In April this year, a number of articles were written and speeches made bemoaning the continuing rapid decline in Labour Party membership, and in membership of political parties generally. The crisis meant an alarming shortage of people to stuff propaganda into envelopes and have doors slammed in their faces at election time. The membership figure quoted by Labour headquarters in April - a number that is rarely released and has to be extracted from them with thumbscrews - was 248,294. Nobody believed it. It probably came from 2003 and included tens of thousands who had left the party over the Iraq war, or who were six months or more in arrears with their subscriptions. By July the picture was clearer. A new organisation called Save the Labour Party forced HQ to confess to a figure of 208,000: half as many members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party's achievable goal. People are leaving Labour in droves. To anyone outside the present administration the explanation is simple: New Labour lies, and is craven, and has failed. To senior party figures and Labour-affiliated think tanks the membership question is the subject of abstruse and angsty discussion about sociological change and how an apathetic electorate can be 're-engaged'.

LRB 19 October 2006 | PDF Download