Independent, non-party members of parliament embody a contradiction. In Edmund Burkes terms, are they to be representatives who owe responsibility to their own judgment rather than electors opinion, or are they peoples tribunes whose larynx is the property of their constituents? The rise of independents in public life there are now over 2,000 in Britains local councils may be read as a direct response to the presidential style of Tony Blairs New Labour government, for which parliament functions as a baroque rubber-stamp.
Many voters are disillusioned rather than apathetic, and troubled as much by Iraq and Britains submission to the United States as they are by jammed roads and nutrition-free school dinners. They are trying to renegotiate their contract with power. When government seems arrogant and opposition parties moribund, where can they go? For many of them, the box marked independent seems an attractive option.
Independents are the Alka-Seltzer of the body politic, says Martin Bell. When party politics fails, they purge the system. In 1997, Bell, his white suit a signifier of moral authority, won a bruising campaign in Tatton against Neil Hamilton an especially venal symbol of eighteen years of Conservative government to become the first independent MP in Britain for fifty years.
In 2001, Dr Richard Taylor stood in Wyre Forest to protect Kidderminster hospital and was rewarded with the largest majority of any opposition MP that year. In 2005, around twenty independent candidates are mounting serious challenges. They are part of a new breed of electoral Davids who might just leave the Westminster Goliaths stunned on 5 May.
Taylor, who is tipped to hold his seat, has widened his portfolio considerably. The fury he felt as he saw the staff at his hospital stripped to a skeleton crew was directed at unelected quangos and civil servants. That was his ticket accountability and less meddling by Whitehall and he travelled on it, voting to make control orders subject to judicial discretion, against the hunting ban, for an all-elected House of Lords. Naturally, he has been a vociferous critic of foundation hospitals.
Iraq has produced two of the noisiest single-issue candidates this time around. Reg Keys says his son, a military policeman killed in Majar al-Kabir, died for a lie. After initially planning to challenge Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, in Ashfield, he has launched a highly organised campaign in Tony Blairs Sedgefield to take on the organ-grinder, not the monkey. His message is simple: let me be the catalyst to hold Blair to account for the catastrophic political blunder of his ill-founded bellicosity.
Craig Murrays claim is subtler, and thus more difficult to stake. He is fighting Jack Straw in Blackburn over human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. As British ambassador in Tashkent, Murray objected to the use by Britain of information that had been beaten out of detainees by Uzbek heavies, a delightful band not averse to boiling people alive. He was shushed, smeared, suspended, and finally severed in February 2005. His campaign, conducted from an ancient Green Goddess fire-engine exemplifies one of things independents can do just by running: expose the mechanisms of constituency politics.
Blackburn is a Labour rotten borough, he says, observing that, in a constituency where a Labour councillor was recently jailed for vote-rigging and where only 43,000 people voted in 2001, there have been 20,350 applications for postal votes. Ten Muslim voters have separately told Murray that they were instructed to submit their postal ballot to Labour party members. Such is the disquiet at Labours Old Queen Street headquarters in London over Murrays challenge that it has placed Straws seat on its list of marginals, despite his 9,249 majority.
Neither Keys nor Murray are readily compared to Jordan, the glamour model who garnered 713 votes as an independent in Stretford in 2001. But there is a link: as single-issue candidates, all are wholly reliant on their central assets.
Elsewhere, a new breed of indie is emerging: candidates who make their independence their platform. They have high local profiles; they are not bound to a single issue; their war cry is representational, accountable democracy.
Kate Allsop is wired in to Ashfield, not least because she used to run a detective agency there. Nottinghamshire born and bred, she is now a local councillor the antithesis of the parachuted candidate. (Hoon, her target, has houses in London and Derbyshire. Asked to comment on this, his constituency staff hung up.) Both she and Stewart Rickersey, who is standing in neighbouring Mansfield, present themselves as the vessels of their constituents will. When the House of Commons divides, their feet would belong to the electorate. Allsop, nothing if not frank, bemoans the sesquipedalian nature of political communication. People dont understand the language of government, she says, citing Hoon as a leading exponent of euphemism: collateral damage means sons and daughters blown to pieces.
Mansfield is perhaps the most likely venue for an upset. In May 2003, twenty-five independents broke Labours thirty-year hold on the local council. Rickersey, managing director of the Chad newspaper for fourteen years, masterminded the campaign. He was selected to take on Alan Meale, an old Labour man with a majority of 11,000 who has passed the tellers in fewer than half of this parliaments votes.
Rickersey takes representation deadly seriously. He enthuses about a consultation system being tested by the Independent Network (IN), a loose affiliation set up to boost the resources of independents who do not have the luxury of round-the-clock Tippex teams. Peter Lay, who heads the IN, says the system could be rolled out early in the next parliament and involves secure IDs that would allow everyone on the electoral register to vote on major decisions by text, email, phone or letter. The idea is to generate in politics the interactivity that mobilises millions of votes for Pop Idol. Six young people in a pub having a bloody argument about Europe could text me and see themselves represented in parliament, Rickersey says.
The arguments against the independent are strong: they split votes, they lack bloc clout. But the first conflates hustings pragmatism with the flaws of first-past-the-post. The second is countered by something Ralph Nader said: The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. If it is not an oxymoron, this is the parliamentary equivalent of direct action: Reg Keys threatened to hang himself outside the Labour conference to extract an apology from Blair. To emancipate the electorate from the long whip of the party system, the independent candidates must show that they can contain multitudes without allowing ethical judgement to be stampeded, to stretch the constitution without snapping it.
In the days before the 5 May election, Tom Burgis will be on the campaign trail with Stewart Rickersey in Mansfield as he attempts to unseat Alan Meale on a ticket of accountable politics. To put representational independence to the acid test, openDemocracy readers are invited to email their questions for Stewart Rickersey to david.hayes@opendemocracy.net, from where they will be forwarded.
