A decline in membership is something that affects all political parties.  There are surges of interest, but the overall long-term trend is against belonging to any party.  Even so, Dave’s Decline, the recent study by John Mann MP and Mike Joslin  (available at Labourlist.org) should be worrying for the Tories, especially in Horsham and Crawley.

Tom Watson says it all better than I can hope to, when he points out the difference between Labour after ten years in opposition, when membership was climbing to a peak, and the Tories after ten years in opposition with membership falling.  Not only that but even Conservative associations for areas with a shadow cabinet member or other prominent Tory MP have been seeing drops in membership and none more so than Francis Maude’s local association.

He has seen the largest drop in numbers of all the shadow cabinet with numbers falling by a quarter from 2006 to 2007 – a decline of 307 members in a year.

The figures for Horsham are a little obscured because if you look at the five-year trend there is a significant increase in 2006 but I think this is when Horsham association merged with the Crawley one.  A year later and the drop in membership takes the combined association lower in 2007 than Horsham alone was in 2005.

Horsham and Crawley are two very different constituencies.  Horsham is rock-solid Conservative and has been for ever, with a Tory MP who is well-known nationally as well as locally.  The sort of place where the local Tory party is part of the establishment and presumably an organisation to join if you are ambitious and want to network with well-connected people.  Crawley is a place where the Tories have started from a low base to win lots of elections locally with high hopes of taking the parliamentary seat.

After ten years in opposition you would surely expect there to be a lot more interest in either of these two constituencies if there really was a groundswell of public demand for the Tories to be in charge.  Certainly in the years leading up to 1997 the Labour party, nationally and locally, saw great increases in membership because we really were desperate for Labour to replace the Tories.  We saw numbers increase in our safe seats, in constituencies with prominent/famous incumbents, and in the marginals which were expected to change hands – just about everywhere.  And yet the Tories, who Cameron would have us believe are in the same position as us in 199 5or 1996 are seeing membership fall, even in his own constituency of Witney.

Going by the sheer number of leaflets, newsletters and other stuff that householders in Crawley have been overwhelmed with in the last couple of years it looks like the Tory party is resurgent because all that sort of stuff takes a lot of footsoldiers to deliver. Or does it?  A combination of bringing in bus-loads of supporters and truck-loads of money from outside does the trick just as well.  As Tom Watson points out:

Firstly, all that froth about a Tory revival on the ground is just not true. They’re not breaking through and capturing the imagination of local communities, despite the attempts by Conservative central office to punt this line.

Secondly, it just shows that if they have an improved presence in local communities, the Conservatives are using a very large cheque book to pay for it. They haven’t got enough members to deliver leaflets and direct mail so they must be paying commercial organisations to do this stuff.

There’s nothing wrong with this but whenever a journalist writes about increased local campaign firepower, they should be aware that this is paid for activity and not freely volunteered by committed local activists. There’s a difference.

An example of this is the fact that the Horsham and Crawley Conservative Association list amongst their published accounts a figure of £50,000 for salaries.  I don’t think that any other party in either constituency can afford to pay any salaries and certainly not that much.  Everything that the people (or person?) does for that fifty grand has to be done by volunteers in other parties or not done at all.  Tomorrow night’s Dispatches on Channel 4 might explain how they can afford to do it.

I’m not expecting any big surprises in that programme, but it will show the very real disadvantage that the rest of us have.  How many times have we talked to voters who said they voted for someone because they were the only ones who they heard anything from.  When they received letter after letter they interpreted it as being from a party who wanted their vote more or who could be more bothered to ask for it: it could just have been that they were more able to afford to pay for stamps or for somebody to fold letters, put them in envelopes and deliver them. It is not that we ‘can’t be bothered’ – we are just spread too thinly and without the finances to fill the gaps.

Its not illegal but its a huge head start.  So maybe Dave’s Decline will not be such worrying reading after all: one supporter like tax-exile Lord Laidlaw is worth a million normal members. Literally. We should be worried because the supply of JK Rowlingsis strictly limited!