With trust in politics in the UK at a historic low, it is unsurprising that membership of both main parties continues to dwindle, with the Conservatives being affected the most. Clearly, the Party need urgent reform to attract new members. Not-so-distant history of the party indicates that the solution may lie in turning the party into a social club as well as a political vehicle.
The Ipsos Veracity index, which measures public trust across professions, found that politicians remain Britain’s least trusted profession. Just 11% of those polled said they trust politicians. According to the index, politicians are less trusted than estate agents, journalists, landlords and even advertising executives.
From the parliamentary expenses scandal, Partygate, the cost-of-living crisis and concerns over border control, this is hardly surprising. This has exacerbated a long-term trend of ever-dwindling party memberships in the UK. Labour has around 250,000 members, a sharp fall from 500,000 in 2019. The Conservative Party is in an even tougher position with just 123,000 members, down from some 2.8 million at its peak in 1953. Combined, the memberships of the governing party and the official opposition represent around 0.5% of the UK population. Rather than giving lifetime party support to political parties and actively participating in them, voters now tend to ignore political realities and focus their political engagement sporadically on single issues, such as Palestine, climate change, income inequality and social justice.
Yet trust in politicians cannot be restored without citizens once again embedding themselves in the political parties represented in Parliament and across local governments.
Ultimately, it is party members who select councillor candidates, parliamentary candidates, and ultimately party leaders. As matters stand, a tiny fraction of the population selects the candidates from whom the wider public must choose their MPs and, ultimately, a Prime Minister. The outsized influence of these small groups of citizens is part of the reason for trust in politicians being so low; members of political parties on the left and right tend to be more extreme in their beliefs than the voters they seek to represent.
A study by UK in a Changing Europe found that only 22% of Conservative Party members agree that “there is one law for the rich and one for the poor,” yet this is a view held by 73% of the public. At the same time, only a quarter of Labour Party members support tougher sentencing compared with 53% of those who voted Labour in 2019 and 70% of the general public.
Financial barriers are not the cause; they are low, with entry open to anyone willing to pay a modest fee. Instead, the offer of party membership needs to improve.
First, political parties need to ensure members feel engaged with and listened to rather than neglected or irrelevant. Feeling ignored is one of the quickest ways to lose trust. I personally made over 300 calls for CCHQ’s membership department to lapsed Conservative members. When asked why they had cancelled their membership, one long-standing member said: “I have been a Conservative member for 45 years and have never once been called by the Conservative Party.”
Second, the party membership offer must become more engaging, enticing and welcoming for young people. This is not a challenge unique to the Conservatives, but a problem faced by every political party in the UK. Young people are consistently under-represented in party memberships and parties need to reconsider what they to offer if this is to be changed.
Put bluntly, political parties need to be more fun. Lord Woolton, Conservative Party Chairman from 1946 to 1955, understood this when he successfully drove up Conservative Party membership just over seventy years ago. Impressively, he managed to increase the Conservative Party membership by over a million in 1948 within the space of just two months.
Nowhere in the Party did membership expand more rapidly than in the Young Conservatives, whose members affectionately referred to Lord Woolton as ‘Uncle Fred.’ Lord Woolton said they “became probably the most powerful political youth organisation in the free countries of the world.” At their peak, they had over half a million members. This is easily explained by the fact that the Young Conservatives were more of a social club rather than a branch for ideological discussions. They staged barbecues and beauty pageants, put on dances, whist drives, garden parties and coffee mornings. If political parties ever hope to achieve fifties-levels participation rates, they would do well to remember this lesson.
When I first joined my local Conservative Association, there were few, if any, young members. This initially left me discouraged from remaining involved. Nevertheless, I persevered and helped establish the Barnet and Camden Young Conservatives, serving as Deputy Chair for Camden. Today, it stands as one of the largest Young Conservative organisations in the country. Through regular social events, meet-ups and campaign sessions, many of its members will be standing in upcoming local elections, and we are gaining more and more members because of the social aspect of the events. An environment has been created where young people feel they have a voice, can engage in politics and can begin to trust the political system.
Cynicism towards politics is understandable. Years of scandals, a prolonged cost-of-living crisis and repeated breaches of public trust by MPs have created a sense of hopelessness. But the solution must begin with what can be controlled. We need young people to join parties, make their voice heard, and stand for local office. It is vital to engage with the political system we are fortunate to possess, yet too often fail to use. That renewal, however, will only be possible if political parties once again become social spaces as well as political vehicles — places where people belong, not merely organisations they pay into.
Original image by Marvin Meyer.