The next week will present a crucial test to David Cameron and the Conservative Party.  The issue will be one that has bitterly divided the Tory Party for the last twenty years: Europe.

Now that the Irish have voted so clearly to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the pressure will be on for the Tories to clarify their position.  As I understand it, this is their evolving position.  Two years ago, they were unequivocal: there would be a referendum and the Conservatives would campaign for a “No” vote.  Now, the position is more “nuanced”: if after the General Election (and if by some mischance they find themselves in Government) and if the Lisbon Treaty has not by then been ratified by all EU member states, then a Conservative Government would “suspend” the UK ratification, call a referendum and campaign for a “No” vote.

And if the Treaty has been ratified by every EU member state? Well that’s the nuanced bit.  Essentially it boils down to accepting the Lisbon Treaty as fact, but having a bit of a whinge about it.

Of course, even the “easy” bit is actually quite complicated.  Now that Ireland has voted.  There are only two member states that have not yet completed the ratification process.  In both of those instances, their Parliaments have voted to ratify.  The Tories seem to be pinning their hopes on the President of the Czech Republic stalling long enough to give them a chance to “suspend” the UK ratification.

But what does “suspend” mean?  UK ratification is a fact.  It is an Act of Parliament that has received the Royal Assent.  No Prime Minister has the power to “suspend” an Act of Parliament.  A new Act of Parliament would be required to undo the ratification.  More legislation would then be required to enable there to be a referendum.  It would all take at least a year – probably more.  And what’s going to happen while all of this is going on?  The rest of Europe is not going to sit still.  Even the President of the Czech Republic is not envisaging holding up ratification beyond next June (by which time even with a May General Election the British Parliament will only just be sworn in …).

So what are the options for David Cameron?  If he wants to show real leadership, he should stop nuancing.

He has two options: either he should tell his Party Conference this week that the Lisbon Treaty is now a fact (and will be past the point of no return by the time of a General Election) or he should admit that the Conservatives want to withdraw from the European Union (with all the dire economic consequences that that would bring) and that the Tory manifesto will commit to calling a referedum to do just that.

That’s why the poll of Conservative Party members in ConservativeHome is so significant.  Only 16% of Tory Party members are in favour of accepting ratification of the Lisbon Treaty as a fact.  (Iain Dale rather innocently seems to think that this finding is such dynamite that it should have been suppressed.)  The real reason this poll has been released now (and Tim Montgomerie has acknowledged in a comment to Iain Dale that it would have been suppressed nearer the time of a General Election) is to PREVENT David Cameron showing that leadership.  There was clearly a fear that he was going to tell the Party that it had to accept Lisbon and the publication of the poll was intended to preempt that.

The effect is to raise the stakes.  If David Cameron were to go ahead and say to his Party Conference, despite the ConservativeHome poll, that the Tories will now accept the Lisbon Treaty, he would be showing some real and genuine leadership.

So has he got the cojones?  We’ll see.  But don’t hold your breath.

At last someone has made the point that I have been meaning to make for weeks: the alternative vote is even less proportional than first past the post.  If anything, an electoral system based on AV will produce bigger majorities for the leading political parties than FPTP and fringe parties – like the LibDems and the BNP – will find it even harder to make headway.

However, the principle of AV is important for anyone in a particular constituency who wants to express a preference for a particular party, but that particular party is not one of the leading contenders for the seat.  AV gives such people the chance also to influence the final outcome by expressing further preferences.  The winning candidate emerges who has the support of at least 50% of the electorate (assuming people use their preferences) and it retains – if not strengthens – the link between an MP and their constituency.  For more details see this.

Such a system is undeniably an improvement on a simple FPTP election and it is one I have long believed should be adopted in the UK.  It is successfully used to elect the Australian House of Representatives.

For those who want proportional representation it is an anathema: it does not deliver proportionality.  What it gives you instead is a genuinely-representative constituency-based system.  No requirement for multi-member seats and no creation of two-tier MPs.

Apparently, the Electoral Reform Society and Neal Lawson, Chair of Compass, are unhappy.  However, the Prime Minister’s proposal for a referendum early in a new Parliament is the sensible way forward.  It avoids the public debate on the issue being lost in the turmoil/excitement of a General Election campaign and, if there is really a popular groundswell for some different change in the electoral system, no doubt that would surface in the run up to a referendum.

At a joint fringe organised by Progress and the Quilliam Foundation the question of engagement with British Muslims was debated in depth.  Four key messages emerged (articulated right at the beginning by Ed Husain, author of ‘The Islamist’):

• you don’t engage with British Muslims as Muslims (every Muslim is like everyone else – an individual with their own interests and preoccupations);
• don’t just go through mosques to engage (just as no-one would try and reach the white working class just through Church of England vicars);
• don’t rely on self-appointed “community representatives”; and
• don’t shy away from confronting “brown fascists”.

The central point for me – as someone who spent the best part of thirty years trying to build community cohesion in London – is that engagement with any community only flows from building a relationship with that community over a long period.  You cannot just be “fair weather friends”.

There is no point in a local councillor asking for people’s support at election time – he or she needs to be seen to working in their interests and listening to their concerns all the time and not just in the four weeks before a council election.

The same applies in building community cohesion: it is offensive (and certainly counter-productive) just to talk to a community when you are worried about violent extremism; you have to build a long-term relationship based on addressing the issues that matter to that community and then you are in a position to have a serious dialogue on more difficult issues.

I was interested in Sean Fear’s analysis on Political Betting of how the London Borough elections will pan out next May.  His predictions (bear in mind he is a Tory activist) give the political map of London Government becoming:

• Conservative  16  (he calls Ealing, Kingston, Merton and Sutton as Tory in what will be close contests)
• Labour  8 (he calls Islington as a Labour gain from the LibDems)
• LibDems  1
• No Overall Control  6
• Too close to call  1 (Haringey – between Labour and the LibDems)

I’ve not done my own calculations yet.  However, his analysis looks reasonably plausible, although I would want more information from a number of places before taking a firm view.

In July 2005, I was asked by John McTiernan, then Political Secretary to the then Prime Minister, for my assessment of what would happen in May 2006 in the London elections.  I gave my view Borough by Borough (which subsequently turned out to be almost exactly correct).  This was dismissed as “much too pessimistic” and was told “what you are forgetting is that by next Spring the situation in Iraq will have really improved and we will have got the ID cards legislation through and that’s going to be seriously popular”.  I make no comment on the political judgement expressed ……

Totnes Conservatives have selected their prospective Parliamentary candidate on a 24.6% turnout – not of Party members, but of all electors in the constituency.  At a cost of £38,000 every elector was sent a ballot-paper and invited to vote for which of three Conservative candidates they would like to see selected (to aid the process a reply-paid envelope was included).  In total 16,497 people voted and the successful candidate, a local GP named Sarah Wollaston, got 7,914 (it was a first-past-the-post ballot – none of this new-fangled preferential voting for the Conservatives).

There have, of course, been Parliamentary by-elections with turnouts of this size – so there is no question that this is a very respectable rate of participation.

The Conservatives will presumably be well pleased with the result of their decision to hold a primary in this way.  Not only have they been seen to communicate with and consult all voters on who should be the next MP (or at least the Conservative candidate), but nearly 8,000 electors will feel that they have a personal stake in turning out and voting in the General Election to vote for the candidate they chose at this stage.  The Conservatives also know which of their three possible candidates went down best with the local population.  It will also boost the name recognition locally for their nominee and it will make any canvassing conversations that much easier (“Do you remember being asked to help us choose our candidate?”).

It is interesting that the primary electorate chose the least political of the three people on the short-list – rejecting two prominent local government figures, in favour of a doctor.  This may say something about the status with which politicians are currently held by the public at large.  However, I wonder whether a typical selection process involving just Party members or Party members sitting on the constituency committee would have produced the same result.

I suspect this sort of open process will become increasingly the norm – particularly when political parties are selecting in “safe”  seats the person who will effectively become the next MP or where a tight fight is envisaged and they want to put up the candidate with the best chance of success.

However, there are a number of consequences that all of the political parties will have to come to terms with.  First, what benefits does membership of a political party bring if you have no more say than any member of the public in who should be the next candidate for Parliament?  Second, will the popular beauty parade approach discriminate against those with a solid (but un-flashy) record fo party service?  Third, how will the process be funded (£40,000 per constituency soon mounts up)?  Fourth, how will the primary campaigns be regulated (should there be expense limits for the candidates, will public advertising be allowed etc)? Fifth, will primaries favour candidates with personal wealth or strong financial backers and, if so how can this be mitigated?

These questions do not mean that the selection in Totnes should be a one-off.  On the contrary, I think the idea of primaries like this would be helpful for the democratic process itself.  However, we should all start devising the answers to those questions pretty quickly.

The European Election results are awful for Labour across the country so far.  However, I cannot help but notice that the results in London were still bad for Labour but not anything like as bad as those in Wales, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber.  So far, the fall in the share of the vote in London is the lowest recorded in any region.  London is, of course, different, but maybe there is something about the London Labour Party that is working better with the electorate ….

I have been watching the BBC’s European Election Night coverage.  On the whole they seem to be getting more information out earlier than Sky News.

However, I am beginning to detect signs of bias from David Dimbleby.  He is sitting next to Nick Robinson.  Increasingly, as Nick Robinson speaks, David Dimbleby’s lip curls, and then he comes back to question what Nick Robinson has said.  He seems to have complete contempt for the quality of Nick Robinson’s intellectual analysis.

Surely that cannot be true?

I have recently got home to North London from speaking at a meeting of Lewisham East Labour Party.  The meeting was fixed months ago and at that time there was no indication that the political scene would be quite so volatile, so the topic I had originally been asked to speak on – “the outlook for the London Council elections in 2010″ – was hardly relevant.  Instead, I talked about the events of the last few weeks, leading up to today’s reshuffle and the implications of the local election results emerging since last night.

The discussion was lively and the prevailing message was that the disunity amongst members of the Parliamentary Labour Party must not continue.  Party members were divided on what they wanted to happen next, but all were clear that the crisis around the Leadership must be resolved within days.

Some commentators are tonight, of course, saying that following the reshuffle the Leadership crisis is over.  I am not so sure.  The European election votes have yet to be counted and it will be critical what the mood is when MPs return to Westminster on Monday and, in particular, what happens at the meeting that evening of the Parliamentary Labour Party (at which Gordon Brown will be speaking).  I wouldn’t like to predict how the next 72 hours will play out, but what I am clear about is that – whatever else happens - Lewisham East Labour Party members are right: the lack of unity must not be allowed to go on beyond the next few days.

Stuart Drummond, whose main claim to fame when he was first elected was that he dressed up in a monkey suit as mascot of the local football team, has been reelected comfortably as Mayor of Hartlepool for a third term.

When he was first elected, his election was portrayed as showing that the idea of directly-elected Mayors was a joke.  Certainly, his election was intended by local people as a protest against the main political parties.  However, they have since voted for him again twice, which rather suggests that he is getting something right.  His main challenger this time was also an independent – the boss of a local taxi firm.  The Labour candidate came third and the Conservative seventh after UKIP, the BNP and another independent.

Certainly, his re-election means that his original election can no longer be used as an argument that directly-elected Mayoral systems will automatically result in electors voting frivolously.

I have just been to vote in the European elections (peers can vote in local elections and elections for the European Parliament, but not for the UK Parliament).  It was quite busy.  I’ve certainly known that polling station much quieter at 9am on an election day.

Maybe the voter turnout is going to be rather higher than was being predicted.  I am not sure who that will benefit, but I suspect for once a higher turnout will not be much help to the Labour Party.  I am not sure that the beneficiaries will be the Conservatives either, but we will see.  The only Party represented outside the polling station were the Greens …….