Political Parties Are Dead in Britain

It is not impossible to increase membership of a political party in the modern age. Blair achieved it in the mid-1990s. Nigel Farage manages it today: at the current rate of convergence Ukip will have more members than the Conservative party within five years. If you have a mission that inspires people, they do sign up. But rather than trying to find such a mission, the big parties seem more occupied with how to reach the holy grail of state funding of political parties without too much in the way of public outrage. One senses that they privately love party funding scandals because each one brings them closer to the point at which, they hope, the public will see state funding as a lesser evil than funding by plutocrats. My guess, though, is that the public won’t buy it, any more than they bought the idea of higher MP salaries to compensate for lower expense claims. There is, of course, another option to propping up political parties with public money: let them go to the wall.