Propping up declining political parties is not why we elect MPs or pay taxes

It’s time for some honesty about political parties. They are dying out. Only the ambitious and the anorak join them now. And ordinary folk just use them as a cipher for voting choice that compromises the discussion of the issues and the effectiveness of our democracy.

There are currently 334 registered political parties in the UK – I don’t propose to trawl through each of these but have focused on the main ones (defined as those with a public profile and a chance of getting folk elected) excluding Northern Ireland to give membership figures:

British National Party (BNP) 12,000 members
Conservative Party 290,000
Green Party 8,000
Labour Party 160,000
Liberal Democrats 65,000
Plaid Cymru 2,500
Respect 5,000 (pre-split)
Scottish National Party 15,000
UKIP 15,000

This amounts to some 572,500 political activists – to which can be added various “parties” created as vehicles for independent councillors, assorted trots and commies and collections of what we’ll call “others”. Perhaps 600,000 folk actively engaged with the party system that, under current legislation, is a core component of our political system:

“The Bill will help to prevent the use of misleading candidates' descriptions on ballot papers at elections, thus helping to protect the identity of political parties and, therefore, the integrity of the political process. In addition, the Bill will allow, for the first time, a registered party's emblem to be printed on the ballot paper as a way of helping to distinguish as clearly as possible between candidates from different parties. (Jack Straw introducing the second reading)”

The assumption here is that we – the poor electorate – are unable to make a judgment who to vote for without the state prompting us towards one or other “registered” political party (you don’t have to register your party but if you don’t all the jolly emblems and descriptions are barred to you).

The problem is that politicians – elected as representatives of their constituents but in reality representing their party – voted to protect the role of political parties because those parties are declining rapidly. Back in 1953 when the Conservative Party had nearly 3 million members and the Labour Party in excess of 1 million, there was no need to protect the party “identity” in law!

However, the real reason for the registering political parties, for requiring all kinds of onerous reporting of income and membership, is to pave the way for state funding of political parties. For us poor taxpayers to pay for those posh London addresses, spin doctors and policy groups – mostly because we’ve stopped giving the money directly because political parties are anachronistic: relics of a different age.

We no longer need to clump together in class-based groups so as to protect our interests – we’re all pretty much middle class with much the same interests as each other. And in the main this interest involves keeping the Government and its agents out of our lives, getting on with raising our families, enjoying the house & garden on which we’ve spent all the cash the government leaves us after tax and not bothering our neighbours overmuch with our individual problems.

In truth we don’t need political parties. We don’t need to spend taxpayers’ money on sustaining the 1% of the adult population who join those parties. And we don’t need special protections or status in law for such bodies. If people like me want to join them that’s our business and we should not expect any privileged status or treatment for the organisation just because they are engaged in politics.