There should be no surprise given declining opinion poll ratings and electoral performance that the Labour Party’s membership has experienced a marked drop since the Starmer administration was elected in July last year.
To be fair, members have left at a slower rate than Labour’s voters, but a 10 per cent fall to 333,235 at the end of last year is still significant. Indeed, membership is now lower than immediately after the 2019 general election defeat, when it stood at 532,046 (all figures from the Electoral Commission). It’s bad news.
Why the drop?
Much of it reflects Labour’s dwindling vote share, albeit members probably aren’t as agitated as the general public about immigration. But controversial moves on welfare, economic policy and Gaza would seem the obvious causes for disaffection.
Without hard data, it is also probably true that some Labour members and activists have defected to the new party co-led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, just as a minority of local councillors and MPs have. The Corbyn-Sultana “Your Party” isn’t yet registered with the Electoral Commission so it’s currently impossible to quantify its impact, though it claims to have received a remarkable 650,000 expressions of support. If fully converted to membership, that would make it about as big as Labour and Reform UK combined. Labour has probably also lost some members to the Greens, who are up by about 5,000 (England and Wales).
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Does party membership matter?
Yes. Even in the digital age, and before that when television and radio were supreme, parties also need to be able to fight a “ground war” – leafleting, canvassing, setting up stalls in the high street, fundraising, arguing in pubs and student common rooms, turning up for branch meetings and so on. Members also provide a more or less reliable source of funding and, without getting too fanciful, ideas for policies, tactics and strategy. As a “grass roots” conduit to the leadership, they can offer some intelligence at least about their current support, though less usefully about winning votes from competitors. The more ambitious also represent a pool from which candidates for election at every level may be found. For Labour, the trade union affiliates provide a link to industry and the public services.
A danger for Labour is that declining membership, continuing loss of council seats and control of local authorities, plus the prospect of disappointing elections in Wales, Scotland and London, will “hollow out” the party, making recovery at the next general election that much harder.
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Charismatic leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn tend to boost party membership(PA)
Is this new?
Quite the opposite. British political party membership peake around 1950, the era of Churchill and Attlee. In that highly motivated time, when a real-life socialist party was in power, Tory members briefly numbered about 3 million and the Young Conservatives organisation was the biggest marriage bureau in the country. Today, they’re at around 132,000 and romance is lower on the agenda for its elderly membership.
Labour, still Britain’s largest party, could in those days boast a million individual members and another 5 or 6 million via trade union membership. And the UK population in 1950 was 50 million, against nearly 70 million now. Britons may be more polarised these days, but also less tribally engaged and less reliably aligned.
Who’s doing well?
Undeniably, Reform UK, which has some 244,000 members, despite a dip earlier this year when several party figures resigned. The party now has a more conventional membership structure – less like a private company owned by Nigel Farage – but remains highly dependent on him.
A large, mostly inexperienced membership with little experience of administration or policy making, plus a tendency to civil war, is not necessarily a guarantee of success. Perhaps Reform UK has grown too large, too fast.
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What can Labour do?
An inconvenient truth is that Labour membership seems to enjoy a boost when a charismatic leader emerges – Harold Wilson in 1963, Tony Blair in 1994 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 are the pre-eminent examples. Sir Keir Starmer, whatever his virtues, hasn’t had the same effect, even before he had to endure the trials of governance. In tribes, the quality of the chieftain matters.