Are UK Political Parties Dying?

[Plus Two Approaches which Might Save Them]

This is a question frequently asked by political scientists and if the answer is yes, our democracy has a mega crisis brewing sometime soon in the future.On 30th September, 2007, Simon Jenkins suggested in his Sunday Times article that ‘Political Parties are Dying’. Let’s look first at the case that parties are already in ‘intensive care’:

Ideology: some time ago now, Otto Kircheimer- a German writing in the USA- suggested that those mass ideological movements called political parties had ceased to relate all that much to ideology per se. Instead, they had become ‘catch-all’ parties: assemblers of voter coalitions, gathering in a pocket of support here, wooing a block of interest groups there. If we apply this model to the UK New Labour might easily be deemed a neat enough fit. Having realized its ideology had been rejected by voters four times in succession, it decided, in effect, to abandon it. But without a saleable message to market, what could it do? Answer, borrow another. New Labour acquired the economic programme of the Tories: Thatcherism, the unpleasant but apparently effective remedy for an ailing economy which focused on tight control of interest rates, opposition to trade union curbs on economic activity and an emphasis on ‘flexible’ employment policies which enabled employers to hire and fire without too much restraint.

To this lurch to the right Brown and Blair, advised by the likes of Mandelson and Gould, added: a line on law and order which openly competed for toughness with the Conservatives; a promise to follow Conservative spending plans for two years after winning power; and an approach to public services which seemed to accept the Thatcherite premise of ‘Public sector bad, private sector good’. Many traditional Labour party members thought Blair was advancing the interests of the privileged class from whence he sprang, rather than the disadvantaged one Labour had always championed. When he came to power, Gordon Brown, having posed as an ‘Old Labour’ supporter, seemed to take the process even further, with his embrace of rightwing policies and gestures like inviting Margaret Thatcher to Downing St. When Cameron turned the tables on him by advancing initiatives on inheritance tax and on the lightly taxed ‘non domiciles’, Brown promptly stole these policies. With this bare faced policy larceny, ‘Political cross dressing’ had reached a kind of apotheosis. Moreover, with Cameron seeking to haul his party into that electorally strategic centre ground, the current political spectrum is as narrow as I can remember. Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian 2nd November 2007 thinks the positioning for the centre ground masks a reality:

At heart, of course, Labour and Tories are viscerally separate tribes, deep-dyed by their own histories, born and bred in opposite intellectual and moral universes; government under either would differ much more than they pretend. Yet in public they converge, swimming in a shoal, afraid lest any difference might alienate anyone. So they nibble each other's tails on small policies, but stick together on everything large.

Participation: to function properly a representative democracy needs a participating citizenry to staff the parties and vote in elections.

Parties: Simon Jenkins, in The Sunday Times, 30th September 2007, sums this up as follows:
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.
Voting Turnout: most people are now aware that the decline in party membership and activism is merely a symptom of a wider malaise. In the 1950 election turnout was 80%; during the seventies it averaged 75% but fell to 71% in 1997 and plummeted disastrously to 59% in 2001, recovering only slightly to 62% in 2005.
Grass Roots Membership: Jenkins lambasts British government for being so centralized, thus stifling the opportunity for parties to build up the kind of vibrant grass roots membership enjoyed in pother European countries. He points out that :
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.
Arguably British government is far too centralized and less competent for this. Critics argue that London based civil servants, party apparatchiks and their advisers are not able to cater for the needs of specific groups with anything like efficiency.
Funding of Parties: it follows that with smaller memberships parties have fallen on hard times financially. Modern politics is highly sophisticated with private polls, focus groups and scores of researchers to staff election efforts and keep the machine ready for when the big tests arrive. It costs around £20m p.a. just to pay for a party to survive, let alone finance election campaigns. So where does the money come from? And where can it come from in the future?
The Conservatives have traditionally drawn their funds from business and Labour from the unions. Membership subscriptions constitute just 6% of Conservative income; 13% of Labour’s. Corporate business donations used to infuriate Labour as ‘their’ party, the Tories, could always be relied on to outspend Labour when it mattered. Unions also delivered millions to ‘their’ Labour party when it mattered, though at the politically damaging cost of appearing to dictate party policies; this more damaging during and the decade after the seventies, the high tide of union power in the Labour Party.
Labour attacked the ‘dodgy’ donations from dubious rich foreigners and, when in power, its Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, 2000, banned overseas donations plus limiting anonymous donations to £5000. However, Labour found that as its own membership declined it was forced, like the Tories, to resort to a few big donors, like Lord Sainsbury and his ilk. Before the 2005 election, Blair’s office arranged for rich donors to help fund the forthcoming election but changed the ‘gifts’ to ‘loans’- a loophole that would keep the donors anonymous but which opened up the hugely damaging ‘cash for peerages’ scandal and accompanying police inquiry.
Sir Hayden Phillips, a retired civil servant was asked to head an inquiry in 2007 into how party funding could be improved. He came up with a possible plan-a £50,000 cap on donations, reduced spending on general elections and increases in state funding. However Labour could not accept Tory insistence that union contributions should be limited to this extent as this would have denied them the millions they have traditionally received from the unions. He gave up in despair at the end of October. So this way out of the dilemma has been foreclosed for the time being.
Charismatic Leaders: shorn of their distinctive ideologies, their membership and, to a degree, their income, parties seemed to invest in charismatic leaders. In a 24 hour news environment a figurehead was needed to attract attention and deliver messages crafted to reach the requisite groups of voters. Thatcher was a one –off but her example encouraged the emergence of Tony Blair with his voter friendly media brilliance. Cameron, without a doubt, sought to emulate such PR virtuosity and the party gratefully welcomed him- though having absorbed some of the focus group led changes, some-Simon Heffer in the Mail, Norman Tebbitt- protested their discontent. This development tends to support the ‘catch-all’ party thesis- part of the stripped down machinery designed to assemble the coalitions of voters needed to win elections- though Gordon Brown surely represents a return to a more traditional kind of politician.
Case that Parties still Function Democratically and Situation Remediable:
Ideology: it could be pointed out that Labour had not choice but to tack towards the centre and appeal to middle class voters as so many of its working class constituency has disappeared: from 75% of the population in 1911 to less than 40% at the end of the millennium. Moreover, it can be argued that the fact of globalization and the enthronement of market economics has made all parties conform to similar economic policies.
Nevertheless, Labour did pursue a distinct social democratic agenda, perhaps not in the generation of wealth, but in its distribution to the poorer strata- something which Brown assiduously sought to achieve in successive budgets. So public services were funded where, had the Tories been in power, they would not have been. Labour also implemented a radical programme of constitutional reform, in the form of devolution and ending hereditary peers in the House of Lords and introducing elected mayors; few would have expected the Conservatives to have done such things.
Representational: Parties still provide the crucial connection with voters and act as the nexus between them. Even the critical Jenkins allows that:
“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.”
He goes on to point out that in the USA one in ten Americans gave money for a presidential candidate and $206 was raised by gifts under $200.
Funding: the parties are predictably wrangling over money, as they always have, but it is still very possible a compromise will be reached. There is also the possibility that state funding might fill the gap. Arguments over this are complex- and Jenkins’ trenchant views are recorded below- but other countries as in Scandinavia and Germany, think democracy is sufficiently important to the common good, to assist it financially.
Conclusion: Jenkins’ diagnosis that ‘the political parties are dying’ has a certain amount of truth in it- the parties are in a bad way and democracy has been healthier- but it is basically an exaggeration. The parties still function- there is no shortage of candidates to sit in the Commons- the debates in the chamber are heated enough to be called vibrant and the system, though ailing, still has popular legitimacy.
Reviving Democracy
Decentralize: local government has been revived to an extent by New Labour- e.g. elected mayors and improved consultation- but some structural reform is needed to bring voters closer to representatives, to devolve services to local level as in other countries like Sweden and France.
Refuse State Aid for Parties: Jenkins argues powerfully that ‘parties need to revive themselves’ and that denying them the easy answer of state aid is one way of doing this. Tony Blair decided to have a membership drive in Sedgefield he bumped up membership to 2000. It is possible but parties have to be made to renew themselves. As Jenkins concludes:
‘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.’
Reform the Voting System: Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, 2nd November 2007, makes a passionate case for proportional representation(PR). A study by the Electoral Reform Society argued that, given the mountains of votes piled up in safe seats, only 8000 votes in marginal seats effectively decided elections. Given this reality parties refused to take any risks but all grapple for a slice of the centre ground, thus alienating people who might otherwise feel they are being represented.
Rather than targeting their millions on such a minuscule number Toynbee suggests a system in which every vote counts would encourage participation and democratic vibrancy. Yes, it would cause coalition government but at least they would be representative of what the nation believed and felt- they would be made via ‘public bargaining after an election instead of current pre-election merging by focus group’ Toynbee is not sanguine however about the chances of voting reform being delivered, despite nudges and hints that it might be on the agenda. It has to be said, however, that the introduction of PR in Scotland and Wales devolved elections, has not noticeably improved turn-out figures.
Bill Jones, November 2007.

Politics of Law and Order in UK

‘A society should not be judged on how it treats its outstanding citizens but how it treats its criminals’ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Polls show that concern with crime is close to the top of voter priorities and has remained so over the last two to three decades. This note takes a look at ‘crime waves’, causes of crime, penal policy and alternatives. It draws on material from my chapter 25 in Politics UK but includes more up to date material as well.

The ‘Crime Wave’: Virtually everyone believes crime is on the increase and that we live in the middle of a perpetual ‘crime wave’. Everyone too has ideas upon why criminals are formed and how they should be treated. We also look back to a ‘golden age’ when we could leave our doors unlocked at night and walk the streets at any time unmolested and without fear. In 1979 the number of serious recorded crimes was about 21/2 million; a decade later it was closer to 5 million when most people would have agreed a ‘crime wave’ was in progress.

Political Party Attitudes: Conservatives tended to blame the permissive sixties for the collapse of values, and behaviour leading to crime: respect for authority had been undermined by the ‘anything goes’ attitudes of that decade and so crime had rocketed. They pointed to the thirties, for comparisons when desperate social conditions had not resulted in increased crime rates. Labour tended to see crime as the consequence of hardship and poverty: if these were removed, they argued, criminals would have no need to commit crimes. Tories argued increased crime could be remedied by ever tougher penalties; Labour argued such reactions merely made the situation worse.

This analysis remained gridlocked in its respective certainties for several decades after the war but around the early nineties policies began to converge. The Conservatives admitted that economic depressions caused increased crime (see also Polly Toynbee’s article quoted below), while Labour, insisting, under its Home office spokesperson, one Tony Blair, that the ‘causes of crime’ should be robustly addressed, as well as its consequences. From here on in-now convinced there were no votes in the liberal approach- parties vied with each other as to which could be the toughest.

Measuring ‘Crime Waves’: criminologists point out that crime statistics are something of a mine-field:

i) More people now report burglaries because more people have home insurance and telephones.
ii) Many crimes are very trivial and may not even have been recorded until quite recently.
iii) Britain used to be much more violent in past centuries. EG Dunning’s work in 1987 calculated that the murder rate in the 13th century was seventeen times today’s rate. The idea of a bygone ‘golden age’ when we were a peaceful country is a myth, though there have been fluctuations of course.
iv) The huge increase in police manpower has enabled more crimes to be registered.
v) Media coverage of crime- often sensationalist- masks the fact that the chances of being mugged in our country are less than once every five centuries and the chances of injury from assault less than once every century. UK is safer than Germany, USA or Australia.

Clear up Rates: when crime rates were relatively low, say under 3 million a year serious crimes, the clear-up rate for them was 40%; not perfect but a tribute of sorts to a police force overstretched and weighed down by bureaucratic requirements. By 1999 the figure had slumped to 25%. Since then Labour has claimed some improvements but their lack of specificity suggests they are only marginal.

Fear of Crime: this is a major problem and I return to it below. When old people are frightened to go out at night and young people are regular targets for violent crime, the streets become even more the property of the criminals. Most people wrongly (see below) believe crime to be increasing and have little confidence in the police. Particularly afflicted are residents of inner city areas which suffer over twice as much from burglary as any other kind of area: much of crime involves working class people offending against their own.

Causes of Crime

Gap between rich and poor: countries with low gaps between rich and poor suffer less overall from crime- e.g. Japan, Denmark, Sweden- than countries with large gaps like UK and USA. People with very little look out on a world where people are judged often by how they look and what they have; if the road to success by conventional means proves too difficult, crime can be considered as an option.

More crimes on statute book: Blair’s governments placed many more offences on the books so offending is now easier to do as so many more things have been classed as crime. More material goods in the shops also act as incentives to crime.
Professor Mike Hough, of King's College London, was quoted recently in The Guardian:

"In Victorian and Edwardian times, in the 1920s and 30s, a far higher general level of violence was accepted. Now people report quite minor incidents that would have been ignored."

Young people face more challenges: most crimes are committed by young people aged 16-24 and this often gives rise to ‘generational’ disputes: older people blame the youngsters while the former vent their anger on their parents’ generation.
a) more are the product of broken homes and fragmented families
b) long term unemployment has taken away the hope which earlier generations came to expect as of right and reduced the number of ‘working’ role model males as heads of families.
c) When unemployed crime can assume an excitement and glamour which makes it attractive.

Growth of an underclass: partly as a result of the above factors a stratum of society has emerged comprising poverty stricken older people and younger ones dependent on benefits where the dividing line between legality and illegality is harder to distinguish and where a culture has emerged disdainful of the values underpinning a cohesive society.

Drugs and Crime: the Home Office calculates that two thirds of property crime is drugs related. A heroin addict has to raise some £15K annually to survive but seldom is in work so crime becomes the obvious route to finance the habit. Police seizures of drugs amount to a mere 20% of the total involved.

Anti-Social Behaviour: this causes a huge amount of resentment- vandalism, graffiti, casual violence, gangs of youths the worse for drink appearing to intimidate ordinary people. When beer is available in supermarkets at prices less than mineral water, it is scarcely surprising that so many young people misbehave- the older generation testify that alcohol was relatively much more expensive when they were teenagers. Having substantially relaxed opening hours moreover, has not contributed much of a restraining effect on drinkers to desist from their binges.

Polly Toynbee and the Economic Connection: Toynbee is often pilloried for holding stereotypical Guardian views but her research is always well founded:

‘Trends in Crime and their Interpretation, by the Home Office in 1988, plotted crime figures in the last century against the economic cycles, with graphs tracking crime against boom and bust. Its evidence is conclusive: in good times when per capita consumption rises with higher employment, property crime falls. When people have money their need is less great so burglary and theft trends drop. However, theft rises as soon as consumption falls when the economy dips and people on the margins fall out of work. But that is not the whole picture. Something else happens in good times. People have more money in their pockets, they go out more and their consumption of alcohol rises. The result? They hit each other more and personal violence figures rise. Exactly this is happening now with near full-employment and soaring drink consumption creating a rise in assaults, mainly young men hitting each other at night (mainly not very hard: only 14% visited a doctor afterwards).’(12/7/2002)

Responses to Crime

The Police: Billions of pounds have been spent on expending police numbers over past decades. During the eighties rightwing commentators lambasted the police for failing; Blair’s New Labour responded by piling in with even more funding to bring the number of police over 130,000. However, Robert Reiner, the leading LSE criminologist, argues that the ‘golden age of policing’ in the 40s and 50s was largely a myth. He believes crime was controlled by:

‘informal social controls, above all by the gradual inclusion of the whole population into common citizenship. However, the police took much of the credit… Much research evidence shows that policing had little effect on levels of offending’.
.
Reiner saw rocketing crime rates as the consequence of neo-liberalism, unemployment, inequality, poverty plus ‘an egoistic consumer culture and declining deference’.

Prison: to advocates of tough law and order approaches, prison is their chief instrument. Depriving someone of their liberty widely thought to be a major deterrent and, given the nature of other inmates prison is indeed a very punitive consequence of being convicted of a criminal offence. When crimes increase or when particular crimes receive publicity, there are calls for heavier sentences- especially from the zealots who attend Conservative Party conferences. However, prison is not regarded by many criminologists as effective in either deterring future transgressions or rehabilitating offenders so that they can ‘rejoin’ society. 60% of offenders re-offend within two years and it is clear young men who graduate from young offenders’ institutions to prison merely emerge as more hardened criminals.

On 23rd February 1993 The Observer published the story of ‘Dennis’ who began his ‘career’ in an approved school aged 12. It was here he imbibed the ‘criminal subculture’; by 15 he was arrested for stealing a car and went to a Detention Centre where ‘the kids were already seeing themselves as gangsters’. Inevitably he graduated to burglary criminal damage and car theft and soon was in Strangeways, doing time. After another stretch he married and worked for while but then drugs, marriage break up and loss of his job led him back into crime, this time armed robbery. His story, unusually, ends happily in that prison education led him into a different world where he discovered his real self and was able to leave the criminal worlds behind him to study law at Bristol University. But ‘Dennis’ is only one out of thousands who fail to haul themselves out of the trough of criminality and waste their lives rotting in prison.

Britain imprisons more extensively with custodial sentences than any other country in Europe and only USA and South Africa imprison more. In the eighties it was clear that a system designed to accommodate 40,000 was having to cram 55,000 two and three to a cell. During the nineties the Conservatives opted for more non custodial sentences but Michael Howard broke with this trend with his ‘prison works’ policy, which saw prison populations grow relentlessly toward 70,000 and above. Private prisons took up some of the slack once riots in the 80s highlighted appalling conditions but at the present time there are 81,000 inmates and no sign of any let up. Writing in The Guardian, the doyen of columnists Simon Jenkins argues in his article, ‘Britain’s prisons reek of a wretchedly backward nation’:

‘The chief concern of the public, always cited by politicians, is violent or sexual offending. But there are only 18,000 such convicts in prison. Meanwhile, the Home Office reports that 55% of the jail population is related in whole or part to the failure of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. Reforming this act along lines familiar elsewhere in Europe holds the key to reducing the prison population, yet ministers are terrified of "the press". Nor are the Tories any better. Their crime spokesman, David Davis, always refers to crime as "violent" and seems ashamed that Blair locks up 30% more criminals than did the Tories.
Young people whose discipline in other countries is a prime charge on schools, churches, sports clubs and communal authority, are in Britain left to the police. Yet the police answer not to any community, but to Whitehall statistical targets and the ministerial demand for good headlines. Crime in Britain has thus shifted conceptually from being an issue of social reform to being one of repression, and the figures show it’ .20/6/07.
Critics of the government’s penal policy do not just attack it on the grounds of its inhumanity, lack of rehabilitation and its sheer inefficiency, they also attack rising numbers when crime is in fact in decline. This is an extraordinarily difficult message to get across to voters, but serious crime has actually fallen by 40% since 1997. As Polly Toynbee argues, maybe this has something to do with the media.
Media and Crime
Polly Toynbee made a swingeing attack on the media’ coverage of crime in a recent article: 23rd October 2007. Pointing out at crime has ‘plunged’ by more than 40% over the last decade she surveys how the media insist on ignoring the good news and focusing only on the scary crimes for which the public has an obsessive horrified fascination . The most recent figures revealed a 7% decrease with serious violence down by 14%, lesser violence 12% and sex offences 7%. These figures are based, official police recorded figures but the British Crime Survey, published at the same time and based on interviews with 40,000 people, suggests crime is stable- neither up nor down. Yet these figures confirm the 40% fall, with a 59% decline in burglary, 61% vehicle theft and 45% personal theft.
Yet we Brits are more frightened of crime than anywhere in the west: 83% think crime is actually rising.
Ipsos Mori's Ben Page has no compunction in saying: "We're obsessed with crime and the media is to blame." He finds 57% say they think crime is rising because they see it on television, 48% because they read it in newspapers.
Fear of crime, stoked up by the media explains why we spend more on crime than any other nation in the world. This makes it prime target for political parties, seeking to win advantage by amplifying scares over crime- David Cameron, of course, has recently spoken of a ‘broken society’. With both main parties likely to be locked in a ‘boat race’ of poll ratings up to the next election, we can expect only more of the same.