Boss Tweed, the infamous leader of New York’s Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine in the mid-1800s, once said; “I don’t care who does the electing, as long as I get to do the nominating.” American politics has come a long way since Tweed’s reign of graft. And whilst it would be foolish to hold up the US system as a paragon of democratic virtue, there is one area where they have us beaten hands down: they value internal party democracy almost as much as they value the final, inter-party election.
From the presidency all the way down to the lowliest state representative, both major US parties are woven together by an interlocking web of primaries and caucuses. This system is, by its very nature, more open and more democratic than what we have in the UK. It has allowed for new talent to break through; think of Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or, most recently, Zohran Mamdani. They represent vastly different politics but not one of them would be where they are today under the British system. Their candidacies would have been strangled at birth by the party machine, long before any voter had the chance to be inspired.
In the UK, we don’t have primaries; we have selections. The business of political nominating is a tightly controlled, byzantine process, unique to each party and deliberately opaque to the outside world. I consider myself a fairly engaged political obsessive, but I’d wager the average party activist couldn’t accurately explain how an MP selection actually works, let alone the average voter. There are various, often conflicting, phases of longlisting, shortlisting, and nominations from affiliated organisations. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to be in a constituency that even gets a vote! At the 2024 election, members of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee even presented themselves with safe seats at the last hour – including an activist from Oxford being given nominations in County Durham without the say of a single local.
The vast majority of voters have absolutely no idea how the candidates on their ballot paper materialise. This closed-shop approach means that in constituencies all over the country, where there are hundreds of thousands of voters, there is often a vanishingly small number of people actually choosing the candidate. Anecdotally, when I ran for Wandsworth Council in 2022, only ten people turned up to my selection meeting. Ten people decided who would represent the party in a ward of thousands of Labour voters.
This lack of public involvement breeds a corresponding lack of scrutiny. Compared to the wall-to-wall coverage of primaries in other countries, UK candidate selections are held in almost total media darkness. With the honourable exception of Michael Crick’s excellent ‘Tomorrow’s MPs’ account on social media, party selections are virtually never covered by the national press. They only make it into the local papers when something goes spectacularly, catastrophically wrong. The public scrutiny of a person’s record and character simply doesn’t happen until they’re already on the ballot.
Other mature democracies are moving in the opposite direction towards a more open and engaging model. In France, the Socialists, the Greens, and the centre-right Republicans have all chosen their presidential candidates via open primaries, allowing hundreds of thousands of self-declared supporters to participate. In Poland, several parties have held primary elections to select their candidates. This adds another vital layer of democracy, getting voters more engaged in the political process long before a general election is called. It creates another layer of scrutiny, forcing candidates to defend their views not just to a room of loyal party faithful but to a broader cross-section of the public. It’s by no means a perfect system but it is unequivocally better than ten people in a rainy church hall, or five people at party headquarters.
Primaries wouldn’t be a complete novelty in the UK. In fact, one of David Cameron’s better ideas – a low bar, admittedly, given his legacy of austerity and pandering to UKIP – was to experiment with open primaries for a handful of key target seats before the 2010 election. Residents could pay a pound to register their views and choose the Conservative candidate. Sarah Wollaston in Totnes and Philip Lee in Bracknell were both examples of MPs selected this way, with Wollaston attracting an impressive 25% turnout – orders of magnitude better than the usual church hall gathering. Both went on to become two of the more effective and independent-minded politicians of the 2010 intake, reaching ministerial office. It is no coincidence, I think, that both eventually crossed the floor over Brexit. A candidate who has to appeal to a broad coalition of voters, rather than just a narrow selectorate, is naturally encouraged to be more of an independent thinker and more attuned to their constituency than to the party whip.
During the Corbyn years, an incendiary debate on mandatory reselection of MPs took hold of the Labour Party. Supporters of Corbyn argued that allowing MPs a free run made a mockery of democracy, whilst detractors argued that putting MPs to the whims of people who turned up to party branch meetings would mean they’d be out of step with voters. Both were in a way right, but open primaries would solve this problem from both ends. Being an MP would not be a job for life; you would have to campaign for your right to represent your party at every election and local supporters and residents would get final say on who the candidates are.
Less so at the current, volatile polling, but for the vast majority of modern British electoral history, a not-inconsiderable number of constituencies have been foregone conclusions (and the effect this has had on relative deprivation and engagement with populism is significant). Places like Liverpool Walton, Bootle, Hornsey, and Westmorland are dramatic examples, where the winning party has majorities running into the tens of thousands. In these seats, the nomination is the election. The result on polling day is a formality.
So if the outcome is already decided then why shouldn’t the people of Liverpool Walton get a real, meaningful say in who represents them? If an certain party’s candidate is virtually guaranteed to be sent to Westminster, it is only right and just that the local residents who so loyally support their party get a direct vote on who their MP will be. Open primaries in safe seats would transform them into vibrant arenas of local debate. Boss Tweed would be appalled – which is precisely why we should do it.
Pablo John is Head of External Affairs for a green energy trade body and a member of the Compass Board.