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Wednesday, August 17, 2022

LabourList misleading on massive fall in Party membership


Our Labour Party has
lost 90,000 members over the past year. The party’s statements revealed that the number of Labour members fell by 17.4% from 523,332 in 2020 to 432,213 at the end of 2021.

Although our current membership is well below its recent peak of 575,000 in July 2017, it remains a great deal higher than the 201,000 members we had going into the 2015 General Election. 


Apparently, “LabourList understands that the fall in membership is in line with the usual trend experienced between elections,” but this understanding is simply not borne out by the data as reported by the Party to the Electoral Commission;


Table 1: Labour Party Membership, 2010-2021


Year

Membership at 31/12

Annual percentage change

2010

193,261


2011

193,300

0.02%

2012

187,537

-2.98%

2013

189,531

1.06%

2014

193,754

2.23%

2015

388,262

100.39%

2016

543,645

40.02%

2017

564,443

3.83%

2018

518,659

-8.11%

2019

532,046

2.58%

2020

523,332

-1.64%

2021

432,213

-17.41%


Source: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/


In the two years after losing the 2010 General Election we lost fewer than 6000 members, which was less than 3%. In the period after losing the 2015 General Election our membership increased massively, as a result of the two leadership elections won by Jeremy Corbyn. During 2018, the year after we lost the 2017 General Election, our membership did fall by a little more than 45,000 (8%). However, in the two years since we lost the 2019 General Election we have lost almost 100,000 members (18.76%).


Quite how LabourList can conclude that the catastrophic decline in party membership in 2021 is normal in a period between elections is difficult to work out. I guess it must be the combined effect of lazy journalism and disingenuous sources.


Another way of looking at this data is to say that Ed Miliband held the membership of our party steady, Jeremy Corbyn massively increased our membership and Kier Starmer has overseen continuous decline.


Tomorrow, I will think a bit about the political implications of these statistics. 




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