Reply to Philip Davies MP

Philip Davies has posted a long and indignant response to Power2010 on the ConservativeHome site. We asked ConHome for a right to reply, but none was forthcoming so we're posting one here instead - please forgive the length, but Mr Davies' post raises a number of issues that it's worth replying to in depth.

The MP for Shipley says he is "surprised" to be singled out alongside 5 other MPs for "failing our democracy" - first in the full-page Guardian ad and then through our local campaigning actions. Had he bothered to check, however, there'd be no cause for great surprise. The 6 MPs nominated were each chosen by members of the public, following which we checked their records to confirm their opposition to the reforms for improving our democracy chosen by the public to make up the Power Pledge. Sure, there are lots of MPs in the Rotten Parliament who could have been chosen, but Mr Davies has excelled himself in defending the status quo and speaking out against civil liberties and the fight for a reforming Parliament has to start somewhere!

Whilst accusing us of making "outlandish" claims Davies makes a number of insinuations about Power2010 which, again, a moment's digging would have dispelled. He says it is "unclear who funds this mysterious organisation" when in fact the answer is right there for all to see on the website and has been since we launched: the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (and previously the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust). Davies also accuses us of having a "partial and almost partisan agenda", yet we've been clear from the beginning that we are targeting individual candidates on their record - regardless of their party.

Our Pledge was not cooked up in a smoky back room it was decided by the public - over 100,000 votes were cast to choose the 5 reforms and the ideas themselves were submitted by the public in an open process that lasted several months. To date Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru and UKIP candidates have all signed up so to try and paint this as a party-driven agenda is absurd.

Equally absurd is Davies' accusation that we are riding "roughshod over the opinions of the people and the liberties upon which our democracy is based" with our robust campaign on the five reforms selected by the public. Do the Conservatives - or indeed any of the other major parties - allow their agenda to be so openly and democratically set? Take a look at John Strafford's article on "The decline and death of Party membership", also on ConservativeHome, and you'll find your answer.

Mr Davies then turns to each of the reforms.

He demonstrates his blinkered view of civil liberties when he discusses Power2010's goal of "scrapping ID cards and rolling back the database state". Mr Davies, it appears, only sees a problem with the physical card itself and the interference this would represent into our lives should they be made compulsory. Well, this is one way in which ID cards violate liberty, but it's not the only way. The real danger behind ID cards lies in the vast centralised database, the National Identity Register, which the cards are linked to.

The Register would collect 50 pieces of registrable information - including biometric information, such as fingerprints - in one place to be accessible by thousands of officials and shared across a wide range of government departments and agencies without an individual's consent. Mr Davies' leader, David Cameron, showed a much better grasp of what's at stake than the member for Shipley when he told a public meeting in Bristol recently that: "Gathering all that data together is dangerous. It's not about the piece of plastic, it's the database and the sharing of data that is the issue." Too right - and all civil libertarians should remind the Tories of those words if they achieve office.

Moving on from ID cards, Mr Davies goes onto argue in support of a universal DNA database that would contain the DNA of all citizens regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime. "If our DNA is stored on a database, what liberty does it actually infringe upon?", he asks. It's more than a little surprising that someone with a prominent place on the board of an organisation calling itself The Freedom Association should need to ask that question, but let's set out why.

Putting aside for one moment the enormous costs of such a database, its inherent insecurity and its questionable value in solving crime (on which see the excellent Big Brother Watch) we need to consider how having our genetic material harvested and stored in a giant database to be trawled in search of criminals moves us from being a society of citizens into one of suspects. This, surely, would represent our ultimate act of submission to the database state; a subjection intolerable to anyone who aspires to live in a free society which maintains a proper distinction between guilt and innocence.

As Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA profiling has said, it leaves innocent people "branded as criminals". Even if you maintain that handing over DNA to the state is no big deal, you have to worry about the corrupting effects this shift would have on our legal system as a whole as concepts such as privacy and innocence are degraded and undermined.

Philip Davies is amongst a small minority of politicians in the Conservative party who believe the DNA database should be extended to the whole UK population. He represents a strand in Tory thinking that opposes the introduction of ID cards but is complacent about the much larger threat posed by the database state to our freedom and privacy and that's why his being called out on this issue should come as much less of a shock than he makes out.

In response to Power2010's call for proportional representation, he points out that "all but one election in the past 60 years has returned a majority for one party or another". True enough. But he conveniently ignores the absurd and unjust distortions of the popular will that this relies upon. Take 1951, for example, where Labour polled more votes than the Tories and still lost the election or the Lib Dems polling 2% less than Labour in 1983 and winning 102 fewer seats.

Perhaps Mr Davies is willing to tolerate such distortions due to his attachment to single party majority government; but this is an idea and a mode of rule which belongs to another era, one when society was dominated by two social blocks and Labour and Tories regularly polled over 90% of the vote. Today we live in a plural, multi-party democracy where at the most recent nationwide elections, to the European Parliament, 57% of votes went to parties other than Labour and the Tories. But we remain a country "kettled" by an unfair voting system and the two main parties whose interests it still serves.

Mr Davies defends this undemocratic state of affairs with the usual clichéd arguments levelled against PR. Let's take each of them in turn:

1. PR tends towards coalition governments which "are usually chaotic"

Not true - see Germany and the Scandinavian countries, some of the most stable in the world, and all with coalition government. Countries with FPTP, meanwhile, are often unstable - see the UK in the 1970s.

2. "If the UK were to switch to PR system, the public would cease to decide who forms the government of our country...As the third party, the Liberal Democrats would hold the balance of power and would be free to enter government with whichever party gives them the best deal."

It's just not the case that one smaller party would call the shots under PR. It's nearly always clear where smaller parties stand and if the electorate don't like them they can vote them out, as they do regularly in countries that use this method of voting. Voting reform would open up politics and offer voters more choice creating new alliances and forms of co-operation between parties that break the traditional left-right mould.

In reality it is FPTP which leads to a small minority of voters having the decisive influence on elections with party campaigns crafted to appeal to the several hundred thousand voters in the "swing" seats which are being contested - the other 44 million are effectively disenfranchised.

3. "Most supporters of PR are from the left. The reason they favour this flawed system is not because they believe it hands power to the people, because they believe it hands power to them."

The charge that PR is some left-wing conspiracy is perhaps the most preposterous of all. It's a voting system used by mature democracies around the world. The arguments for it rest on fairness, pluralism and political equality, not on partisan interests, which is probably why in polls, over 60% of the public regularly back it as the best system.

Ironically, despite Mr Davies' claim that under FPTP "when you don't like the Government, you can show them the door" he and his party are entering an election at which there's a decent chance they will win more votes than Labour across the country, but less seats. Truly this election could be the "last gasp" of FPTP. Why not embrace reform now and be one step ahead!

Next, the House of Lords. Having given us a dogged exposition of the need for proper accountability when it comes to voting systems, Mr Davies' principles go out the window when it comes to considering the Upper Chamber. Davies defends an unelected House of Lords as "a lot of the more detailed examination of legislation takes place, certainly more than in the House of Commons".

That may be true, but the abject state of the Commons should not be an excuse for tolerating the presence of a medieval chamber of appointed cronies, hereditary peers ruling by birth and a small band of Bishops unsure what to do with themselves! Mr Davies mentions the cash for peerages scandal, but this is only one of many scandals involving the Lords we've endured in recent times.

From cash-for-peerages to cash-for-amendments to the outrage of non-dom donors the unelected chamber has been a constant source of sleaze and scandal. Few will have been surprised by revelations in the recent "cash for influence" affair that retiring MPs, such as the "Honourable" Sir John Butterfill, see a seat in the Lords as the best place to pursue a career in corporate lobbying.

Is it unfair to a few individuals to point this out? Perhaps, but the fact is the Lords, and its system of appointments, has been one of the principal sources of corruption not just in our politics but in our society as a whole as good behaviour and loyalty to the status quo are bought off with ermine and coronets in a ritual that degrades our public life. Are there decent and honourable and diligent people in the Lords who do a valuable job scrutinising legislation? Of course there are, but if they would like to remain let them stand for election and convince the voters they deserve to make laws on our behalf.

If we were to approach reform of the Lords in an imaginative fashion aiming for a diverse and independent second chamber of lively debate and competing views there is no reason we would end up with something as craven and party-dominated as the Commons as Davies fears. An elected Lords is long over-due.

Mr Davies concludes with a list of other important issues relating to our democracy, such as our relationship with the EU, and asks why we aren't challenging MPs on these. Of course there are many issues that are worthy of urgent public debate and consideration but, as we've set out, we have limited ourselves to campaigning on the five that came out of the Power2010 process of bottom up deliberation and public decision.

The campaign was launched in response to the catastrophic loss of trust that followed the expenses crisis last year with the aim of ensuring our representatives in the next Parliament take seriously the need for reform. Before the election gets up and running we have dedicated ourselves to highlighting the record of those MPs who have consistently stood against democratic reform, civil liberties and the issues in the Power Pledge.

Some may consider it harsh to single out particular MPs like this, but this action must be seen within the context of an overall crisis of the system. Faced with a democracy on life-support, with historic levels of public anger and distrust, the political class seems unable to shake itself out of its complacency. Well, Power2010 aims to start the shaking and in the process spark up some vital debate on urgent issues which are being ignored. In this spirit we accept Mr Davies call for an open debate. We have offered him a live radio debate on the issues and are already planning to organise a hustings where Mr Davies - and all candidates standing in Shipley - can debate the reform of our democracy and the five issues on the Power Pledge.