“This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.�
Aneurin Bevan, May 25 1945
Apart from noting, with a sense of weary irony, that in the space of mere sixty years since Nye Bevan made that particular comment in a speech at Blackpool, the organising geniuses of successive governments have succeeded in producing a dire shortage of both named commodities, one can only wonder quite what Nye would have made of a Labour Party that has succeeded in losing 50% of its membership in the space of a mere eight years. Yet that’s the sad fact that faces party members today; since 1997 Labour Party membership has declined from 407,000 at the time of that year’s general election to around 200,000. In the last eight years, half the party’s membership has simply got up, turned its back and walked away.
Now we are going to have a commission to examine why, not that you’d realise this from the party website which has yet to catch on to this initiative and there’s no mention of it whatsoever on there as yet, despite the fact that news of this commission emerged a few weeks back via Tribune.
To some extent, party membership was always going to decline somewhat from its peak in the run-in to the 1997 election; the general air of ‘get the Tories out’ of the time meant that along with many committed members, Labour also attracted a fair few ‘fair-weather friends’, people who joined up more for reasons of wishing to see an end to 18 years of Tory misrule than out of any genuinely heart-felt commitment to the Labour cause; but even allowing for that to lose half your members in a mere eight years seems rather more than carelessness.
As Bob Piper rightly points out, its not just Labour Party membership that’s on the decline. Overall, membership of the main three political parties; Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories, has fallen in recent years and a big part of that has to be down to the general malaise that affecting politics in the UK, the widespread perception that politics and politicians, in particular, have become so remote from the real world in which us mere mortals live that any connection between them and wider public is now so tenuous as to be of negligible value and I have to admit that, like Bob, I really couldn’t give a toss about the troubles affecting other parties except in the most general terms that a lack of public engagement in politics in bad for democracy as a whole. I’m a Labour Party member and its the Labour Party and where it goes on from here that I care about.
So what has gone wrong?
Lots of things. In fact the one thing I would expect from this commission if it does its job properly is that the question ‘why did you leave the Labour Party?’ will throw up a myriad of different reasons; some of which be very specific to the way the Party has operated over the last eight years, others being more general in tone and reflective of wider loss of confidence in the wider political process: in fact there’s already a very good paper on this very subject (PDF), produced by Dr Gaye Johnson of Save the Labour Party, which outlines many of the more obvious causes of decline, from dissatisfaction with policies adopted in government on specific issues – Iraq features heavily as you may expect – to frustration with Party leadership and its general lack of regard for the democratically expressed (at the annual conference) position on a number of policies. In recent years, the annual conference has voted solidly against, amongst other things, foundation hospitals and PFI and in favour of the restoration of the railways to public ownership, all of which have then been disregarded by the Parliamentary Party in government.
At this year’s conference, depending on which resolutions make it to the floor, we’re likely to see further ‘defeats’ for the Party leadership on a variety of issues if they are debated; ID cards and City Academies being two obvious ‘banana skins’ that the PLP are likely to be keen to avoid, plus whatever comes from the Trade Union movement in the aftermath of ‘Gate Gourmet’ which seems likely to involve calls for the restoration of rights to mount secondary picketing. The simple fact is that on a significant number of policy issues, including pretty much the entire output of the Home Office in the last few years, not only the ‘top brass’ of the Party are likely to find itself very much at odds with the rank and file membership but also unlikely to be able to rely on the big trade unions to pull their collective arses out of the fire should any number of contentious issue be put to the vote.
At the very heart of this issue is the question of democracy itself, both within the Party and in the wider sense of democratic engagement with the political process. The very first thing it says on the back of my membership card is:
“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party.�
…yet from where I and many other members are sitting, the last eight years has seen precious little socialism in some key policy areas (Home Office) and even less democracy within the party. How, indeed, can we even maintain the pretence of being a democratic party when democratic decisions on policy, taken by party members, are blithely ignored by those who we elected to represent our interests.
That’s not necessarily to say that the Party in government must be absolutely bound to follow a lead given by members to the very letter of the conference resolution. It’s quite right that there should be a degree of flexibility and a bit of give and take on policy issues simply because, as ordinary members, we are unlikely to be aware of many of the practical constraints which come into play in government in trying to take policies from the ‘drawing board’ and put them into practice. An important facet of representative democracy is that there are times when it is right for a government and/or a party’s MPs to go against the wishes of their own membership and, indeed, against wider public opinion; as has happened on several occasions when the matter of the death penalty reared its ugly head only to be voted down by MPs who did the right thing, even in the face of media histrionics from the ‘usual suspects’ – the Mail, Express and, of course, The Sun. Let’s not forget, if public opinion at the time had been slavishly turned into public policy, we would have almost certainly have hanged both the ‘Guildford Four’ and the ‘Birmingham Six’.
Yet, the fact that, even in a democratic society and a democratic organisation, like the Labour Party, we accord our elected representatives an element of autonomy when practicalities demand it, does not absolve those representatives of their wider duty to be accountable. At the very least, when the PLP chooses to disregard the democratically expressed wishes of the wider party membership there remains a basic duty to explain themselves and account for their actions. The single most consistent mantra amongst certain upper echelon Labour politicians during their time in government has been, and still is, ‘I reject’.
To be perfectly frank, if there is one practice within politics that pisses me more than anything else its the apparent belief amongst many senior politicians that just about any difficult question or contrary position can simply be ignored just on the basis of their having stated that they reject whatever it is… which is then almost always followed by a five minute exposition of whatever the official party line is.
And, if anyone who is involved in this new commission does happen to look in then you can quite happily take that as my first and, in many respects, most important contribution to your review. It all comes down to one thing which, quite laughably in many ways, has become a central plank of current government policy. Respect.
I have a very simple philosophy when it comes to the question of respect.
It starts with a recognition that everyone I encounter in life is due, in the first instance, a basic level of respect, and indeed courtesy, which comes the mere fact that I am dealing with another human being; after that, respect is something you earn. In fact it’s something you have to earn because only them does it have any real value.
That’s what, for me, politics and many politicians have lost – or maybe they never had it in the first place and its only in the modern era where television and the Internet lets us see far more of our elected representatives, first hand, than ever before that this has become apparent. Whatever it is, the fact that politicians have lost the respect of the public and that the Labour Party has clearly lost the respect of 200,000 members sufficiently for them to to have left the party, is down to the politicians themselves and their failure to show us ordinary folks even the basic respect and courtesy of engaging us in real dialogue and debate.
That’s the bottom line here, the single most important message that needs to be understood.
This isn’t difficult, you know. All we are talking about here are the most basic facets of human communication and interaction. I ask you a question, you give me an answer. I put a reasoned argument to you, you give me a reasoned argument back. If we agree, we agree. If we disagree, we disagree… but either way I’ve given you the respect and courtesy of treating you as a reasonable and, hopefully, intelligent human being and you’ve done likewise. Throw in a bit of basic honesty on both sides and there you have it, a simple recipe for rational, adult, engagement in the political process.
So why doesn’t it happen?
Actually, it is a question I really would like see put to a politician on either the radio or TV, just to see how they’d react to it and whether they could actually come up with an answer. Wouldn’t it just be wonderful to see ‘Paxo’ on Newsnight tackle one of the legion of anodyne junior ministers that get shuffled out on to the programme on regular basis with the opening gambit of:
“Minister. Would you like to explain why you and your colleagues insist on treating the general public as a bunch of total imbeciles?�
Or maybe after a particular long and banal ‘party line’ answer on Question Time for someone in the audience to ask:
“Yes, that’s all very well… but why are trying to take us for a bunch of prats?â€?
To be scrupulously fair and play the ball, not the man, I should point here that it’s not necessarily the case that junior Ministers are personally banal or anodyne, more than the requirement that they slavishly toe the party line while acting as if they were deviod or personal opinions that makes them appear that way.
If you look at many of the things which are often cited as damaging the political process and, in particular, real engagement in policy-making in the modern era; whether it’s the proliferation of ‘up-there-own-arse-so-far-they-clean-their-teeth-with-Andrexâ€? think-tanks, the millions, billions when it comes to central government, spent on ‘consultants’, the endless round of tedious ‘rubber stamp’ consultations which aren’t consultations at all as the only questions being asked are ‘do you agree with our answers? - please answer yes’; these are all symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself. The real problem is that politics, like a number of other professions – law and medicine spring immediately to mind – has a culture which is predicated on the idea that it knows best and, more importantly, on the idea that any sense that it might, sometimes, not know best or make the occasional mistake, is to be avoided at all costs, that even the slightest sign of fallibility damages their credibility. The Doctor/Lawyer/Politician is always right and even when they’re not they’re going to keep on telling you they’re right until you believe it without every realising that its precisely that attitude which damages their credibility more than anything else. You’d think just once that someone in these professions would finally get around to understanding that its not the fuck up that gets you, its the cover up afterwards, after all it’s only Healey’s first rule of holes – when in one, stop digging.
Case in point – look at the absolute hammering that Bush is getting at the moment over the mishandling of relief operation in New Orleans. Would it really be anywhere near so bad if instead of praising his cronies and trying to pretend that everything was going fine he’d have called a press conference after the first couple of days and said something along the lines of:
“Look, this is complete fuck-up. I’m sorry, I’m as pissed off about it as you are, which is why I’m calling together to all the relevant City, State and Federal authorities into a meeting where I’m going to kick a few arses and get things sorted out and the relief operation moving properly.â€?
I really don’t think so, in fact had he taken that kind of line – without the expletives, obviously – then you’d find that not only would his public approval ratings be massively on the rise but he’d also be a shoe-in for the cover of the next Time magazine who’d be lauding him as a ‘man of action’ who happily shoulders the burden of a heavy responsibility.
I happen to think that it is a basic facet of human nature that we respect people who are prepared to take responsibility for their own actions, people who are honest enough that when they make mistakes and get things wrong, they accept responsibility for those mistakes and do their level best to learn from them. And, by and large, we can accept that people make mistakes if those mistakes are made genuinely and not out of negligence or malice – it’s almost always in how we deal with those mistakes, how we react to an adverse situation and take on responsibility that we shape the way in which we’re perceived by others. Its one of the more important and valuable ways in which we earn respect.
I’ve drifted off into generalities here but the point remains painfully valid when its comes to the question of why the Labour Party has lost half its membership in a mere eight years. Yes, there are a plethora of practical things which need to be done here to make both membership of the party and engagement in the political process attractive once again – not least of which is the re-education of the media and the wider electorate in the understanding of the critical difference between an open and frank political debate and a ’split’ - but all of these things proceed from what are very basic, very human attitudes and faculties; respect, courtesy and simple, honest communication.
So when it comes to the work of this commission, whatever it finds to be the detailed reasons why party membership is in decline, the one question it needs to be asking of all our politicians and of others working within the party hierarchy at various levels is:
“What responsibility are you going to accept for this situation?�
… with the full expectation that what we get in return is a full, frank and honest answer.
More on this soon.
