Is This the End of the Political Party?
Grassroots activists are being totally disregarded by parliamentarians. Who would be a party member? Across Britain this week, the Tory grassroots are being trampled on by desperate MPs.
Who would be a party member? Across Britain this week, the Tory grassroots are being trampled on by desperate MPs. After one timid attempt at democracy, Conservative parliamentarians have made it clear they don't trust the members to choose a new leader. In reasonably recent memory this party had more than a million members; now it is down to less than a third of that, and falling.
Labour activists can hardly crow. Whatever their private thoughts about Iraq, tuition fees or private involvement in the NHS, they know No 10 cares little. This week the party's general secretary, David Triesman, has departed, amid suggestions that somebody needed to be scapegoated for Labour's disastrous performance at Brent East. The official reason is that he's 60. A more realistic explanation is that Triesman did not share the view of some in Labour's leadership that party members should be seen and not heard. He was not, to put it bluntly, enough of a control freak. Meanwhile, Tony Blair's boasts of his ambition to create a new mass membership have, like Labour's membership, quietly subsided.
Are we seeing the end of the political party as it was known in late Victorian and 20th-century Britain? Is it over for huge national organisations with local tendrils in every housing estate, village and town hall? Apart from trudging from door to door with leaflets and filling meeting rooms when the MP or candidate was speaking, these millions of local activists provided community services of a kind it is hard now to recall.
The days when a middle-class teenager joined the Young Conservatives to meet members of the opposite sex seem like a Betjeman fantasy; yet in the 50s and 60s the YCs were a huge organisation - and a mainstream middle-class one, too. Now Tory activists seem divided between old and unfeasibly rightwing ladies and a smaller coterie of pink-faced young men, even more rightwing than the oldsters.
It was to stop people like this having a say that Tory MPs plotted so hard last week. William Hague and his party chairman Archie Norman are widely blamed for giving a shrinking membership, unrepresentative of Tory voters generally, powers in choosing the leader. MPs were terrified that David Davis would be chosen by them, should his candidature make it to a second round; so there was a plot to drive him into third place by putting up a moderates' candidate such as Tim Yeo or Michael Ancram, and transferring votes to "stuff David". Davis's supporters insist he pulled out from high-mindedness, but this plotting must have been known to them.
The Tory membership problem is caused by decline. Thirty or 40 years ago, when the members of Conservative associations were more deferential to their MPs, giving them a say would have been far less of a problem. They were a broader, more moderate church, as well as a bigger one. Now few Tory voters hold the passionate anti-European and moralistic views of the party membership; just because grassroots Tories think X or Y, or indeed that IDS is a good leader, doesn't mean potential electors will.
This is all familiar to Labour. At the time of maximum Labour activist power, the party membership was well to the left of Labour voters as a whole. Local parties had been taken over by zealots; they wanted Tony Benn, not Denis Healey, and they very nearly finished Labour off. Desperation at successive heavy election defeats drove the party to accept the Kinnock changes and, later, Tony Blair.
He began, I think, honestly, with a vision of a greatly expanded New Labour full of the moderate socialists he came across in Trimdon and Sedgefield - aspirational, relatively unideological people who would bring the party back to the mainstream and yet keep it honest.
This never happened. The most obvious reason is that, while talking of a mass membership party, the Blairites actually ran things as a centralised, top-down permanent coup. It was about control, not internal democracy, and it still is. Local activists were invited to annual conference, but it was bright, glossy newsletters and offering a variety of services that were intended to keep people interested. Yet without the urgency and passion of old Labour, the choices to be argued through at meetings, people simply did not care.
Of the main parties, the Lib Dems remain the most activist-centred, but even they have problems. Looking at the psephological map, Charlie Kennedy knows that he needs to target Tory seats and voters. His frontbench changes and his tacking in policy direction are meant to reflect this; but the party's activists are deeply suspicious. In their way they too are to the left of the parliamentary leadership.
So does it matter? Is this not just the nostalgia of ageing political hacks, remembering the comradeship of school halls on winter evenings, or the kitsch charm of a village Tory bring and buy stall? In an age when most people get their news from the telly, and can be bombarded with information and appeals by email, and when postal voting is the next wheeze for boosting turnout, should the members count? The focus groups and pollsters are no doubt a more accurate way of measuring what voters think than local party meetings. Soon, maybe, we'll be able to vote by text message. Why stuff your handbag with envelopes and trudge up Memory Lane?
The short answer is that if democracy doesn't have local roots, it isn't democracy. You cannot have a parliamentary system based on political parties if across most of the country they have ceased to exist. A "party" means a coming together and a meeting of one group of people, as distinct from another. It is unavoidably plural and busy.
And the same kind of people who might join parties because they are interested in where society is heading, are exactly the public-spirited people this government is so desperately seeking. Yesterday the theme was local control over police boards. On other days ministers have been talking excitedly about greater power for local schools, local hospitals and, on transport, local councils. They say they want to boost local mayors. John Prescott is going around trying to drum up interest in English regional assemblies.
So where are all the people to do this going to come from? Are they going to be self-selected independents? I think not. Are they going to be autonomous groups of patients, parents and shoppers with no political agenda beyond the immediate? Again, it seems implausible. The government is summoning with one hand exactly the public-spirited and politically engaged people it has been shooing away with the other. And the Tories would do just the same.
After years of moderately ineffective centralism, New Labour has decided it needs a nation of buzzing, public-spirited committees. And it's political parties that will help provide these, not focus groups. Focus groups can answer questions, but they can't run anything.
· A service of thanksgiving for Hugo Young will take place at 10.30am on Thursday November 20 at Westminster Cathedral, Victoria Street, London SW1. The service will be open to the public.
Labour activists can hardly crow. Whatever their private thoughts about Iraq, tuition fees or private involvement in the NHS, they know No 10 cares little. This week the party's general secretary, David Triesman, has departed, amid suggestions that somebody needed to be scapegoated for Labour's disastrous performance at Brent East. The official reason is that he's 60. A more realistic explanation is that Triesman did not share the view of some in Labour's leadership that party members should be seen and not heard. He was not, to put it bluntly, enough of a control freak. Meanwhile, Tony Blair's boasts of his ambition to create a new mass membership have, like Labour's membership, quietly subsided.
Are we seeing the end of the political party as it was known in late Victorian and 20th-century Britain? Is it over for huge national organisations with local tendrils in every housing estate, village and town hall? Apart from trudging from door to door with leaflets and filling meeting rooms when the MP or candidate was speaking, these millions of local activists provided community services of a kind it is hard now to recall.
The days when a middle-class teenager joined the Young Conservatives to meet members of the opposite sex seem like a Betjeman fantasy; yet in the 50s and 60s the YCs were a huge organisation - and a mainstream middle-class one, too. Now Tory activists seem divided between old and unfeasibly rightwing ladies and a smaller coterie of pink-faced young men, even more rightwing than the oldsters.
It was to stop people like this having a say that Tory MPs plotted so hard last week. William Hague and his party chairman Archie Norman are widely blamed for giving a shrinking membership, unrepresentative of Tory voters generally, powers in choosing the leader. MPs were terrified that David Davis would be chosen by them, should his candidature make it to a second round; so there was a plot to drive him into third place by putting up a moderates' candidate such as Tim Yeo or Michael Ancram, and transferring votes to "stuff David". Davis's supporters insist he pulled out from high-mindedness, but this plotting must have been known to them.
The Tory membership problem is caused by decline. Thirty or 40 years ago, when the members of Conservative associations were more deferential to their MPs, giving them a say would have been far less of a problem. They were a broader, more moderate church, as well as a bigger one. Now few Tory voters hold the passionate anti-European and moralistic views of the party membership; just because grassroots Tories think X or Y, or indeed that IDS is a good leader, doesn't mean potential electors will.
This is all familiar to Labour. At the time of maximum Labour activist power, the party membership was well to the left of Labour voters as a whole. Local parties had been taken over by zealots; they wanted Tony Benn, not Denis Healey, and they very nearly finished Labour off. Desperation at successive heavy election defeats drove the party to accept the Kinnock changes and, later, Tony Blair.
He began, I think, honestly, with a vision of a greatly expanded New Labour full of the moderate socialists he came across in Trimdon and Sedgefield - aspirational, relatively unideological people who would bring the party back to the mainstream and yet keep it honest.
This never happened. The most obvious reason is that, while talking of a mass membership party, the Blairites actually ran things as a centralised, top-down permanent coup. It was about control, not internal democracy, and it still is. Local activists were invited to annual conference, but it was bright, glossy newsletters and offering a variety of services that were intended to keep people interested. Yet without the urgency and passion of old Labour, the choices to be argued through at meetings, people simply did not care.
Of the main parties, the Lib Dems remain the most activist-centred, but even they have problems. Looking at the psephological map, Charlie Kennedy knows that he needs to target Tory seats and voters. His frontbench changes and his tacking in policy direction are meant to reflect this; but the party's activists are deeply suspicious. In their way they too are to the left of the parliamentary leadership.
So does it matter? Is this not just the nostalgia of ageing political hacks, remembering the comradeship of school halls on winter evenings, or the kitsch charm of a village Tory bring and buy stall? In an age when most people get their news from the telly, and can be bombarded with information and appeals by email, and when postal voting is the next wheeze for boosting turnout, should the members count? The focus groups and pollsters are no doubt a more accurate way of measuring what voters think than local party meetings. Soon, maybe, we'll be able to vote by text message. Why stuff your handbag with envelopes and trudge up Memory Lane?
The short answer is that if democracy doesn't have local roots, it isn't democracy. You cannot have a parliamentary system based on political parties if across most of the country they have ceased to exist. A "party" means a coming together and a meeting of one group of people, as distinct from another. It is unavoidably plural and busy.
And the same kind of people who might join parties because they are interested in where society is heading, are exactly the public-spirited people this government is so desperately seeking. Yesterday the theme was local control over police boards. On other days ministers have been talking excitedly about greater power for local schools, local hospitals and, on transport, local councils. They say they want to boost local mayors. John Prescott is going around trying to drum up interest in English regional assemblies.
So where are all the people to do this going to come from? Are they going to be self-selected independents? I think not. Are they going to be autonomous groups of patients, parents and shoppers with no political agenda beyond the immediate? Again, it seems implausible. The government is summoning with one hand exactly the public-spirited and politically engaged people it has been shooing away with the other. And the Tories would do just the same.
After years of moderately ineffective centralism, New Labour has decided it needs a nation of buzzing, public-spirited committees. And it's political parties that will help provide these, not focus groups. Focus groups can answer questions, but they can't run anything.
· A service of thanksgiving for Hugo Young will take place at 10.30am on Thursday November 20 at Westminster Cathedral, Victoria Street, London SW1. The service will be open to the public.
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