Disillusion with Labour is now so great that the party is losing a member every 20 minutes, a candidate for the Labour deputy leadership has claimed.

John Cruddas, the only candidate from outside the Cabinet to stand for the post, suggested that the party would have no members in less than a decade if it kept losing them at the same rate.

Since 1997, when membership peaked at 405,000, Labour had lost more than half its members, Mr Cruddas said. The trend accelerated after 2000 to the equivalent of 27,000 lost members a year. If such a rate continued, Labour, which has just under 200,000 members, would have lost them all by 2013, he told the BBC.

In a separate interview with The Times, Mr Cruddas accused Tony Blair of turning Labour into a “virtual party” operating only through the media and via the internet. He said that party members risked being made irrelevant other than when they were asked for money or to put up Labour posters during elections.

Mr Cruddas said that Mr Blair’s obsession with “precision-bombing” swing voters in marginal seats to win elections left a vacuum in the party elsewhere. “What you have got is a belief around the Labour Party leadership that the future lies not in a federal party, that we are used to, but in a sort of virtual party,” he said. “You have a direct link between the centre and an amorphous mass of supporters that you contact through new technology. They put a poster up at elections, you occasionally hit them for money, and that is your party of the future.”

Hazel Blears, the party chairman, reacted angrily yesterday. She accused Mr Cruddas of using the membership figures in a sensational way, saying that the rate at which members were leaving had slowed significantly last year, when 3,348 quit the party, the smallest loss since 1991. She said: “Our membership is broadly the same as other political parties, and not just in this country but around the world there is a lack of political engagement. And I think that the process we are undertaking to involve the public should also help us to reinvigorate our party politics.”

Mr Cruddas insisted, however, that ordinary Labour members would continue to be marginalised unless the leadership stopped focusing on marginal seats and restored the party’s local organisation. He said: “The virtual party is a great description for it because you have got a press strategy mediated by the parliamentary press corps, precision-bombed on swing voters in swing seats, but it is not based on real mobil isation of real people in real communities.”

His own East London constituency of Dagenham experienced a surge in support for the British National Party at local elections this year, which won 11 seats to become the second largest party on the council. “In areas like mine that is acutely important,” Mr Cruddas said. “It is not an abstract debate because what will fill those vacuums without the Labour Party in its traditional role of mediating within communities like mine?” Mr Cruddas, a former Labour Party official who was Mr Blair’s link with the trade unions at Downing Street during his first term, called for a new form of state funding for political parties to rebuild their organisation.

Voter vouchers should allow each elector to nominate a party of their choice to receive £3 from public funds each polling day, as advocated earlier this year by the Power inquiry into reviving democracy, he said.

Mr Cruddas said that Labour needed a 600-seat strategy, rather than one concentrating on 40 constituencies, and accused Mr Blair of choosing policies on the basis of which would not alienate floating voters in swing seats.

Lost members

405,000 Labour members when Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997

27,000 members left each year for several years after 2000

3,348 members left in 2005

198,026 members by last year

£23.4m owed by Labour after election last year

Source: Labour Party

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