The end of the popular movement?

There was an interesting article in the Independent on Sunday about declining membership levels in the Conservative Party, with research suggest a 21.5% drop since David Cameron’s election as leader. But the phenomenon is not unique to the Tories, Labour too have seen drastic falls in membership levels since 1997.

One could argue that the race to the ‘centre ground’ of British politics has led to the larger parties losing touch with their ‘core vote’ and becoming somewhat less inspirational. Whatever the cause, a dangerous by-product of this drop in membership is a real change in where parties obtain their funding.

Political parties are supposed to be popular movements, campaigning for the country to governed in one particular way or another, organised and funded by their members. But when membership levels start to fall, parties are obliged to turn to other sources for funding. The big three parties seem now to be more interested in soliciting donations from millionaires than from members.

But while members expect little return from their contributions, millionaires quite naturally expect something more than a quarterly newsletter and a little plastic card from theirs. In other words, a level of corruption is apparently now necessary in order to obtain adequate funding for a political party.

While there are of course some wealthy supporters who genuinely back a particular political party and expect nothing in return for their donations, the increasing reliance on affluent donors is worrying. One solution to the problem could be state-funded political parties – removing the need to seek shady donations just to cover a party’s day-to-day expenses.

It could be argued that this would be the final nail in the coffin for the ‘popular movement’ – but the essence of a popular movement could be retained in such a system if the amount of funding a party received was proportional to its membership, with membership and funding of parties being overseen by an independent regulator.

Inevitably though, such a system would not address the key question – what is it about the main political parties today that has caused so many of their members to leave, and so few new members to join? Clearly the best solution to the problem of party funding is to reinvigorate politics.

The Obama campaign showed that when politics is inspirational millions of ordinary people will donate – for example more than three million online donors gave an average of around each. Obama was shrewd to turn down public funding in favour of private donations. Whether this was done for ideological or financial reasons is debatable, but it does show that the traditional model of the ‘popular movement’ is still by far the most powerful force in politics.

The challenge for British parties is to inject some of this enthusiasm into our own political scene. I’m sure many voters feel that there are too few dividing lines between the main parties, that it almost doesn’t matter who they vote for any more. It is this crisis of ideology, or perhaps lack of it, that must be addressed if we are to have parties which are popular movements and keep politics in the hands of the people.