Normalising mass deselection is a big mistake | thearticle

Boris Johnson is on a deselection mission. Europhilic Tory MPs who vote against the Government on Brexit this week will not, we are told, be able to stand as Conservatives at the next

election. What will happen to the Party when the rebels are weeded out? By way of a blueprint, one need only look to Labour. The threats to deselect ‘Blairite’ MPs have led several observers

to brand the party Stalinist. But Corbyn and his allies have ignored the criticisms and ploughed on – because they understand the dangers of taking power when the party is not united. For

the Tories, it is much the same. What did for May was rebellion – the much maligned ‘saboteurs’ – and now Boris Johnson has encountered the same problem. His plan is not to swamp them with

an overwhelming majority, though. Instead, he will cut them from the herd altogether. In the short term, it makes a great deal of sense. In order to get any semblance of a Brexit deal, let

alone No Deal, the Prime Minister needs his party onside. The public, meanwhile, is tired of the time wasting, and what many perceive as deliberate attempts to derail the democratic process.

Far from seeing Johnson’s actions as a ‘coup,’ they see the new Prime Minister as decisive and proactive. According to the polls, Remain and Leave voters now agree: the government needs,

above all, to ‘get on with it’. Brexit was as much a vote against an unrepresentative, self-absorbed Westminster as it was a vote against Brussels. There is nothing to say that such a cull

of pro-remain MPs would play badly with the electorate. The problems, though, will come further down the line. The same discontent many people felt, and, indeed, still feel towards

Westminster stems from an idea that the political parties were out of touch with the people before the 2016 referendum. But creating a Labour party in the image of Jeremy Corbyn, along a

single particular strain of left-wing political philosophy, has done little to cure the public of that view. If anything, Labour is now seen as more out of touch than it ever was under

Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband. The party doesn’t listen to the people. That is the problem the new Tory party could face. Normalising mass deselection, will not, long term, make politicians

more like their constituents. Instead, it will make them more like the party leadership — and if Labour are anything to go by, it could well make it easier for the Tories to become more

detached from the rest of the country, and more in thrall to what the upper echelons of the party say. In the short term, deselection might allow the Tories to push on with Brexit, as the

majority of the people want. But the Party must heed the warnings of history and not give top politicians even more say in deciding what the public wants. It was that close-mindedness, that

arrogance, that caused the discontent that gave us Brexit in the first place. Closing the Conservative mind to thoughts outside of a narrow worldview would be as much a betrayal of Brexit as

any Remainer plot.