Is party politics dying out?

This week has brought the role of party members and activists back to the front pages. That’s rather unusual to be honest – and rightly so, as party members (swivel eyed and otherwise) make up only 1% of the British population.

Being a party member is already a niche interest. You are somewhat odd if you’re a party member – sorry to break that to you, but of course I’m odd too (and quite possibly odder than you).

What swivel-eyed loongate has brought into focus is how reliant politicians are on this rather small band of people who choose to become party members. Anyone who doubts this fact should read the Prime Minister’s grovelling letter to party activists – released during the Equal Marriage debate last night. To win elections, politicians need activists on the ground, campaigning in their local communities, knocking on doors and turning out the vote. Without those activists, turnouts decline, politics becomes an increasingly remote Westminster spectacle and fringe politics begins to gain a foothold.

So the disastrous decline in party membership in this country should be a cause for concern for anyone who cares about politics in this country. Tory membership, for example, has slumped to around 130,000 and could easily fall below the 100,000 mark before the next election. And as Rachel Sylvester notes in her Times column today (£) the average age of a Tory party member is 67. That’s right, the average Tory Party member is retired.

We might feel quite chipper by way of contrast, with 200,000 members, but much of the boost in Labour’s membership appears to have come in the immediate aftermath of the general election and the leadership contest. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of stampede towards the Labour Party from those who share our ideals or who want to see the back of this government. And whilst 200,000 members seems relatively healthy, there are two things to bear in mind – that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the country, and in the 1990s we had 400,000 members.

So what should political parties do if they want to get more members? Well giving activists a say would be a start, and not just over selections once in a blue moon, but over policy – locally and nationally – in a tangible way. For all of the talk of party involvement and engagement, the change from Local Government Committees (LGCs) to Local Campaign Forums (LCFs) actually seems to have lessened the say party members have over local government policy. Likewise YourBritain is a positive initiative, but there is a certain level of confusion as to how much say – if any – ordinary party members (or the National Policy Forum, for that matter) will have over the final party manifesto. I’m not advocating a return to conference floor debates on policy – but at the very least, party members need to feel invested in what they’re expected to campaign for on the doorstep. Party leaders need to develop policy that extends far beyond the niche worldview of the party member, but if they’re going to win a ground war for votes – and make no mistake, 2015 will be a ground war – then they need to keep their activists onside.

If parties lose their members, then party politics as we know it dies out.

If this all sounds a little fatalistic, then it needn’t be. At present all of our major political parties are subject to a sort of disinterested malaise. That’s lowering turnouts, squeezing poll ratings and – inevitably – holding down party membership. But for the first party that really grasps what party membership could and should be like in the 21st century, there are bountiful rewards. Genuinely innovative online campaigning focussed at the interests of the reader and movement building politics like that conducted by Arnie Graf that engages (and re-engages) activists and would-be activists could be added to a more holistic manifesto process – creating a more nuanced party machine.

And there is no reason why such renewed engagement – in conjunction with, for example, encouraging members of affiliated unions to join the party – shouldn’t see Labour aim for a lofty target of a million members by 2020. The contrast with a dwindling Tory party would be stark.

To do that though, the party must continue to plough ahead with the kind of structural reform being undertaken by Andrew Rosenfeld, which I wrote about last week. I’ll leave the final words to Andrew, who told me:

“I think that one of the key failings in Government is that you neglect the Party and I think one of the most important things that we can do is to ensure that when elected into Government we have a structure that we can build and use in the same way that Obama’s using his Party structure.”

Amen to that…