Tory Party membership: Last Orders have been called
The Tory Party is electing its next leader and has reduced the contest to two clean shaven men in suits, eliminating the two, very right-wing, women candidates
Given that it is most likely to be the Tory membership who will appoint the next Prime Minister there is understandable interest in how many of them there are and who they are.
How many of these members are there actually?
We do know that in the early 1950s the Tory membership was 2.7m. These were the days before many had a TV let alone the internet and it was often a social and networking thing. That said it was also a very powerful network to spread Tory ideas informally. In some areas the ‘Conservative Club’ remains a social centre although usually only very vaguely at best connected to the Party.
As recently as March 2018 the Tory membership was reported to be 120,000 and even that was believed to be optimistic.
The thought of 120,000 people of an average age of somewhere between their mid-50s and early 70s (again the precise detail is unknown) overwhelmingly white and rural managing to appoint the next Prime Minister, does run the risk of bringing the Tory Party into even further disrepute, if that is possible.
That spurred Tory chair Brandon Lewis into action in the Sunday Telegraph. He is responsible for Tory organisation. As he makes clear he is not actually responsible for doing it, or little would have happened. Rather he has employed some people to do it.
Writing in the Telegraph on 26th May 2019 Lewis claimed that the membership has increased from 124,000 in last year to 160,000 now. Lewis suggests the growth rate has been much higher in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than England. In England the bigger increases have been in the East Midlands and the North East. One suspects these are mainly former UKIP members seeking to make sure the Tories pursue a No Deal Brexit. The cost of joining the Tories is only £25 a year which equates to around 8 pints of lager in Brexit friendly pub chain Wetherspoons so only a little amount of drinking has to be sacrificed to pay for it.
Brandon Lewis also says that the Tories youth membership has increased by 64% with one hundred new Young Conservative Associations. I take it that previously the numbers of Young Tories must have been very low indeed and if the average age if the membership is around 70 then perhaps anyone below 60 qualifies as a Young Tory.
These are just statistics and reality provides a more useful perspective.
I’ve been a trade union activist for 40 years and up to around 20 years ago one would run across workplace representatives and activists who certainly voted Tory and in some cases were members. They invariably went on about tax cuts allowing them more freedom to spend their own money.
Such people don’t seem to exist anymore, or if they do keep very quiet about it. Likewise the Party’s elected representation on local Councils in urban Britain, which is the bedrock of mainstream party organisation in the UK, has gone.
To slightly misquote the Sex Pistols, there is no future in the Tories dreaming. The Party is almost over.
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