Britain is now undeniably a Party dictatorship

Here’s an interesting fact: the aggregate membership of the three main political parties in Britain fell from 3.5m in the 1950s to about 476,000 in 2009 – that’s  just over 1% of the UK adult population. Given the whopping increase in our population over the last half-century, one can effectively conclude that active involvement in politics has been decimated over that time.

And it’s still continuing: the editor of the ConservativeHome website, Tim Montgomerie, alleges that Tory Party membership has declined by 80,000 under David Cameron’s leadership. It’s also falling even in Cameron’s own constituency: a point Christopher Shale was at pains to point out to the Prime Minister before his untimely (and still unexplained) death in a Glastonbury Festival portaloo recently.

It’s not hard to work out why politics has become the concern of a tiny number of activist wonks, and those who see it as a way to avoid real work: as long as a decade ago, the Guardian asked people to rank professions by their status and reputation, and the bottom line was politicians came second to last….last place going to journalists. (The top most liked were doctors, nurses and teachers –  a fact Camerlot would’ve done well to take on board before it started treading water in those areas over the last 14 months).

We should all remember, therefore, that when Party bigwigs talk about ‘staying in touch with the grass roots’, what they’re actually doing is listening to the views of a tiny oligarchy of obsessive eccentrics. Of the three Parties, the LibDems are by far the worst example of listening to the lunatic fringe, but things are getting worse in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party too. And the Conservative Party membership is, I understand, getting older.

Between the three of them, the LibDems, Labour and the Tories respectively reflect the views of EU eco-warriors, the pc feminist to trade union axis, and senile free marketeers still hoping for 1979 to be revived – and preferably, Baroness Thatcher to be cloned. It is thus no surprise that all of them miss the Big Things on the electorate’s radar.

The total adult population of the UK is, give or take a few hundred thousand, 50 million. Between them, the Cleggerons polled 17.5 million votes in May 2010, or about 35% of that total. The truth is that we have a Government supported by just over a third of Britons, and an Opposition supported by around 15%. That’s half the population left out – because they voted for other Parties, or didn’t identify with anything on offer.

This isn’t elective democracy, it’s an unhealthy melange of dictatorship, autocracy, and apathy. Ask any MP or senior local Party organiser, and they will tell you how much the falling electoral involvement with politics disturbs them. What they never do is look in the mirror and ask, “Is it something we’re doing wrong?”

Earlier this year, voters rejected an electoral reform option. 68% of electors voted no to the majoritarian AV system – a result hailed by Camerlot as unequivocal support for the existing system. That interpretation is bollocks for two blindingly obvious reasons. First, loads of people (like me) want a PR list system – which wasn’t on offer. And second, 58% of the adult population didn’t vote either way. The First Past the Post (FPTP) system has been retained on the say-so of 27% of the electorate. Add the 32% of voters who voted  in favour of a more representative system to those who stayed at home, and you arrive at nearly three quarters of Britons NOT supporting FPTP

I know I’m going to get a huge wall of comment threads and rude emails asking why on earth any of this matters, given our massive economic and fiscal problems. But very little of it will be justified: the right change to a voting system capable of breaking the Party dictatorship would also bring new, more relevant Parties into the mix – and encourage existing Party MPs to break away into new, more relevant opinion groups.

We are in the mess we’re in because Big Party dictatorship has been able to ignore Radical Realism – and push pointless and outdated polemics at us. There was no way earlier this year that any of the tripartite cabal were going to really hand the power back to us. But tedious as it may seem, that’s what we must continue to insist upon. Ultimately, either we are successful in this aim in the near future….or the powers of darkness will try to stop us ever having the opportunity again.

The tendency of the Party Establishment to protect its privilege will never change. Newscorp would never have changed its ways without the force of revelation being applied. The Establishment’s collusion in the amoral rise of Newscorp should be noted and remembered: we will have to apply the same principle of destabilisation to the Party Dictatorship as we did to the Murdoch empire.