Wednesday 2 October 2013

Political Parties

My childhood was highly politicised. On the left wing was my father, Labour party councillor, CND marcher, Fabian; on the right was my grandmother,  a pro-nuclear, Tebbit enthusiast who was the campaign organiser for a Conservative MP. Some of my earliest memories are singing the Red Flag in the Islington Council Chamber and visiting the Houses of Parliament with my gran.

My father even dragged me and my brother along on his brave attempt to be elected Labour MP for Faversham. I use 'brave' in the Charge of the Light Brigade sense of the word. This was Kent in 1983, so Labour was about as welcome as radioactive waste. Oddly enough, my grandmother in her ongoing attempt to offset her son's leftie influence on her grandchildren would regularly drive us to look at the Bradwell nuclear reactor. I am not entirely sure what point she was making; but these visits usually took place after a visit to a seaside funfair. Her crude psychology may have worked, as I now associate uranium with enjoyable afternoons at an arcade.

My father and my grandmother violently disagreed on every aspect of politics, save one thing. They both hated the Lib-Dems (or SDP as they then were). These competing influences have shaped me, granting me a greater, more balanced understanding of the wider world. I also hate the Lib Dems.

There is another subject where my now deceased relatives would find common ground. They would both mourn the demise of mass membership political parties. The Tory party now only has 134,000 members, half the number when Cameron took over leadership in 2005. They are literally a dying breed. Now some of you might celebrate the extinction of the Tory party activist, in particular the Young Tory. I met some of this rare species eight years ago, when doing a BBC show at the conferences. They are a very odd bunch indeed, like people grown in a laboratory when the scientists weren't paying attention. Before any left-wingers get smug, try meeting Labour youth activists. You'll be pining for those Sloane Rangers wearing 'This Lady's Not for Turning' badges soon enough. Labour's membership may not have fallen; it has stagnated for over ten years at the low level of 150,000.

Halfway through their conference and I am not surprised that no one joins the Conservatives any more. They have come to resemble a cluster of  lobbyists working for their paymasters rather than a mass movement. If there is a guiding ideology, it is leave the City of London alone. Britain experienced one of the worst financial crises in history, brought in large measure by negligent and fraudulent practises in the financial sector. Yet no one has gone to prison, nor have been their meaningful reforms. The fact that the Tory party receives nearly all its funding from the City may be pure coincidence. Not.

If the Tory party's craven brown-nosing of its donors is off-putting, Labour's policies do seem equally partisan and shallow. They are no longer party of the underdog or the disadvantaged, rather a means for public sector workers to protect their pay and conditions. Labour's philosophy seems to involve everyone in the private sector working harder, longer and for less money, so those in the public sector can retire early. And they wonder why their membership flatlines?

You'll notice that I have not mentioned the Lib-Dems. See third paragraph.

Policies alone do not explain the decline in party rolls, modern politics itself is off-putting. Thanks to media training and aggressive Paxman-style interviewers, most TV debate is the repetition of soundbites and key messages. The only drama exists in an interviewer finding a minor discrepancy between what one person may have said on one occasion as opposed to another. Apparently, the ideal we strive for these days is consistency, not intelligent thought. Better to be wrong all of the time, than right occasionally.

Yet people will still take to the street in their 10,000s for issues ranging from austerity cuts to fox-hunting, so voters are not apathetic about specific causes. They are apathetic about political parties. Unfortunately this makes the parties more reliant than ever on their donors, who represent special interest groups, not the general public. They continue their transition from million strong movements, to hollow shells, fronted by a professional political cliques.

Maybe the slow death of the political party is a good thing, a sign of less a polarised era with more consensus. Or maybe that's the childhood uranium exposure talking.