From Churchill to Cameron: The Curious Rise and Fall of British Political Party Membership.

According to new data in a report released recently by the House of Commons Library research team, It’s no wonder that there is a sizable change in membership for British political parties. Indeed, the three biggest parties in the House of Commons (the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats) had never been lower in membership in term of the amount of the electorate.

Only 1% of the British electorate is a member of the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats. This number was 3.8% in 1983. Even more surprising are raw numbers considering that the British electorate had grown with time. The Conservative Party have about 149 800 members today which is a very small number considering that they had a whopping 2.8 million members in 1953 with a smaller electorate than today. Another reality is that Tory Membership went down in half since 2000 even if the party had been in power for five years now. This is in contradiction to when the Tories were in power in the 1980's and early 1990's, as they were usually the party with the largest membership in British politics.

The Labour Party never had more one million members as they had in the early 1950's. Today the party have about 190 000 members, which is similar to their 2010 level. The Liberal Democrats had about 100 000 members in the 1990's. 25 years later they have about 44 000 members.

What is more curious is the rise is the membership of smaller parties left and right. Both UKIP, the Greens and the SNP had seen a big rise in membership as their polling numbers went up, but it’s too early to have a genuine estimation of the number of members other than from the political parties themselves. Especially in Scotland, the SNP now have about 93 000 members, which is not bad considering that the total electorate in the recent Scottish independence referendum was composed of 4.2 million people.

But one thing is sure. Even if smaller parties had gone up in membership in recent months and years, membership of political parties tend now to have become more and more an ‘’elite’’ thing in British politics reserved for the few and not the many. There seems to be little will for the average British voter to be a member of any political party in this day and age.