Conservatives earn more from the dead than their living membership

Jack Maidment and Steven Swinford THE Conservative Party is “stuck in the Stone Age” and showing “disdain” for its grassroots, senior MPS claim.

Robert Halfon, a former deputy chairman, spoke out as the party’s annual accounts suggested its membership is stagnating, with the central party receiving more money from the dead than from membership fees.

In a call to arms, Mr Halfon said members should be allowed to vote on a shortlist of four leadership candidates to “democratise the party” and increase the diversity of possible leaders.

He also said the party should become like a trade union, with members able to propose and vote on motions at the party conference and have a vote on appointments to the party board.

Mr Halfon told The Daily Telegraph: “We are just stuck in the past, stuck in the Stone Age in terms of our member- ship offering.”

He called for greatly expanded voting rights for members, a bursary to help poorer people join, and help with fuel bills and transport costs.

Current party rules allow MPS to select just two leadership candidates be- fore members get a vote. Giving members a wider choice would mean a better chance for a populist candidate like Boris Johnson.

Members were not given a say in two out of the past four leadership elections, when Michael Howard and Theresa May were effectively appointed as leader in 2003 and 2016 respectively. Jacob Rees-mogg, a Eurosceptic Tory MP, said: “We need party members to feel that they are an important part of the political set- up.

“There is by and large a disdain to party members. It’s unhelpful. We are not the nasty party.”

Official figures show Tory income from membership fees nearly halved last year. The party centrally generated £1.5million in membership fees in 2016 but £835,000 in 2017, while £1.7 million in bequests was received last year.

Labour received £16.2 million in membership fees in 2017.

A Conservative source said the £835,000 figure was only a fraction of total membership fees, with a further £4.1million collected locally.

In 1953, the Conservative Party had an estimated membership of around 2.8 million. Today it’s closer to 100,000 and, according to Electoral Commission data for 2017, membership income is dwarfed by Labour’s: £16 million vs the Tories’ £835,000. The precision of these figures is debated, but the picture is clear. The Conservative Party has shrunk. It has become dangerously reliant on wealthy donors and legacies, and claims that this is because the era of mass activism is over are bunkum. Labour has half a million members.

Some on the Right say this isn’t a big problem, that Labour’s mass-participation model has actually been a mistake. Labour made it too easy for MPS to be nominated for leader (including a radical such as Jeremy Corbyn) and for entryists to vote for them. But parties do need activists, and not just for their cash: these are the people who knock on doors during elections. And there’s no comparison between the Marxists who signed up to back Mr Corbyn and most of the Eurosceptics joining the Tory party. The Trotskyists don’t belong in any democratic party because they don’t believe in parliamentary democracy; the Eurosceptics are, in many cases, coming home.

In its heyday, the Conservative Party was about more than just Westminster. It was a civic institution and a badge of identity, a statement about who you were and what you believed in. In recent years, Labour has rediscovered such clarity, while the Tories have lost it – or even, in a bid to appear liberal, thrown it away. This has cost them members just when conservative ideas are most needed and are rather popular. What else was the Brexit vote but an affirmation of sovereignty, patriotism, democracy and the rational desire for smaller, more local government?

Some day Brexit will be behind us and the Conservatives will have to reconcile conservatives who were for it and against it. Unity will be possible only if there is some definition of belief. The current model of the Tories, as a vague party of the centre-right, expecting members to bankroll it on trust that it’s better at the job than Labour, will not do. The party must listen to members, give them a sense of having a stake in government and be as enthusiastic about the nation’s constitution, tradition, ambitions and aspirations as so many million of Britons are. If the Tories want more members, the best way to start is by courting conservatives.