Peripheral Vision: THE DECLINE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

THE DECLINE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

It was just over a decade ago that the (rare Coalition) government asked the British public whether they wanted to change the First Past the Post electoral system and its citizens (by a 2/3 margin) gave a resounding NO – thus losing the opportunity to loosen the grip the the Conservative and Labourl parties (uniquely) have on the British mind. Virtually all European countries have very different electoral systems which value consensus and lead to coalitions. But European citizens have, since 2000, become very cynical of politicians – and Britain is no exception

The previous post looked at the influence Harold Laski had on the Labour Party in the interwar years. Parties are elusive animals – difficult to pin down as the famous parable about the elephant and the blind men recounts. But political parties have a very clear purpose which I tried to explain in a 1977 article

The modern political party is a creature of a pluralist society - in this role its function is to:

recruit political leaders

represent communitygrievances, demands etc.

implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intraparty dialogue - into the nature of governmental decision-making (such insights can, of course, either defuse or inflame grievances!)

protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decision-making.

These days, they probably perform only the first and fourth of these roles – which perhaps accounts for the public cynicism which Peter Mair explored in this 2006 article in NLR developed, after Mair’s too early death into the seminal Ruling the Void book of 2013.. And the two British parties are torn by profound internal divisions – with the right-wing elements in both having so far won out. Today’s post continues the focus on the Labour party and will use 4 books which have appeared in the past couple of decades to give a sense of those divisions. The first and last titles, it should be noted, are the only ones which offer a compendium of views – the others are written by sole authors and reflect, as a result, a rather partial view.