How broad should a broad church be?

Kemi Badenoch’s crackdown on Conservative candidate selections hasn’t been front-page news, because nothing the Tories do is front-page news. But it’s a good opportunity to talk about the desirability, and viability, of the “broad church”.

The term “broad church” describes the historic character of our major parties. Under our electoral system, which militates against smaller parties, the big ones tend to have the character of permanently constituted coalitions, compassing a broad span of opinion on the left and the right respectively. 

This state of affairs is generally seen as both desirable, because it creates more space for internal debate and is an impediment to dogmatism, and necessary, because only a party with broad appeal can hope to win the level of voter support needed to secure an overall majority in the House of Commons.

It is to this tradition that people tend to appeal when opposing any real or imagined purge. Consider this, from Prosper UK’s statement on Gavin Barwell being refused a Tory candidacy:

A selection process built around two contested issues risks both narrowing the party and driving away a generation of talented people who want a state in its future. Millions of centre and centre-right voters who take a different view on Net Zero or the ECHR will conclude that they are no longer welcome either.

Naturally, such arguments will appeal to you more or less depending on whether it is your allies or opponents that are struggling to get selected. But without suggesting for a moment that the general case for broad-church parties is wrong, it does come with two important qualifications.

The first is that there has always been, and logically must always be, a limit to how broad the church can get before it ceases to be a meaningful congregation. In a competitive party system, a party has to stand for something.

Where the bar for the bare minimum of political coherence is set depends on other factors, such as whether or not your system has referendums. If a prime minister can outsource a particularly divisive question to a plebiscite, it becomes much less important to impose party discipline. That is, in fact, why Harold Wilson introduced them to British politics in the first place.

If you don’t use referendums, however, then the way to resolve a question like Britain’s EU membership is a general election — and in those conditions, it is absolutely imperative that the party leadership is able to ensure that every party candidate endorses, and is prepared to support in the Commons, the party’s position.

This fact has in recent years been often missed. Even thoughtful constitutional thinkers such as Jonathan Sumption fall into the trap of deprecating referendums as alien to the British tradition and treating Boris Johnson’s decision to withdraw the whip from 21 rebellious MPs as a constitutional outrage.

But these things cannot both be true. Johnson was preparing to fight a general election on the question of Brexit; it would have been utterly absurd for him to allow forward as Conservative candidates men and women who were not only not voting for his programme, but actively colluding with the opposition to impose a completely different one (the real constitutional outrage of that Parliament). 

And that’s the second qualification: that the extent to which parties can afford to be broad churches depends a great deal on not just specific constitutional rules, such as whether or not big questions are settled by referendum, but the wider political culture in which the parties operate — and in particular, the attitudes of MPs and the media.

You will not find many commentators who will praise outright as a positive development the modern tendency towards top-down command and control in our political parties. It seems the handmaid of an age of withered party memberships, waning quality of parliamentarians, obsession with media management, and other ills besides. 

But imagine that a party tried to go back to the old days, to the old bottom-up process in which the party chose its MPs, the MPs chose their leader, and that leader did their best with what their party gave them. It would not work, for two reasons.

First, the critical ingredient to the old diversity was loyalty and discipline. Parliaments were, on average, far less mutinous in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, than in modern times. It was far less important for the leadership to tightly control candidate selections as most candidates could be relied upon to vote the right way.

Consider that even in the first hard years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when her popularity had collapsed, there was no attempt to depose her and she had no general difficulty getting her business through the Commons. The Wets might have loathed what she stood for, but that was no excuse for indiscipline. No Tory MP I’ve yet asked can imagine the modern Conservative Party behaving like that in the face of similar polling today.

The other essential element of the old-fashioned “broad church” was the role of the press. When the media understood parties to be organic institutions over which the leadership did not have total control, they were less likely to treat as newsworthy the presence of malcontents, eccentrics, and unsavoury characters.

How this changed is something of a chicken-and-egg question: was the Blair/Cameron-era fixation on media management a reflection of changing press behaviour, or did their attempts to control the narrative change journalists’ expectations? But whatever the reason, those attitudes have changed.

I suspect they are overdue some big rows which would lead, one way or another, to the departure of some of their remaining MPs

This does not excuse every purge, of course; no party hoping to win an overall majority under First Past the Post can afford to get too narrow. But honestly, the Conservatives are probably a long way from the line. If anything, I suspect they are overdue some big rows which would lead, one way or another, to the departure of some of their remaining MPs. 

What we have seen under Rishi Sunak, and to only a gradually diminishing extent under Badenoch, is a party paralysed by the fact that its MPs neither agree on answers to any of the big questions nor have the discipline to deliver a programme they don’t personally support. So long as that remains the case, they will never deserve to return to office.