Home page Britain's anachronistic political parties Thorstein Veblen, the American Economist, observed that institutions were formed to address the conditions of the past and therefore were never quite in tune with the conditions of the present. This observation certainly applies to the relevance of Britain's political parties to the challenges facing the people of Britain. It is not an exaggeration to state that British political parties do not have the intellectual critical mass, the organization nor are they possessed of the appropriate motivations to enable them to provide a transparent and objective mechanism for helping the people of this country overcome the challenges we face. Anyone observing the current evolution of politics in the United Kingdom is bound to be impressed by the degree to which so-called party leaders have become trapped in a web where they struggle to impress upon outsiders that they are the "leaders" of their parties and yet seem to be in a constant battle trying to get their messages out to the public without too much erratic interference and censorship by their own political party members, most of whom are unelected. The sheer absurdity of this state of affairs is that all of the political parties are so tiny that they have no means of claiming that they reflect the views of the British electorate. All of the parties together cannot amass a membership greater than 1% of the electorate. Politicians who think that they have something really useful to say should be communicating this directly to the people of the country. We need individuals in politics who are more substantive and who frankly do not have to rely upon these tiny power-crazed factions called political parties. It is, after all, the people of the country who count. On the other hand, politicians hang on to political parties because it is these organizations which provide them with a means to gaining personal power. This is why Gordon Brown, in his latest appeal that the the Labour Party should engage in local community groups and voluntary associations such as NGOs is completely missing the point. Voluntary organizations with memberships many times greater than any political parties focus on the issues they feel are important. There is no need for a political party whose members might have less understanding of the detail to get in the way of this process. On the other hand it is also patronising to suggest that such local enthusiasts should join a political party to succeed in achieving what they want to do. Most political party leaders maybe sense but do not admit that political parties are no longer adequate vehicles for reflecting public opinion. They therefore continue to be locked into this absurd circus because they see this as the only means they personally can get into a position of power. Gordon Brown has been in the habit of taking the best policies from the other political parties and rebranding them as those of the Labour Party. But this cynical process works both ways and will result eventually in the destruction of the coherence of political parties an distinct entities. This could be a reason Gordon Brown wants to "engage" with groups who naturally might not be natural Labour supporters so that the moulding of policies becomes a more organic process with a Labour brand label not causing a cynical reaction. But the failure of the General Election system is that political parties combine too many policies which for people with a more profound understanding of specific issue find mutually conflicting and often badly explained or deficient because they have suffered party enforced compromise. Therefore party leaders cannot expect that "engaging" with voluntary groups will lead to increased party membership simply because the party approach ends up with too many mutually conflicting positions from the standpoint of those with more knowledge and who are not members of the party. People, in genereal, have as much intelligence as members of political parties and politicians. The difference is that most people pursue an interest not in order to gain power but to rationalise decision-making, hopefully on a participatory basis. The grand distortion and corrution of this process is the fact that political parties and politicians are very much more interested in gaining power and the route to this status invariably results in a "reshaping" and a degradation of most originally sound propositions into grey compromises. It is these distortions, called policies, which such political parties as minority factional governments then proceed to impose on the majority; those with whom they sought to "engage" are essentially spurned. For the people of Britain to remain free they need to have the participatory means of influencing government decisions as opposed to being diverted into the inefficient and corrupting process of trying to shape political party policies. Party leaders will never contemplate participatory decision making in governance and as a result they continue to put off, as they have for centuries, the time when all Britons will sense that they live in a country where their free expression is taken seriously and counts towards the decisions which affect the people of the country. A people with no adherence to any political party line are obviously freer to think on all issues in a more objective fashion free of the compromise enforced by partisan bias or even fundamentalism. The big question which needs to be addressed in Britain is: "If political parties are so anachronistic why do we need them at all?" Posted: 23rd September, 2007.