Key Pledges

Candidates covenant to resign if recall process is triggered

As a party, we are committed to the principle that elected representatives at all levels should be constantly accountable to their electorate and we regard our current ‘occasional democracy’ as hopelessly inadequate. Whatever the interval is between elections it will inevitably be both too short for representatives to give their full attention to the job and too long for the public to feel properly sovereign. True democracy requires that the public have some means to spontaneously dismiss representatives they’re not satisfied with – a recall process.

Most of our goals can only be achieved by getting enough MPs elected to push through changes to the law. But this is one we can partially achieve unilaterally. By binding themselves to resign if the conditions of a recall motion are fulfilled, our candidates will be setting an example that other candidates may feel obliged to follow at future elections even without a law mandating it.

The party will be dissolved once its aims have been achieved

A significant barrier to constitutional reform is the fact that it can only be achieved through people from all parts of the political spectrum working together – which, of course, requires them to put aside their traditional rivalries. We don’t feel people can reasonably be expected to do that without some independent flag to rally round, and they will be reluctant to do so if it means empowering a new party which will become a rival to the ones they are already committed to.

For that reason, we believe it’s important that this party should be solely a party of change and explicitly rule out any possibility of a long-term future as a party of government. To ensure that, our constitution binds us to dissolve the party once our most important goals have been achieved. That condition can only be effective if those goals are defined fairly specifically but they are not set in stone.