Who needs political parties? Last week’s Labour conference was so boring they
had to bring back the Red Flag. This week the Tories must mimic the Liberal
Democrats and use their event to prop up a faltering leader. These annual
politics fests once blasted sea air into the dusty attics of Westminster.
Union dinosaurs petrified Labour cabinets. A bewhiskered squirearchy tore
Conservative home secretaries limb from limb. There was blood in the veins
of the body politic and on the floor.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair neutered their conferences and turned them
into adjuncts of the new politics of charisma. These events were no longer
mass movements to which leaders paid homage. The public was invited to see
politicians as celebrities, not as invisible factotums of a London club.
This emphasis on personality, familiar since the days of Gladstone and Lloyd
George, has become more important when no great interest divides voter from
voter and when political leadership is mostly a matter of managing events.
Labour has for a decade pursued policies on privatisation, education,
defence and Iraq to which its active supporters are opposed. Nobody cares.
What has revived Labour’s opinion poll fortunes since Gordon Brown’s arrival
in Downing Street is not some new platform. It is that Brown is no longer a
thundercloud but a substantive personality. What has weakened David Cameron
is his stumbling off the firm path of agreeability into the morass of policy
disputation. Who cares about grammar schools, green taxes or referendums?
The new politics wants a leader smiling, strong and safe in a crisis.
The political parties long fought the growth of charismatic politics,
initially resisting Blair’s one member, one vote for leadership primaries
and his innovation of directly elected mayors. Politics was to be kept a
party closed shop. This has proved a hopeless cause. As we are witnessing in
London’s mayoral race, the contrast between Ken Livingstone and Boris
Johnson is attracting both attention and debate about how the capital should
be run. When last did local government claim front pages, columnists and
cartoonists?
For all this, charisma is only half the political conversation, the top half.
“Without party,” said Disraeli, “parliamentary government is impossible.”
Parties remain the golden thread that links voters to their governors both
at and between elections. Parties embody the democratic mandate. They can
discipline representatives and leaders who stray from what was pledged to
the public. They hold MPs’ jobs in their hands.
Parties are also essential to winning elections. Even the highly personalised
American presidency requires the infrastructure of a party apparat to
deliver votes. That in turn rests on a nationwide but localised base of
membership, fundraising and patronage. The spotlight falls on the donations
of the rich and famous, but in 2004 10% of all US adults gave money to one
presidential party or another (sometimes both); $206m was raised by gifts of
under $200.
The collapse of parties in Britain has been spectacular. In the 1950s more
than 4m people claimed some affiliation. Today the figure is 0.5m and
falling, having dropped 70% in the past 25 years alone. Even those asserting
some political activity amount to a mere 2% of adults, the lowest in any
comparable democracy.
With that decline has come poverty. Unable to raise money from the public,
parties have run out of cash. They have officials, researchers, pollsters,
advertisements and conferences to finance. As a result they react like any
British organisation whose credit lines are exhausted. They are turning to
the state. They already get some 30% of their income in cash and kind from
government, mostly to help with elections and parliamentary expenses. They
say they need more.
Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat may squabble about many things but they are
in sweet harmony on party funding. Democracy has survived for more than a
century without party nationalisation, but those days are over. Having
deprived us of the red meat of politics, the parties want our money to pay
for the resulting collapse in membership income. They should not get it.
In democracies across Europe and North America millions of people feel a duty
to public affairs. This is through elected local government, to which Brown
and his ministers are adamantly opposed as reducing central control. The
resulting democratic deficit is yawning. In France there is roughly one
elected official for every 100 voters and in Germany one for every 250. In
these countries local mayors and councillors are known by name and often in
person to the overwhelming majority of voters. In Britain the figure is one
elected person for every 2,600 voters and few can name any local community
leader, let alone one to whom they might turn in trouble.
The smallest unit of democratic administration in France, the commune, covers
an average of 1,500 people, in Germany 5,000 and America 7,000. The
equivalent figure in Britain is 118,000 and the Brown government wants that
size to increase under “unitary” authorities, thus removing government still
further from voters and consumers. It is no surprise that ever fewer people
want to be patronised in this way.
Local party activism is integral to the web of public service, patronage and
interest on which accountable democracy depends. Its decay has not only
driven British politics to rely ever more heavily on charisma, it has also
made British public administration incompetent. Power is exerted by central
oligarchies, with parties as no more than cliques of London-based
politicians and advisers whose bond is to have been at university together.
The ease with which Brown can at present garner scalps from across the
spectrum – including the spectacular one of Lady Thatcher – shows how
homogeneous this oligarchy has become.
Parties need to revive themselves. They are the only institutional curb on an
elected leader and the only proper conduit of public accountability. For
most people they are also the vehicle for public service. The best hope of
kicking them back to life is to deny them a penny of state money. Membership
subscriptions make up just 6% of Tory party income and 13% of Labour’s. When
in 1992 Blair was chided by party apparatchiks for jeopardising union
donations, he went to his constituency and increased its membership to
2,000, showing it could be done.
Nobody bothered to follow Blair’s example (nor did he) because members were
too much trouble. The bulk of party money continues to come from business
and trade unions and from individuals donating in the hope of business
advancement or an honour.
A political party is not a philanthropic charity but a private association
which, like the press, serves a public good. It needs regulating if it is
not to descend into excessive corruption, but the less it is regulated the
better. The 1976 Buckley judgment of the American Supreme Court ruled that
any curb on campaign finances was a breach of free speech: “It is not the
government but the people . . . who must retain control over the quantity
and range of debate.” As Ronald Dworkin retorted, this was as partisan a
view of democracy as refusing to regulate monopolies was of capitalism.
Yet relieving parties of the moral hazard of fundraising by giving them
subsidies will not make them more effective democratic institutions.
All politics is based on some quid pro quo. In return for their help at
elections, members expect some preferment. This may be help in finding a
council seat, appointment to a hospital trust, an expedited planning
decision or just an invitation to a Commons dinner. Above all it is some
role in the exercise of power. The decay of that role in Britain has
debilitated government.
Nothing would do more to restore democracy than forcing parties to find more
members to give them money and publicly declare it. An active and empowered
membership, warts and all, is essential if the British constitution is not
to lapse into oligarchy. Party finances will be restored only when parties
persuade enough voters that they are worth preserving. Otherwise they will
become mere offshoots of the state.
Charismatic leaders will get away with murder.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
