From the Observer archive, August 1972: Dick Taverne and Labour

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/aug/09/from-the-archive-labour-party-dick-taverne

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The central point has been misunderstood in the controversy about the decision of 75 members of the Lincoln Labour Party to replace Mr Dick Taverne, MP, with another candidate at the next election. The right of a party to choose or to change its representative is beyond question. The real question is: how should that right be exercised?

Should it be done by a committee with or without full consultation with the members? Or should it be done by the members themselves? These are important questions because more than half the constituencies in the country are – like Lincoln – safe seats for one party or the other, so that though a majority of the electorate votes the winning candidate in, it is the “selectorate” that chooses or changes him which exercises the real power.

When the Bournemouth Conservatives decided in 1959 to get rid of their sitting MP, the Tory Central Office organised a ballot in which more than 7,000 members voted. Isn’t it rather deplorable that Labour leaders should now show themselves so much less “democratic” than the Conservatives were then?

Key quote

We do not have to choose between being intellectual snobs and indifferent slobs. Equal opportunity is not inconsistent with quality of achievement.Dr William Carr, president of the World Organisation of the Teaching Profession, criticising extravagant teaching ideas

Talking point

I should like to appeal to “friends of Ireland” in Britain to manifest this friendship by trying to make the part of Ireland for which Britain has responsibility a decent place to live in. Insistence on the need for unity does not have that effect in Northern Ireland; it has the opposite effect. As regards unity, friends of Ireland should follow the example of most Irish people, and leave that question to God. Conor Cruise O’Brien on Northern Ireland