The Leader’s Cheerleaders

Simon Jenkins

The Cost of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics by K.D. Ewing
Hart, 279 pp, £30.00, March 2007, ISBN 978 1 84113 716 2

Men are dying daily to bring Western democracy to supposedly less advanced parts of the world. Its export is the chief cause of conflict between the developed and the developing world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But how healthy is that democracy? Most people assume that its requirements are met by a periodic visit to a polling booth, but dictators can arrange that. What if ever fewer people vote? What if prosperous modern citizens take the view that their lives are more or less fine, so why bother? In particular, why worry about other things democracy is supposed to entail, like free speech, executive scrutiny, judicial independence and membership of political associations, all in noticeable decline in modern Britain?

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Vol. 29 No. 18 · 20 September 2007 » Simon Jenkins » The Leader’s Cheerleaders (print version)
Pages 3-5 | 2480 words

Letters

From Neil Forster

One can but admire the energy that Simon Jenkins displays rowing strongly as he does when deciding on the treatment best calculated to cure our ailing democracy (LRB, 20 September). But that energy rather goes to waste once you appreciate just how regressive Jenkins’s basic proposal is: that the political parties in this country set about ‘re-engaging with the public’. How they’re to do this he doesn’t so far as I can see tell us. More important, why on earth should they want to re-engage with the public when they are doing very nicely thank you without making any such noble attempt? The thought of starting to redistribute the political power that has become – no doubt unhealthily – so unshiftably entrenched in central government, is unlikely to cross the minds of such as our recently retired prime minister, his successor or the party that has proved so docile in following where the leader of the day requires that they go. Party high-ups may now and again pay lip-service to the kind of democracy Jenkins hankers after, whereby local political activities can generate some real input into the country’s governance but I for one don’t believe for a second that we’re going to see New Labour, or whatever other party may one day replace them, planning to turn back the clock.

As for what the best system could be for political parties to raise the money they need, Jenkins once again takes a line so impractical as to read like defeatism. Party budgets have increased enormously since the days when they survived happily, supposing there ever were such days, on the money they managed to winkle out of their members. If we went back to a system in which party income was raised by that method, annual dues would be onerous to say the least, and the vast majority of people I don’t doubt would be unwilling to pay them. ‘If parties operating as now regulated cannot afford large establishments and advertising budgets, that is their business: they should cut their costs.’ Thus Jenkins. To which one can only answer: Pardon me? The example quoted, of Tony Blair in 1994, newly become leader of his party, going back to his constituency and recruiting 2000 local members, in order to show that from now on New Labour wasn’t going to be in hock to the subsidies it received from the unions, won’t wash. That was an exceptional situation. The local members had the rare experience of finding that their MP was now their party’s leader, which was enough in itself to persuade them to cough up. How many of them remain members of the Labour Party today? And how many of them would have joined had they appreciated Blair’s big reason for wanting them to join?

We can all allow that Jenkins’s political heart is in the right place, but the therapy he asks for is way out of reach. And as for the best system of funding the parties, I found by the end of what he wrote that I agreed with the author of the book he was discussing, that the sensible thing is for them to be subsidised by the state. ‘A party in receipt of state money loses its incentive to build its base,’ according to Jenkins. Unable as I am to perceive any such incentive as existing in our current circumstances, we might as well cut our losses and accept that state funding would be a whole lot more predictable and transparent than the haphazard system we at present live under, with all its murky opportunities for corruption.

Neil Forster
London N1