Skipper

'The survival of political parties is now in doubt as much as Blair's' wrote the always interesting Michael Portillo yesterday in the Sunday Times. His argument is that their sources of funding have progressively dried up: subscriptions as voters have ceased to join parties for social reasons; company donations banned; rich donors(which this scandal will probably outlaw); and trade union donations which the Conservatives will ban when and if they acquire power. Portillo expresses his personal distaste for state funding of parties-'a dreadful idea'- and speculates that any PM would struggle to introduce such a measure while the present disaffected climate persists. Few would argue with that.

He then suggests that the big parties might go bankrupt; adding that the reinvention of both big parties over the last decade or more provides evidence that they are, to borrow a phrase, 'not fit for purpose'. Portillo goes on to envisage politics without parties- something which might 'bring joy to an embittered electorate' and lead to a 'government made up of independent MPs.' This would work because 'the people in office have little need of parties. They can use the full aparatus of the state to promote their political objectives'. But whilst political parties- so long unrecognized constitutionally- might atrophy through lack of funding, one assumes the basic constitution would survive and that majorities in the legislature would determine the law.

This would certainly make it more difficult for governments to be voted out as clarity of choice would be lost. But I'm sure that after only a very brief-though dangerous- period, new parties- perhaps better attuned to our changed times- would emerge to contest the power to govern. Maybe such a genuine 'breaking of the mould' experience -unlike the one anticpated by the SDP in the eighties- would do us a power of good, but I suspect that well before such a situation state funding will have arrivedlike the cavalry to relieve the beseiged fort of democratic government.