The historic trend, it has been argued, is against mass- membership political parties. They are dinosaurs left over from the inter- and immediate postwar years. People’s time is at a premium and the personal computer and the Internet are encouraging online democracy. The future, it is claimed, lies in town meetings, citizens’ juries, focus groups and Internet chatlines.
Yet no party leader publicly advocates abolishing individual membership; rather, the parties seem anxious to recruit more members. What leaders want, it seems, are pliant, supportive and inactive members, still willing to give money but not demanding influence over party policies in return. So why not abolish party membership and seek merely party supporters, who just donate money and act as cheerleaders? James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party typified this model.
The main parties, however, still need members for fund-raising and campaigning. Fund-raising is particularly important in Britain because the parties do not get extensive state financing. Traditionally they have raised much of their money from institutions such as companies and trade unions, but increasing public concerns about sleaze and the need for financial transparency have led to stricter rules on party funding. So parties are ever more reliant on small donations from individuals – according to Margaret McDonagh, Labour’s general secretary, the party gets 40 per cent of its income from membership subscriptions and small donations, twice what it gets from what she calls “high-value donors”.
In a national survey of Labour Party members that we conducted this year (we got 1,328 respondents from a 60 per cent response rate), we found that the more active the member, the greater the financial contribution. The very active members had given an average of £129 in the previous 12 months; the inactive gave £45.
But the much-despised activists are needed not only for their money, but also for their campaigning. Again, Britain has uniquely tight restrictions on spending on constituency election campaigns. So the parties have to rely on volunteers, rather than paid campaigners, when they want to communicate directly with voters. Though some political scientists argue that local campaigning makes no difference to election results, our research suggests they are wrong. We surveyed 4,442 Liberal Democrat members (a 58 per cent response rate) and asked them about their activities during the 1997 general election – canvassing, leafleting and election-day organisation.
We found a strong relationship between the extent of constituency campaigning and the Liberal Democrats’ vote share. Computer simulations reveal that, in the absence of any campaigning at all, the Liberal Democrats would have won only three seats, and it suggests that extensive and relentless local campaigning explains why the party more than doubled its number of MPs from 20 in 1992 to 46 in 1997.
A similar point can be made about the Labour campaign. Between 1994 and 1997, the Labour Party increased its membership by about 40 per cent and this helped to boost Labour’s constituency campaigning in 1997. Our survey also asked Labour respondents about their election activities, and the computer simulations show that if Labour had campaigned at twice the rate it actually did in the election, it would have won 76 per cent of the seats rather than the 64 per cent it actually won. At the other end of the scale, if the party had done no campaigning at all, it would have got only 54 per cent of the seats and an overall majority of only 33 instead of 177.
A further implication is that, if the increase in membership had taken place before the 1992 election and the new members had campaigned as they did in 1997, then the Conservatives would not have won an overall majority in that election. On the same basis, we could say that the campaign effects would have made the difference between winning and losing the elections in 1964 and in 1970. But it is likely that voters are more willing to change sides in response to campaigning than they were a generation ago.
All this suggests a strong case for promoting an active, participatory party. Will recent changes in Labour organisation help to achieve that? Our survey showed that 11 per cent of members had attended one of the local policy forums, which Labour leaders believe to be better mechanisms for developing policy than the supposedly inefficient and adversarial annual conference. By large margins, our respondents found them interesting, friendly, efficiently run and easy to understand. However, a majority also agreed with the statement that “the party leadership does not pay a lot of attention to ordinary party members” and, significantly, there were no differences between those who had attended a forum and those who had not. This suggests that members believe that policy forums work well, but that they are not very influential.
Now, a task force chaired by Ian McCartney, a member of Labour’s NEC, proposes that local parties should run all-member events in place of existing delegate-based structures. It argues that members are not attracted to traditional constituency and branch meetings. Our survey, however, shows that 40 per cent of members had attended at least one local Labour Party meeting in the previous year and 18 per cent were frequent attenders. Almost three-quarters of those who had attended found them interesting, friendly and easy to understand.
The myth is that all local Labour Party meetings are boring and arcane and that members would like to dispense with them. The truth is that the core of activists regularly involved in meetings are fairly satisfied. Any policy that reduces meetings may merely end up by demotivating the activists, who will then give less money and time to the party. All-member events have a certain populist appeal, but they should not preclude a structure that gives activists a role and institutionalises formal accountability – a necessary feature of democracy.
It is clear from our survey that Labour members do not want to return to the traditional party conference mechanism for exercising influence with its often contradictory composite resolutions and its truncated debates. But what has been lost is the ability of grass-roots members to take initiatives and make proposals that the centre could not easily block. Labour needs some procedure that enables members to raise issues, get them debated within the wider party and then demand a response from the leadership. It is most important that such a procedure cannot be blocked by the leadership or by Millbank.
This could involve requiring the party to hold a plebiscite on an issue if enough members proposed it. Plebiscites are already held frequently – two by Tony Blair and three by William Hague – on issues decided by the leadership. But it is important that members are allowed to initiate them as well.
Further, Labour could allow members to recall a leader, just as they balloted to elect him or her in the first place. For example, it could be laid down that, if 20 per cent of the membership signed a recall petition, then the party would be required to hold a leadership election.
But, at root, the problem of party democracy is less about specific mechanisms than about political values and political culture. If the culture grows ever more centralised and controlling, the party will atrophy. The leadership should recognise that open debate and dissension are healthy; that it may sometimes benefit from a defeat, and learn that it has to consider alternatives to the preferred orthodoxy. Ultimately Margaret Thatcher’s downfall was the product of a closed mind that had surrounded itself with courtiers and which lost touch with reality. A Labour Party dominated by a culture of political orthodoxy, which is fearful of dissension and debate, is likely to end up the same way.
The writers are professors of politics at Sheffield University
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