George Santayana famously coined the phrase “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“ I am not sure if he ever considered the opposite problem but an American author of self help books, Denis Waitley certainly did. He said “losers live in the past, winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future”. This weekend two of Labours best known faces were interviewed during the Sunday morning political programmes and spoke about the future for the party and by implication the future for all other political parties. It was as though they were reading from the same script. Sadly they both appear to be living in the past. However they are not alone, there is every indication that others share their delusion.

In speaking about the future of the Labour Party David Miliband was interviewed by Andrew Marr for the Marr programme, and he expressed his view that the party needs to reinvent itself and make itself more open. Both statements that are clearly true, however he then spoke about the need for the party to regain its mass membership. Whilst this would clearly help solve the funding challenge currently facing the party, it is so far fetched as to place Mr Miliband in the category of being something of a loser. Angela Eagle repeated the idea of mass party membership in her interview with Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics Programme.

There is ample evidence that a great many people are interested in how the nation is governed, but every indication that this does not extend to support for political parties and certainly not sufficient levels of interest to persuade people to join political parties in the numbers needed. There is plenty of evidence that the traffic is all heading in the opposite direction very quickly. In 1951 the Conservative Party membership peaked at 2.9M and a year later the Labour Party membership peaked with 1.015M members. Since then the membership for all parties has diminished consistently with only occasional blips. The last time more than 1M people were members of any political party was in the early 1990s. By comparison the National Trust had 2M members in the early 1990s and since then has doubled its membership to around 4M, 8 times the size of the combined political parties. In the last 5 years the combined membership has been lower than 500,000.

The future for all of our political parties will not look like the past, and whilst there is no precise definition of mass membership it is inconceivable that the parties will ever come close to the current level of support for the National Trust. It is vital that people such as David Miliband and Angela Eagle begin to paint a picture that is believable. With turnout at elections falling to levels as low as 15% in the recent Police Commissioner elections and 30% in the local council elections, it is vital that we find a new way of mobilising support for democracy and it is time to accept that the Political Parties are not the only way of doing so, as disappointing as that might be for David and Angela.