Like the fabled stopped kitchen clock, I am afraid I find it very hard to agree with the eminently intelligent Peter Hitchens most of the time. However occasionally he nails it like he did at the end of last nights question time. The Question was “A recent Populus poll branded Politicians as weird, arrogant and out of touch – are they?” To be fair to fellow panellist Allan Johnson, he did rather set up the shot for Hitchens. He conceded how desperately worrying the current state of support for his profession is, he pointed out that even Churchill had the experience of an Independent candidate standing against him and the Independent gained 10,000 votes. Allan explained that he has never known the disconnect to be so bad. Then it was Peters turn.

He pointed out that Politicians don’t get elected, they get selected. The criteria by which the parties select their candidates depend on the candidates accepting the rules and the conditioning that the Party demands of them. In essence the Populus Poll had it right in recognising that the conditioning creates an appearance of weird, arrogance and being out of touch. At this point Bernard Jenkin and Jo Swinson did what Politicians do when defending the system that keeps them out of reach – why don’t you stand? Hitchens response was that he would not be selected by any of the parties and as an Independent he had no prospect of election. The final pathetic attempt to defend the status quo came from Left and Right. Bernard Jenkin challenged Hitchens suggesting that if Hitchens was right, then Caroline Lucas would never have got elected, and his comment was then echoed by Christine Blower.

It is clearly impossible for any Independent to replicate something as organised and capable as the Green Party. Despite its many critics the Green Party is a very capable election machine. What we do need are individuals across the UK who are commited to seeing a change brought to our Parliament so that Independent candidates and small local parties can break the stranglehold of the major political parties. We don’t need to remove the parties, simply erode their stranglehold on our levers of power in places and with candidates who are most weird and out of touch or in areas where our votes are worth least. If we do this, when our views are being taken into account, that they can arrive at Westminster through a myriad of routes and not just through the very controlling lens of three large political parties. In about 85 constituencies next May, there will be a serious prospect of the outcome depending on the votes of the people who turn out on the day. In the remaining 550 or so constituencies, the electoral maths suggest that the outcome will always be predictable. Tatton was one of these places until Martin Bell stood against the corrupt Neil Hamilton. Few MPs are as corrupt as Hamilton was, but the system has a corrupting influence of its own. We need a few hundred modern Martin Bells, in the hope that 10 or 20 of them might get through and change the electoral maths once and for all. That would then force the parties to change the way they do business.