I read with interest Howard Martin's letter on these pages last week. In it he is very disparaging about party politics.
No one would deny that politics in Wyre Forest is both interesting and unique, but experiment of a single issue political party campaigning on just one agenda is one that has not been repeated elsewhere. In saying that party politics is, in general, a bad thing, I feel hat Howard is missing out on one very important lesson from history - that Parliament has also evolved over time to produce a system that is based almost entirely on political parties.
I have been talking to the people of Wyre Forest for the four years that I have been the Conservative parliamentary Spokesman and I feel that I know some of their problems. Sure there is a huge anger at the closure of the hospital; sure there is a huge popularity for Richard Taylor. But what I know now is that there is an even greater anger at the current Labour Government. People in Wyre Forest and across the country as a whole feel deeply let down for many reasons too numerous to discuss here. Every morning at three o'clock, half the population of this country wake up in a cold sweat, worried about their mortgages, their credit card debts, the cost of filling up their car and the cost of filling up their shopping trolley. But when they go back to sleep, they do not hold in their minds an image of a benevolent independent MP coming to the rescue.
The problems this country faces are vast. At times like this, people don't want to be told by their parliamentary candidates that they will make a decision on how they will vote on an issue by looking at other parties' ideas and then making a judgement at the time; I am finding that they want to be told "this is how my party will sort out inflation; this is how my party proposes to sort out your pension problems; this is how my party will make the NHS more accountable to local interests, this is how much of your hard earned cash we will take in taxation."
Howard asserts that he hopes "that our Tory MP wasn't subsumed into the party machine at the expense of his community". But in saying that he is missing two important points.
The party machine is a good thing because we all help each other. As an individual I cannot possibly hope to be able to be an expert on everything that I would need to be as Wyre Forest's MP. But as part of an organisation with nearly 200 MPs, over 10,000 councillors, 300,000 members nationally and teams of analysts and researchers, I can be sure that amongst my network of support I can find an answer to the most tricky problems. Importantly, we are making proposals that people can vote that are carefully thought through by teams of very bright people, who consider how policies inter-relate and who can work out a strategy that will dig us all out of Labour's legacy.
Secondly, as a Conservative parliamentary candidate, we have drilled into our minds from the very start the mantra that we represent our constituents first, our country second and our party last. This is an important distinction because it underlines the fact that I am not the representative of the Conservative Party in Wyre Forest, but that I am Wyre Forest's representative in the Conservative Party. My job is to make the Conservative Party work for Wyre Forest. That would be as the Government, should the electorate so decide.
Health Concern is a party that has contributed a great deal to both the national debate and to local politics and I have stated here before that I have nothing but praise and respect for Richard Taylor. But if they are to field a candidate at the next general election, they must be very clear about how their candidate will use his or her time as an MP to represent Wyre Forest at the national level, as opposed to the local level. I may be proved wrong, but I suspect that standing on a promise that they will wait for someone else to have an idea and then deciding on the hoof how to vote may not be good enough next time.