Labour has still not developed a coherent and sustainable mass-membership model. Unless it can do so we believe that the era of mass Labour party membership is over.
Labour's latest campaign to attract members has run into the sands because the party has failed to learn the lessons of past failure in the Blair years, according to an article by two University of Bristol academics published today in the journal British Politics. At the tail end of Gordon Brown's leadership in 2010, party membership dropped to around 150,000 - an historic low. Subsequently Labour embarked on a series of initiatives designed to 'refound' itself as a mass membership party. But the article by Hugh Pemberton of the Department of Historical Studies and Mark Wickham-Jones of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, which compares the 'Refounding Labour' initiative with New Labour's successful membership drive in the mid-1990s, is profoundly pessimistic about the prospects for success. The researchers analysed the full extent of the membership crisis in 2010 using new data. They found that it was not just that overall membership was low, in many areas of the country it was catastrophically low. Moreover, membership had declined fastest in areas of the country where Labour needed to gain seats to win back power.
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