Conservative supporters were on the
Register. A list of errors was sent to
the Electoral Registration Officer so that the Register could be altered before
the Register was finalised.
The result of all this work was that few people were left
off the Register and the final Register was accurate. Branches of political parties throughout the
country were doing the same as
Gerrards Cross.
So what are the costs to society of low voter
registration and turnout? Potentially
the costs will be significant. There
will come a point when the legitimacy of the elected government is questioned
because of the low turnout. Democracy
is a process by which you determine the will of the majority. If the gap between the views of the majority
and those elected becomes too great the people may say “What can we do to
change this?” The only solutions will
be major electoral reform, reform of the political parties, or revolution. Time is running out.
Research on party membership,
done in the 1990s and published in the book “True Blues” showed two main
reasons why people join political parties.
The first reason was for social purposes. People like to be with others of a like
mind. They feel more comfortable. There is a tribal instinct. Party members
like to be led, but they also like to know that the Leader has listened to them
before he or she takes a decision.
The second reason is participation. This has to be meaningful participation i.e.
they either vote on decisions to be taken or vote for the people taking the
decisions. It is this latter reason
which has not been met by the two main political parties. Effectively large numbers of people join
these parties each year wanting to participate. When they find that they have no voice they
leave, usually after a couple of years.
Only by adopting a radical approach will we break this cycle of
decline. I set out below the measures
that need to be taken. It is a check
list to which all parties should adhere:
- Party constitutions should be capable of being amended or changed by the members of the Party at a General Meeting of the Party on the basis of one member, one vote provided there is a majority in favour of amendment or change and not less than 50% of the members have voted. Proxy voting shall be allowed.
- There should be an Annual General Meeting of the Party to which all members are invited. (Note: this meeting should not always be held in the same location so as to prevent it being skewed in favour of members from a particular Region.)
- The Chairman of the Party should be responsible for the Party Organisation.
- The Chairman and Treasurer of the Party should be elected by the members of the Party.
- The Chairman of the Party should present an Annual Report on the Party organisation at the Annual General Meeting of the Party for adoption by the members.
- The Treasurer of the Party should present the Annual Accounts of the Party to the Annual General Meeting for adoption by the members.
- The Chairman of the Committee on Candidates should be elected by the members of the Party and should present a report on candidate selection at the Annual General Meeting of the Party.
- The Chairman of any policy groups should be elected by the members of the Party and should present a report on their workings at the Annual General Meeting of the Party.
- Motions for debate on policy should be allowed at the Party’s Conference and voted upon. If due to time constraints all motions submitted cannot be debated the members at the Conference should be able to choose at least three motions for debate. All motions duly proposed and seconded should be put on the Party’s web site.
- Regional/Area/Constituency officers should be directly elected by the members of the Party.The most important of these provisions is the ability to change the Party’s constitution on the basis of One Member One Vote.If we believe in democracy the fundamental requirement for political parties is:
“No
political Party should be registered with the Electoral Commission unless it
has a democratic constitution which can be changed at a General Meeting by a clear
majority of its members on the basis of one member one vote.”
By adopting the above, participation
would be guaranteed for party members.
Some parties already have some of the above provisions in their constitutions. The Conservative Party has none of
them. The Labour Party is still
dominated by the Trade Unions although the Labour Party constitution has been
changed so that their Leader is elected on the basis of One Member One Vote
including registered supporters. At
present the Labour Party conference has Trade Union delegates attending. These affiliated delegates should be full members
of the Party and in such a case would have full voting rights. Both Conservative and Labour operate electoral
colleges which distort democracy by breaching the principle of One Person, One
Vote of equal value. The Liberal
Democrat constitution is more democratic.
For years our two main political parties have protested
that the decline in membership is because membership is a redundant
concept. People have other things to
do. They are too busy. They join single issue pressure groups. Rather than give any power to members the
oligarchies would rather retain all power in a diminishing Party. The Scottish National Party has demonstrated
just how wrong they are. In September
2014 at the time of the Scottish Referendum their membership stood at approximately
25,000. By the time of the General
Election in May 2015 they had increased it to over 110,000 so how does the
Scottish National Party compare with the Conservative Party?
The Scottish National Party:
- Has quarterly newsletters to members.
- Policy is determined at their annual Conference.
- Their Officers are all elected by their members including their Leader and Deputy Leader who are elected annually.
- They can change their Constitution on the basis of One Member One Vote with a two thirds majority.
They are a democratic party!
What a comparison with the Conservative Party where the
Chairman and Treasurer of the Party are appointed by the Leader, and are thus unaccountable
to the membership. There is no Annual
General Meeting of members, so there is no formal forum for members to raise
questions about the Party’s organisation or policies. The Annual Accounts of the Party are not
tabled for approval at an AGM. The
selection of parliamentary candidates of the Party is controlled
centrally. The Party Board can and does
take control of any Constituency Association, which does not toe the line. The infamous clause 17 of their constitution
states: “The Board shall have power to do
anything which in its opinion relates to the management and administration of
the Party”, and this makes the rest of the constitution meaningless.
What does a member get from membership of the
Conservative Party? Prior to the Party
reforms of 1998 there were a number of reasons to be a member. There were meetings at area and national
level where you could raise issues of policy or organisation. Social gatherings emphasised the tribal
feeling and sense of belonging. The
Party Conference was run by the voluntary party and it had motions for
debate. Votes were taken at the end of
the debates and although they were not binding, they reflected the views of the
members. Constituency Associations were
for all intents and purposes autonomous.
The Party had three distinct sections - the parliamentary party, the
voluntary party and the professional organisation. There were checks and balances in the
distribution of power. All of these
were swept away in 1998 with disastrous result.
The Labour Party has seen similar changes in recent
times. Its conferences used to be
dominated by motions from constituencies and Trade Unions. Vast amounts of time were spent on creating
“composite motions”. This was scrapped
and now there is little place for such debates. Instead delegates are invited to vote on
long policy papers on a take-it-or leave it basis. The old system was far from perfect, but the
new one means that delegates become rubber stamps.
Policies
Who determines policy?
Of the two main political parties, policy in the Conservative Party is
decided by the Leader and is constructed by a small coterie of people around
him or her. In the 2014 European
Parliament election the Leader of the Conservative MEPs only discovered what
was in the manifesto on the day it was published! The Conservative Party no longer goes
through the charade of pretending that the members of the Party have any
say. There are no motions for debate at
the Conservative Party Conference. The
Conservative Policy Forum has little, if any, influence on policy. The Labour Party has the National Policy
Forum and policy discussion papers. Its
conference sets the “framework” of policy, but the days when it was the conference
which decided policy are over. The
National Policy Forum has severe limitations.
Few members know who sits on it or what it talks about. There is very little reporting back to
members or consultation with members before issues are debated.
With the development of the internet Party members could
and should be much more involved in policy making. The priority of policies has to be left to
the Party Leaders but in determining those priorities they should be aware of
the strength of feelings of the membership.
Policy in the Liberal Democrat Party is determined by
their Party conference and it was their Conference which had the final say on
the Coalition Agreement. Ironically, as
soon as they got into government they changed their rules so that their MPs had
the final say on a Coalition Agreement.
Power corrupts!
Contrast the approach of the three main parties with the
three political parties whose membership is increasing. In the Scottish National Party, UKIP and the
Green Party, policy is decided at their National Conferences. Perhaps when people have a say in policy
they take ownership of the policy and are better able to propagate it? By allowing members to participate, you
increase membership.
Clearly, although the parties should determine policy, it
is the Leader of the Party who determines priorities and ultimately can alter
or abandon policies if conditions change.
The Leader should be accountable to the Party for his or her actions.
Candidates
Why cannot any registered member of the Labour or
Conservative Parties be a candidate, subject only to vetting to ensure that
they have no criminal convictions and comply with electoral law? It should be up to the members of the
Parties to determine who shall be their candidate. This is a fundamental principle. If the members do not decide, who does and
how are they accountable to the members?
The selections of parliamentary candidates of our
political Parties are controlled centrally.
They do this by controlling the Approved List of candidates in the case
of the Conservative Party or by setting various criteria for selection
determined by the Organisation Sub-committee of the National Executive
Committee in the case of the Labour Party.
We have heard a lot recently about how the range of
candidates should be widened and the Conservative Party have made much of Open
Primaries. The model for Open Primaries
is the United States so how do Conservative Open Primaries compare?
In the United States anyone can stand. In the Conservative Party the candidates are
centrally sifted and three or four candidates put forward. In many States electors have to register
support for the Party in order to vote.
With the Conservatives anyone on the Electoral Roll can vote in an Open Postal
Primary or an Open Meeting Primary, even if they are members of another Party.
The candidates in the United States raise their own funds
for campaigning in the Primary. The
problem with this is that candidates who win primaries are often those with
most money to spend. “Pork Barrel”
politics still has a big role to play in United States politics. The Conservative Party pays for a postal
primary. The costs in Totnes amounted
to £38,000. There are only half a dozen
constituencies in the country that could afford this, so unless the Party at national
level pays, or State Funding is given, postal Primaries will be few and far
between.
Campaigns in the United States are usually prolonged,
giving plenty of time to investigate the candidates. The campaigns run by the Conservatives are
strictly limited in time.
Caucus meetings of registered voters are held in the
United States at which the merits of the different candidates are debated and
then voted upon. These are banned by
the Conservative Party.
A distinction should be drawn between Open Primaries
where there is a postal ballot as in Totnes and Open Meeting Primaries. The most common, because of costs are the
Open Meeting Primaries. The
Conservative Party imposes a number of restrictions on Open Meeting Primaries:
The meetings are advertised in the local paper so there
is no guarantee that every elector is
aware that the selection is taking place.
At the meeting no debate is allowed between the
candidates – they are not even allowed
to be on the platform together.
The elector must be present for the entire meeting and
cannot leave the room for any reason. Contrast this with a postal primary where
the elector doesn’t have to hear any
candidate before voting.
Limits are imposed by Central Office on the amount of
money candidates can spend on
their campaigns.
The vote on the final adoption of the selected candidate
is by Conservative Party members.
It can be seen from the above that there are major
differences between what the Conservatives call Open Primaries and what in
practice most people understand as Open Primaries. The Conservative Open Primaries are a
gimmick. The people and the media have
been hoodwinked into believing that the process is open. It is not.
The process is controlled in detail by the Party hierarchy. There is also the danger that the selection
can be manipulated by the members of other parties, who can vote for the
weakest candidate. The Conservative
Party does not care, because it has decided on who the candidates will be.
Some Constituency Associations now run Open primaries for
local government elections. In these
cases, the sift of candidates is done by people accountable to the members of
the particular Association, so the fundamental objections do not apply.
One of the objections to allowing the members to
determine who their candidate shall be is that in many constituencies there are
very few members and they may be unrepresentative of the voters. In the Conservative Party it is estimated
that about 130+ constituency Associations have virtually ceased to exist. In such circumstances it is reasonable for
there to be a minimum number of members taking part in the selection process
and where that minimum is not reached Party Headquarters has to take over the
process.
Recently both Labour and Conservative Parties have
allowed Registered Supporters to participate in selections. Attractive though this might be in involving
more people in the electoral process it has its dangers. During the course of the current Leadership
election in the Labour Party, Registered Supporters who paid a fee of three
pounds were then given a vote in the contest.
“The Daily Telegraph” proceeded to give a step by step guide on how to
register with the admonition to vote for a particular candidate. The Trade Union “Unite” boasted that it
would sign up 70,000 affiliated members.
It is estimated that between the date of the General Election and the
date of the Selection no less than 140,000 affiliated members and registered
supporters will have joined the Party.
Already charges of entryism from both the “left” and the “right” are
being made, throwing considerable doubt on the legitimacy of the
selection. Registered supporters could
totally distort the election. It is the
members of the party which should take these decisions.
In Hong Kong in 2014 the people took to the streets in
protest at the Chinese Communist Party imposing a short list of four candidates
for the people to choose from. Yet this
is the very same process that is used by the Labour and Conservative Parties in
the United Kingdom.
Whenever Approved lists are used or procedures are
implemented for the selection of candidates those taking the decisions should
be democratically accountable to the ordinary Party members. Other than the Conservative and Labour
Parties all the other main political Parties operate with approved lists for
parliamentary candidates and there is democratic accountability of those who
decide who can be candidates.
Funding
There is no doubt that the public’s perception of
politics is influenced by the way in which the political parties are funded. Big donors or Trade Union Leaders have more
access to the Party hierarchies so more opportunity to influence. “Cash for honours” is continuously
levelled at the Conservative party. “Controlled by and funded by the Trade Unions”
is levelled at the Labour Party. People
believe that money buys influence in politics.
There needs to be a complete overhaul of party funding with a cap on
donations of £5,000. There may have to
be a transitional period for this to be brought in as suggested by the recent
all party report on Party Funding.
It is estimated that 50% of the Conservative Party’s
income is from financial institutions i.e. Bankers and Hedge Fund Managers and
80% of the Labour Party’s income is from the Trade Unions.
It is quite clear that the way in which the Conservative
and Labour parties are funded distorts our politics, but any changes would
involve them in a considerable loss of income.
The way out of this is State funding of the parties. This should be done by a payment per head
for audited membership of all political parties. Such a scheme would be a big incentive to
the parties to increase their membership.
Over a period of say five to ten years it could be phased out. The costs of such a scheme could be met in
several ways:
- Abolition of the “Short” and “Cranborne” money saving over £8 million with a substantial cut in the number of political advisers employed by the government.
- Abolition of the freepost at the European and General elections saving some £68 million.
- Sending out all election addresses for each constituency together, in booklet form, as was done for the London Mayoral election would save £47 million.
Social
Media
The development of social media has been a lifeline to
our main political parties. Twitter,
Facebook, email, have all improved the Parties ability to communicate at little
cost. A daily email requesting a £10
donation to several hundred thousand supporters brings in a substantial amount
of cash particularly when those supporters have been targeted for their views.
For the 2015 General Election the appointment of Jim
Messina (former social media guru to President Obama) as an adviser was an
indication that the Conservative Party believe that the way forward is to
organise our campaigns as in the United States by gathering up supporters
rather than relying on members. The
Labour Party made a similar appointment.
What of course is forgotten is that the Presidential Election in the
United States costs approximately $6 billion.
Support is bought. Canvassers
are paid. “Pork Barrel” politics still
has a major role to play in the politics of the United States. Because of the financial restrictions on
campaign spending we quite rightly cannot do this, but there are clearly ways
in which social media can be exploited.
For example registered supporters could be signed up for a nominal sum, or
even no sum at all, and with regular communication and involvement encourage
them to become members of the Party.
Only members of the Party should be able to vote on decisions of the
Party or vote for those who take the decisions.
Conclusions
With the rise of UKIP, the Green Party, and the Scottish
Nationalist Party, not forgetting the Democratic Unionist party we are now in
an era of multi party politics. Who now
knows which seats are marginal?
By one of those moments of irony future General Elections
will be fought on Electoral Registers drawn up by individual registration
rather than household registration. The
main reason for this was to reduce fraud.
The origins of modern political parties were as Registration Societies
as a result of the 1832 Reform Act.
Their main function was to ensure that their supporters were all
registered to vote. This job will now
be resurrected, except that there will not be the Party activists to carry it
out.
The most important factor in the General Election will be
“feet on the ground” At the margin it is the canvassing and the
knocking up that will count most. For
that you need volunteers and the most committed volunteers are members. The political Parties will ignore this at
their peril and unless our two main Parties reform themselves into democratic
organisations their decline will continue until they cease to exist.
The Scottish National Party with 110,000 members fought 59
seats in the General election. It was
the only Party that mounted a “feet on the ground” campaign in all
the seats it contested. It won 56 of
them. The other parties that fought 650
seats would have needed a million members each to fight a similar
campaign. This makes you think! It ought to make the parties think too! The result was seen in the 2015 General
Election. Turnout in Scotland was
71%. For the UK as a whole it was 66%.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that our two main
political parties face extinction unless their whole culture is changed. They must embrace democracy, member
involvement and participation and without this, like the dinosaurs, extinction
will be their destination. The Labour
Party must break the link with the Trade Unions other than as an affiliated
organisation. Voting rights should be
reserved solely for the members of the Party.
The great danger is that within the next five years the Party could
implode. Due to its low membership it
can no longer fight a ground campaign in every constituency, leaving it
vulnerable to attack from the new parties which will target their seats. What happened at the General Election in
Scotland could easily be repeated in England and Wales.
The Conservative Party must break the link between itself
and big donors who wield influence by being members of organisations such as
the £50,000 club. There is a danger of
complacency in the Conservative Party which having just won a General Election,
has a belief that their Road Trip 2015 - where they attracted hundreds of
supporters into a constituency on a particular day - is a new way of
campaigning. Lots of information was
gathered, but unless you can get hundreds of supporters into every seat on
election day, there is nobody to get the vote out and the information becomes
useless. It was probably the fear in
the electorate’s mind of a coalition between the Labour Party and the Scottish
Nationalist Party that swung the election rather than superior campaigning.
The Conservative Party has the advantage of patronage as
it is in government and by pushing through parliament the Boundaries Commission
proposals altering constituency boundaries it will get some further advantage,
but like the Labour Party it can no longer fight a general election campaign on
the ground. With a new Leader before
the 2020 General Election and a possible split during the European Referendum
the Conservative Party is also vulnerable to attack and could implode.
One final point, in 2017 there will be a referendum on
whether the United Kingdom will remain a member of the European Union. Whichever way the electorate vote there will
be a substantial minority perhaps as many as 10 million who will be
disappointed. They will be deciding
which political party to support in the future. After the Scottish referendum the Scottish
National Party attracted huge support in spite of losing the referendum. Which party will the disappointed turn to
after the European referendum – one of the major parties or one of the new parties. What is for sure is that we are moving to a
major shake-up in British politics and it will be those parties which are
democratic which are likely to be the beneficiaries.
About
the Author
JOHN E. STRAFFORD
John Strafford is the author of “Our
Fight for Democracy” – a history of democracy in the United Kingdom.
John Strafford joined the Conservative Party in 1964, and was a
Councillor for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea from 1968 to
1974. He has served at nearly all
levels of the Conservative Party including as a member of the Party’s National
Union Executive Committee for nine years and three years on the Conservative
Board of Finance. Within the
Conservative Party his political achievements include:
- As Treasurer and then Chairman of Beaconsfield Conservative Association from 1980 to 1990 increased the Constituency’s income per annum from £30,000 to £100,000.
- Successfully campaigned for the Conservative Party to be recognized in Northern Ireland and in recognition of this was made the Hon. President of South Belfast Conservative Association, Hon Vice President of the North Down Conservative Association and Hon. Vice President of the Northern Ireland Conservatives.
- In 1990 published a Paper on the Reorganization of the Conservative Party proposing a Board of Management. This was introduced in 1993.
- As Treasurer of Wessex Area in 1991 raised over £250,000 from the Constituency Associations for the Conservative Party. This still is the highest amount ever raised in one year from an Area.
- In 1995 wrote a Paper for the Bow Group – “The Conservative Party for the 21st Century” proposing a Party Constitution. This was introduced in 1998.
- Member of the Management Committee of the National Conservative Draws Society since its formation in 1994. Since its formation the Draw Society has raised over £15 million for the Conservative Party.In 2011 John was Chairman of the Conservative Yes Campaign in the referendum on the Alternative Vote.27th July 2015
