Douglas Carswell

Lee Anderson, who has defected from the Tories to Reform, is about to find out that switching parties is not an easy thing to do. Politics is so tribal that most politicians are inclined to stick with ‘their side’ no matter what. When they change sides, it’s worth asking why. Having once been a Conservative MP in a solid blue constituency, who made the decision to join Ukip – which at the time had never won a parliamentary seat – I know how difficult a decision it can be. Anderson is likely to have had a lot of sleepless nights.   If you decide to change party, you owe it to your electorate to go back and ask their permission Cynics might suggest that Anderson, who had already lost the Tory whip, was pushed, rather than jumped. I am not sure that is entirely true.

It wasn’t Liz Truss’s failure to make big changes we should worry about. It was her inability to deliver even the most modest pro-market reforms after a decade in high office that ought to alarm us. As Prime Minister for six weeks, Truss tried and failed reduce Britain’s tax burden to about the level it was under Gordon Brown. As a cabinet minister for ten years, Truss – a mother as well as a free marketeer – tried to reduce the costs of childcare by reducing red tape. Her efforts to change legally mandated child/carer ratios, despite mountains of evidence it could be done safely, were persistently thwarted.

The only person ever elected for the Brexit party’s predecessor, Ukip, at a General Election, I really can’t see the point in voting for them now. Why? If you want Brexit done, Boris needs to be returned as Prime Minister on 12 December with a working majority. Backing him is the only way to beat the Brexit blockers, who’ve done everything they can to try to stop us leaving. A vote for the Brexit party won’t just add to the uncertainty. When Nigel Farage announced he’d be fielding candidates in every seat across the country, unless Boris ditched his deal, he also suggested that the Brexit party now wanted us to remain in the EU for an extra six months. You read that right.

As the only person ever to have been elected for Ukip in a General Election, if I was in the House of Commons today I would not just vote in favour of Boris Johnson's deal. I would do so cheerfully in the knowledge that this is pretty much what I have spent much of my adult life campaigning for. Firstly, UK law will become supreme in the UK. No longer will we be under the jurisdiction of the EU courts.  Nor will we be bound by EU regulation. There’s none of Theresa May’s nonsense about a ‘common rule book’. We will be free to determine our own standards. Who knows, we might even start to use elections to decide such things, restoring purpose to our derelict democracy in the process?

Exhilarating, isn't it? A referendum on Britain's continued membership of the European Union is at hand. For the first time in a generation, there's a real possibility that Britain might leave. With that prospect so tantalisingly close, it's tempting to want to rush ahead. 'Bring it on!' many regular readers will say. Hold on. Let's make sure we maximise our chances of winning. Like it, or not, a great many voters - despite all that Brussels red tape and all those ghastly EU commissioners - have yet to be convinced that we should leave. If you think that winning over fifty percent of the votes is easy, just cast your mind back to election night in your constituency... For almost forty years, we Brits have complained about Europe.

Remember Ted Heath’s greatest hits of the 70s? Riding high in the charts was his 'prices and incomes policy'. Followed by 'state subsidies' and 'picking the winners'. And who can forget the smash hit 'Barber boom' – with the bust on the B side. Far from being a distant memory, too many Tories today are carrying on as if they were in a Ted Heath tribute band. Instead of a statutory incomes policy, they are crooning about something called a 'living wage'. That’s right folks, these retro Tories want us to overturn one of the greatest Thatcherite achievements and undo the free labour market reforms. (Heck, why don’t they go the whole hog, and insist that the living wage be set at £50,000 a year, and we’d all be rich?

The Conservative party is a bit like HMV, the bankrupt music business. For years, just like HMV, we were market leaders. We won 44 per cent of the vote in 1979, 42 per cent in 1983 and 44 per cent again in 1987. But like the old music retailer, we have been losing touch with our customer base.  HMV sold music the wrong way, via a costly chain of shop outlets. We, too, have been retailing politics the wrong way. We last won a Parliamentary majority over 20 years ago. When we gained office after the 2010 election, we did so having got 36 percent of the vote. A pinnacle of success? Thirty-six per cent would have once been regarded as a disastrous trough. The stark truth we must confront is that the Tory party has wasted away across many parts of the country.

Ed Miliband got it right. Faced with a fiasco in Falkirk, where the trade union, Unite, attempted to fix the Parliamentary selection process, the Labour leader has come out on the right side of the argument about political reform. In our eagerness to attack him, we Conservatives are in danger of putting itself on the wrong side of the debate. Falkirk-type fixes have been going on for years. Safe Labour seats have been run as trade union fiefdoms for as long as anyone can remember. What Falkirk demonstrates is not that tiny cliques have been manipulating party selections, but that that old school way of doing politics is no longer acceptable. The fallout from Falkirk illustrates that deferential democracy is dead.