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The awful lure of the grassroots Samuel Brittan: The Financial Times 25/05/03 Arthur Balfour, British Conservative leader a century ago, once claimed that he would no more take the advice of the Conservative conference on public policy than he would of his valet. He was right. Political leaders are frequently advised to "go back to the grassroots". These voices are particularly loud after a period in which a prime minister has steered a course far removed from the instincts of his party members, as Tony Blair has done over Iraq. But long before Iraq, Peter Hain, the Welsh Secretary, was giving warnings about the need for Labour to regain its grassroots support. Recent middle level Cabinet changes have been interpreted as a token gesture in this direction. For Labour, grassroots means constituency members and trade union leaders. In the Conservative party it also means constituency activists, especially those who come to party conferences. Sometimes nourishing of grassroots is urged in the name of democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The views of activists tend to differ far more from the majority of the electorate than do those of cabinet ministers and MP's. Nor is it that party activists are "more extreme". As Thomas Paine said: "Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice." The trouble with the grassroots is not that they are undemocratic but that they represent beliefs which are too often outmoded, authoritarian or inhumane. One does not have to have a starry eyed view of the capacities of modern electorates to see that even they often judge better. It is mainly the activists who still take seriously the left-right political spectrum deriving from the seating of parties in the French Revolutionary Assembly of 1789. Labour activists are more suspicious of profits, more hostile to the price mechanism and more inclined to "soak the rich" than the mass of Labour voters. The Third Way may not be all that it is cracked up to be. But Tony Blair could never have weened his party away from old fashioned socialism if he had followed the grassroots instead of leading them, using as his weapon the supposed threat of never ending Tory governments. The dubious nature of grassroots pressure does not only affect Tony Blair. The chancellor, Gordon Brown has pursued market-based policies much further than any Conservative chancellor has dared, most recently in his espousal of market-based regional pay differentials in the public sector. He has been able to get away with it so far because he has a personal style which goes down with party workers and seeks to maintain good relations with union leaders even when he is trampling their sacred cows underfoot. But style can only get one so far. Already there have been rumblings and some back pedalling on the regional pay idea. Conservative activists are not the monetarist fanatics of left of centre imagination. Their failings are different. They focus on distinctions between English people and foreigners, they are harsher on immigration and would never let supposedly Thatcherite free market economics stand between them and special subsidies to protect agriculture or "the countryside". It may be a cliché to say that they are keen on hanging and flogging. But both these barbaric practices have remained off the statute book mainly because successive Conservative Home Secretaries have either defied their activists, or at least not tried to reverse reforms introduce by Labour parliaments. The biggest mistake of the post Thatcher Conservative leadership was to open the election of the leader to the mass party, with disastrous results. If the system had existed earlier, Disraeli would have stood no more chance of leading the party than Michael Portillo does today. I do not know what to say about Liberal Democrats. The party is almost defined in terms of its grassroots. Indeed it started to recover its electoral prospects by embracing "pavement politics", which were an extreme concentration on local issues which should have been the concern of municipal bodies. Yet it is the descendant of the 19th century Liberal Party, whose intellectual leaders, such as John Stuart Mill, were not only contemptuous of grassroots, but were very cautious about extending the franchise too rapidly to people who would not know how to use it. Elite groups can often be mistaken. For instance, I would not take the obsession of the British Foreign Office with a "seat at the top table" - which has caused it to veer from Atlanticism to the European Union and back again - as the last word in wisdom. My thesis is unashamedly negative. Grassroots opinion would not have saved British governments from the mistakes of their official advisers but would often have embroiled them in additional ones. The sophisticated case for paying attention to grassroots supporters is that they make the political system work by selfless efforts at constituency level and also by cash support. It is mainly nostalgia that focuses on the devoted local loyalist licking stamps and serving rather good cups of tea. Elections are influenced by the mass media, above all television, and by general impressions the electorate have of particular leaders or the character of the government. The cash problem is more serious. But the conventional view that state support should replace or supplement the grassroots as the source of party funds takes us along a dangerous route. Instead, donations of wealthy individuals should be welcomed as a way of freeing Labour from dependence on the unions and the Conservatives from constituency subscriptions. Some recent research has shown that, in the US at least, the donations of corporations and rich individuals have not been enough to swing policy in favour of their financial interests*. The real charge against Tony Blair in this respect is not that he pursues orders for arms and dubious capital projects in the hope of receiving donations for Labour, but that he pursues such projects at all. Let us examine a topical test case. What do you think would obtain a more considered result in a referendum on British euro membership? A franchise confined to party activists, a secret poll among the senior civil service, a free and secret vote of the House of Commons or the envisaged referendum?. Surely the real choice is only between the last two. It may be too late to revert to the system by which MPs alone elected the party leaders. But at the very least we should give three cheers when prime ministers go by their own instincts in the knowledge that, if they succeed, their partisan followers will have no choice but to accept. * "Why is there so little money in US politics?" S. Ansolabehere, J. de Figueiredo and J.M. Schneider, Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003.
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