As the election nears the air is full of talk about political apathy and the decline of traditional politics. For some in Labour’s ranks the answer is to reform the party, making it more ‘democratic’ or ‘closer to the community’. But as a party member for twenty years – the first fifteen as an activist – I have come to the disturbing conclusion that far from being part of the solution to political disengagement our party and all the other parties are a large part of the problem. The action we need is to break up the party cartel in our nation’s political life. Local government may be just the place to start.
The recent history of the Labour Party shows party democracy to be an elusive and contingent phenomenon. Three decades ago, in response to the perceived failure of the 1974-79 government and, in particular, the rejection of the draft manifesto prepared by party activists and officers in preference for that of the leadership, the left of the Labour Party developed a set of demands to ‘democratise’ the party. But the image of democracy promoted by groups such as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy was one that sought to put control not in the hands of ordinary members but instead in those of union officials and party activists. The result of the partial success of this movement was undoubtedly seen in an increase in internal debate in the Labour Party at all levels. However, far from strengthening the party and its contribution to civic activism, this debate contributed to opening a yawning chasm between the concerns and priorities of the party and those of the majority of voters, including Labour’s own ‘heartlands’.
Having famously been knocked over by the waves at his first conference as leader, Neil Kinnock gradually rolled back the tide of activist control, with the Policy Review process being critical. Kinnock also supported then party General Secretary Larry Whitty in developing proposals for a National Policy Forum that would seek over time to replace adversarial resolutionary politics with a deliberative model of policy making. Despite the One Member One Vote drama and the first meeting of the policy forum, John Smith did not appear to have a grand plan to reform party democracy. By contrast, Tony Blair and the modernising enthusiasts around him saw the existing model of party democracy as a sham and an impediment to electoral success.
Under Blair, New Labour cast its net far and wide in recruiting hundreds of thousands of new members. There were also full membership ballots on two key issues: Clause IV and the pre-manifesto. These measures contributed to giving Blair a level of control over his party of which earlier leaders could only have dreamt. But it is also crucial to appreciate that Blair’s control rested on consent – not only were most Labour members willing to accept any discipline as the price of victory, but the left opposition to Blair was weak, divided and devoid of ideas.
But after the 1997 election New Labour’s political machine appeared to forget the importance of consent. In Wales and London legitimacy was sacrificed to expediency and members came to see that their sovereignty depended on them agreeing with the leadership. By the conference of 2000 the style of party policy making appeared to have reverted to 1970s form, determined by last minute deals between the leadership and trade union general secretaries.
The point of this brief history is to demonstrate that in the Labour Party, whatever the claims of leaders or rebels, the pursuit of ‘democracy’ has always taken second place to the pursuit of power. The reason why leaders occasionally have to take members seriously is less to do with principle and much more to do with pragmatism and the life cycle of political parties.
Put in highly simplified terms, the major parties appear to go through cycles of power, disillusionment, defeat, insularity, renewal and – usually – back to power. In the 1980s the perceived failure of Labour in office led to an increase in activist power. The need for Michael Foot, then Kinnock, to keep a rebellious and assertive party on side meant Labour’s leaders could not determine their policy agenda according to electoral needs. It was only with the defeat in 1992 that Labour’s activists become willing to accept the primacy of electoral necessity in the determination of policy and presentation. Yet, after 1997 with Labour in power and inevitably disappointing some of its members’ ambitions, the party becomes less compliant and leaders who thought they had thrown off forever the need to pacify dissent and horse-trade with union bosses find themselves having to re-learn old tricks.
The Conservatives are at a different stage of the cycle. Following the disillusionment of the party under John Major, William Hague lacks the authority to determine his policy and presentation by the desire to win a majority but must constantly reinforce his position by giving the party what it wants. Arguably, it was the hostility of his party that helped to see off his early attempt to brand himself as a socially liberal, compassionate conservative. For those who try to link the health of party democracy with the capacity of the party to engage citizens, it is noteworthy that the decline of the Tory Party as a community organisation has coincided with the partial democratisation of the party. The Tory Party was a considerably greater force in local communities when its leaders made absolutely no pretence of listening to members.
While some may continue to believe that Labour need only return to resolutions and composites at conference to build a mass party, there is a more sophisticated version of the view that the internal reform of political parties can contribute to broader political re-engagement. This is the attempt to turn local party organisation outwards, engaging with local people and becoming their champion. While a noble idea, there are several problems with this approach, two of which appear to be fatal.
First, while party leaders may express enthusiasm about parties getting closer to communities this belies their desire to maximise discipline. Inevitably, the voice of local communities will tend to be loudest when opposing failure by public authorities – people rarely get active to express contentment. Second, it appears that community activists are increasingly unlikely to see political parties as the most fruitful channel for the pursuit of their interests. Generally, parties and their representatives are seen as the enemies of radical change. Those involved in new forms of political activity on a national or international level may see themselves as being outside the political mainstream, organising in new ways precisely because traditional channels like political parties fail to articulate their demands. For many emerging political activists, parties are seen as either irrelevant, divisive or both. Across Britain we are seeing the establishment of youth assemblies, forums and parliaments. Twenty years ago these would have been divided into party groups, perhaps with a Trotskyite clique as well. But in 2001, as far as I can tell, none of these bodies are organised on party lines. For today’s youth the idea that you have to pledge lifelong allegiance to a party to qualify as politically concerned or active is laughable.
Underlying these shifts is a profound cultural change. The party affiliation model of loyalty to a single organisation seems not to fit the less deferential, more individualistic, faster changing realities of modern life. As David Walker has written, ‘Party decline looks like it is part and parcel of a well-attested social phenomenon – the privatisation of our lives and retreat from the “public space”. Parties are in the same empty place as trade unions and churches.’
It is here that we begin to see parties not as the victim of political disengagement but as a chief suspect. For while the social, cultural and behavioural base of parties have declined, the stranglehold which they have over the formal representative democratic process has – if anything – increased.
Parties effectively control who can be elected to office locally, nationally and in the European parliament. Although occasionally new parties appear to be breaking through (for example, the Social Democratic Party in 1983 or the Greens in 1989) and, equally occasionally, exceptional individuals or circumstances produce electable independents (for example, Ken Livingstone, Martin Bell), in all other circumstances anyone who wants to be an elected representative must join and be nominated by one of the three major parties in England or the four major parties in Scotland and Wales.
It is undoubtedly parties that represent the first call on the accountability of politicians. While MPs and councillors may ponder over whether they owe loyalty to their supporters or their electors, the reality for the vast majority is that it is to their party that they must first and most completely be answerable. Some of this accountability is owed to the activists who must campaign for and re-select the candidate; but most flows upwards to the party hierarchy in party HQ, council executive or government, to those whose patronage will determine the career prospects of the representative.
We have long grown used to the effect of party discipline on the power of parliament to call the executive to account. However, it is instructive to see the issue of party control in the light of the new arrangements for local governance. The division of executive and scrutiny functions in local authorities requires that backbench councillors change their role in the council chamber from that of committee fodder to the voice of the local community calling the executive to account. In recognition of the way in which this whole system could be undermined by party loyalty, Labour has changed its standing orders so that the group whip cannot be applied to the scrutiny function.
But this move – welcome thought it is – is likely to be of more symbolic than real significance. In authorities run by their party, Labour councillors will continue to be powerfully constrained by the patronage powers of the executive and by the understandable desire not to embarrass their own comrades in public. For this reason it will continue to be in closed party group meetings rather than public scrutiny sessions that the executive will be called to account by the majority group.
Despite their narrowing base and declining public legitimacy, political parties continue to control entry, progression and voice in the democratic representative process. But the argument here is not that we should do away with parties. The party system is vital to ensuring that politics continues to be based at least some degree on choices between values and programmes. We have only to look to Italy to see the danger that when traditional parties decline the space can be filled by parties based on prejudice or personality. But two processes must now be begun if the legitimacy of political parties is not to become so weak as to threaten their whole place at the heart of our democratic system.
First, parties must be forced to adapt, becoming more open, more broadly accountable and more genuinely representative. But we have to recognise that the case for party reform is not usefully made through appeals either to some partisan notion of ‘true party democracy’ nor through the hope that parties will seek to balance their short-term electoral needs with a commitment to the overall health of the political system. This is why the second process should involve governmental and constitutional reforms which have the effect of loosening the party stranglehold on entry, progression and voice in the democratic system.
In one area, public concern has already driven Labour to move the debate forward significantly. In subjecting party funding to legislation the government has taken an important step in recognising the relevance of party behaviour to the overall health of the political process. But this addresses only one part of the problem. Observing the still predominantly male, overwhelmingly white and increasingly aged profile of party members underlines the need to lower the barrier of party nomination for elected office. The process of party selection should move from one largely based on choosing the person in the party most suited to stand to one based on identifying people in the community who share the values of the party and who have appropriate skills and or community links.
The role of the party is not to act as a closed shop but an organisation that offers support to those in the community who share its broad values. This may appear to be a technical or even a semantic change; indeed both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats already have more of a tradition of this kind of lateral recruitment already, but for Labour this shift would be highly significant. Crucially, the fact that the representative is more likely to have a base, networks, and skills outside the party will help to balance the pressure the party will try to bring to bear on the representative in office. In time – if reforms to parties halted or reversed the process of party disaffiliation – the move to a more inclusive form of selection (along the lines of American primaries) could be pursued.
Reform is also needed to party discipline and culture when it comes to decision-making and accountability in democratic institutions. There are many proposals to strengthen parliament in relation to the executive, most, if not all, of which would require backbench MPs to act in ways which cut across party lines to emphasise their collective scrutiny role, for example in select committees. The scope for such reforms to affect the accountability of the executive is hinted at by the apparently better balance of power between executive and legislature in the Welsh assembly and Scottish parliament. In local government, every party should be encouraged to follow Labour’s lead and remove the whip from scrutiny. Beyond this parties should reinforce though exhortation, training, and incentives that scrutinising the executive is a valued activity even when it causes embarrassment to an executive of the same party.
But a more radical step should also be considered – one that points to a wider constitutional agenda. Although there are bound to be tensions and problems, the current relationship between Ken Livingstone and the members of the Greater London Authority appears to have great strengths in terms of real scrutiny. This is surely not unrelated to the fact that Livingstone does not control the majority or even the largest (or even any) party group on the GLA. This is not to argue that future mayors must not stand on a party ticket but it points to the possible value of further extending the space between the domain of executive authority and that of legislative scrutiny.
At the local level, the electoral separation of executive and legislature/scrutiny body (currently available only in the case of directly elected mayors) could help to ensure that backbench councillors are less easily dominated by executive members. If non-executive councillors no longer had a role in selecting the executive, nor were eligible themselves to join the executive, this would surely make it more possible that parties would relax their control over the selection of these councillors. Electing councillors whose role was exclusively to champion their locality and to call the executive to account would further undermine the already peculiar idea that parties should fight to the death to ensure every councillor is of their party.
Sadly, it is not the business of political parties to revive our political culture. To put it bluntly, any party would rather win on a 25 percent turnout than lose on a 75 percent turnout. The limited and self-interested ambitions that parties have in relation to democratic engagement as a whole is echoed in the partisan nature of most campaigns for greater ‘democracy’ within political parties. Despite important and legitimate concerns about the emergence of personality or single issue politics, it is time for those who are genuinely alarmed at the feebleness of representative democracy, and its growing distance from the lives of ordinary people, to demand action to remove the hand of party control from around the throat of our democratic system. Indeed, on reflection, it may be precisely our loyalty to our chosen political parties that has stood in the way of progressives mounting a more concerted campaign for the modernisation of our party-dominated political culture.