A disappointing turnout?

Much has been written about the recent Labour Party Deputy Leadership contest in recent weeks, from Justine McCarthy’s rant in the Indo about the lack of women’s representation in the party (without even mentioning that we have the same number of female TDs as Fianna Fáil!) to widespread debate about what the role should involve.

But examining the election result throws up some interesting points which are worthy of comment.  Firstly, turnout was 59.3% of members eligible to vote (making it considerably less than 50% of Labour Party members).  For a party who pride ourselves as having Democracy as one of our key values, this figure is extremely disappointing.  I believe the low turnout can be explained by two factors – paper members and the lack of a leadership contest.  Paper members are a part of every political party in Ireland – people who pay their membership fees every year, but have never shown any activity other than this (and possibly voting for us at election time!).  And I believe that paper members would account for 10-15% of eligible voters in any election, regardless how competitive it was.  The lack of a contest for the position of Party Leader was just as significant in my view.  I was a member of Eamon Gilmore’s campaign team for the leadership contest, but even within that campaign team, there was some disappointment that we wouldn’t have a contest.  A contest would have allowed for a much more open and public debate on the future of the Labour Party, while also giving the new leader a few weeks to prepare for the role.  With the media attention such a leadership contest would have attracted, I believe turnout for the deputy leadership would have been 10-15% higher.

Which leaves about 10% of the eligible voters unexplained.  The fact that Jan and Joan are very friendly, and are viewed as having similar politics probably explains much of this, as it could easily have led to some voter apathy.

So, broadly speaking, that probably explains the low turnout.  However, when looking at these figures, that was not the figure which remotely concerned me.  The one figure which leaped off the page at me, was the total eligible membership of the Labour Party – just 4,661.

Now, this membership figure only includes full members who have been in benefit (ie – fully paid up) for the last two years.  This means that any members who joined as youth members only were ineligible to vote, as were all new members, and any members who had missed their dues for one of the last two years.  However, even rounding that figure up to take account of such members, we’re talking about a total membership of under 7,000.

7,000 members nationally gives us about 160 members in each constituency in the country.  If we are seriously going to aim to have a campaigning organisation in every constituency, those numbers will certainly need to rise.  Indeed, if we are going to gain a substantial number of local election seats in 2009, those numbers will need to rise pretty fast.  So we need to recruit, we need to activate, and we need to campaign – I think we should be setting ourselves a target of at least 15,000 members by the next election – this figure would still only amount to 0.3% of the Irish population (roughly speaking), which should certainly be acheivable.

This country needs a new politics – a Government with Labour at it’s centre.  Without the people to help make that happen, that new politics could be a long way off.