Opinion - News Analysis

The United Kingdom's phantom party

Polly Toynbee

This week's conference in Brighton has exposed Labour as a shell, deserted by members. It needs big ideas, not clever stratagems.

THE SYMBOLISM was too good to be true. No screenwriter could have devised so apt an image as the rough handling of an 82-year-old party member out of the British Labour Party conference for shouting "That's a lie!" Some New Labour enthusiasts have scoffed at such a triviality getting front-page display, but they deliberately ignore its graphic significance. This old man perfectly embodied a weak and depleted party that was not even allowed to debate the war it has been dragged into.

It has not been necessary yet to forcibly eject all members from the party: half have already stomped off of their own accord. Election campaign reports reveal a party hollowed out, often a near empty shell where even "activists" remain angrily inactive at home.

Consider just how empty Labour is now that it has lost control of heartland cities. In conference fringe meetings, fallen councillors plaintively lamented how they once had a Labour council and MP, and now have neither. With few councillors, local parties lose their roots and their reason for existing. Labour is disappearing in the real world.

Hollowed-out unions

The trade unions, once the backbone of TGMOO (this great movement of ours) may have had their last hurrah in Brighton. Their might alone voted down Labour's health and pensions policies and worked in favour of legalising secondary strikes. Set aside the rights and wrongs of these issues: a handful of union barons out-voting constituency parties was hardly democratic. The unions themselves are hollowed out, emptied partly by years of devoting more resources to baronial priorities than to recruiting the lowest paid and most vulnerable.

Tony Blair will now reform the party voting system to stop union domination. He may also break the unions' last real hold on Labour, as its financier, by opting for state financing of parties. This is a long necessary act to free all parties from the gross corruption of grubbing and grovelling for money from bizarre billionaires who want power and favours in return. But it also puts at risk Labour's umbilical link to a working class that has not died, even if now it owns its own home and no longer belongs to union or party.

Democracy cannot survive on virtual parties, manufactured by professionals, devoid of roots. Labour is in danger of becoming a phantom party — a self-perpetuating oligarchy given absolute power by only 25 per cent of the electorate through a perverted voting system that will, with a swing of the pendulum, deliver the same power to an equally unrepresentative Tory clique.

What was encouraging was the life and verve on the fringe in Brighton, where enough decent and desperately worried MPs, Ministers and long-time members agitated over how to renew, repair, and woo lost members and voters. Geoff Hoon, the Leader of the House (of Commons), is now considering compulsory voting — and why not? A citizen's duty to vote helps establish that everyone has common responsibilities as well as rights.

Only proportional representation, though, would make the real difference. One reason why politics has atrophied is the voting system's imperative for all parties to target the same 250,000 waverers on the centreground in key marginals. All parties crowd together, and use the same language and blandishments to entice a handful of the non-political at the expense of big ideas, killing off more progressive ambitions. Ed Miliband MP, another Brown foot soldier, put it best in a rousing speech at a meeting on social justice, talking of the deep divide in income, class, and wealth. He quoted American social critic Russell Jacoby: "The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable Utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on Utopian dreaming — or at least Utopian thinking drives incremental improvements."

He captured the mood: frustrated, waiting for the next Labour-era, hoping for something better. Without the big vision of the good society, without a Utopian dream, the steps Labour has already taken go unnoticed and under-credited. Mr. Blair decried "ideology" in his speech, calling it theology and dogma. But it has been his deliberate, triangulating strangulation of dreams that has lead to his party's atrophy. People flock to parties attracted by great ideas. No other clever stratagems will repair Labour (or Tory) fortunes.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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