This article first appeared in the Observer on 08/09/13

During its 100-year history, Milnsbridge Socialist Club in the Colne Valley, West Yorkshire, has seen some heady nights. There was the visit of local hero Victor Grayson – “our Victor” – a famously handsome orator who became the most radical socialist MP in parliament in 1907, and liked to ask swooning female members of the audience what they thought of his splendidly swept hair. Then Christabel Pankhurst came to champion the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1964 it was the turn of another local boy, Harold Wilson, to address the floor as prime minister.

Pictures of those halcyon days adorn the walls, but the oldest surviving socialist club in Britain, which overlooks the Huddersfield canal, is a sad shadow of its former self.

The windows have been filled in and the upstairs reading room, where many a mill worker was educated, has fallen into disuse. Apart from a few party diehards, people have stopped coming and the debts have piled up.

“It needed saving,” said Paul Salveson, Labour councillor and passionate chronicler of the life and political times of this patch of the Pennines. “This place is a precious part of the political history and radical heritage of the industrial north.”

But Salveson’s motive for forming a co-operative to take over the building is not a sense of nostalgia for socialist days of yore. “Communities need bases,” he said. “The aim is to turn the club into an inclusive place for the exchange of ideas. One with its roots in the centre-left, but where people can meet to discuss, agree and disagree. And where there’s music and film and cultural life. The dream is to revive the old club culture and spirit of association and debate, but on an open and civic basis.”

It is an aspiration that ministers, MPs, activists and party members, whether Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, would do well to reflect on. For the near dereliction of the Milnsbridge club, once a hub of working-class self-improvement and activism, mirrors a national crisis in politics. The numerical decline of Britain’s red, blue and yellow tribes has been going on for decades. But on the eve of the autumn conference season, which kicks off with the Lib Dems next weekend, there are signs that the end may be nigh for our beleaguered and diminished party system.

Labour, down to around 190,000 souls from a post-second-world-war record of one million, faces a financial crisis as it distances itself from unions that provide the bulk of its funding. The shadow leader of the Commons, Angela Eagle, claimed optimistically last week that the answer was “the creation of a new mass participation party for the 21st century”. Easier said than done.

The Conservatives, perhaps wisely, decline to release membership figures. But Central Office has failed convincingly to rebut claims that true-blue numbers may have dipped below 100,000, compared with nearly three million in the 1950s.

In total, less than 1% of the British population belongs to a political party and the trend is set to continue downwards. In Europe, only Poland and Latvia score worse. The only mass movement is that of the non-aligned. Conducting its annual audit of political engagement, the Hansard Society found that a mere 42% of Britons were interested in politics – a nadir.

Comparisons with other campaigning organisations are embarrassing. The RSPB has more than a million members, far more than all the political parties combined. The National Trust has topped four million. Even the Taxpayers’ Alliance, launched nine years ago to campaign for lower taxes, counts 75,000 supporters and rising. If current trends continue, it will soon overtake the Conservatives, who have pursued the same goal for a great deal longer.

What has gone wrong with Britain’s political parties? And, with all due respect to remaining members, should anyone care?

Moisés Naím, an academic at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, is the latest in a long line of thinkers to attempt a diagnosis. In his book The End of Power, he describes a draining away of authority from the main western parties, which, since the end of the cold war, have become increasingly bland: dangerously similar when it comes to ideology, and incorrigibly controlling.

Pre-crash and pre-web, alternative avenues of political engagement may have been thin on the ground. But in a world where social media have, to adapt Karl Marx, allowed people to take control of the means of communication, why bother with the traditional parties and their top-down hierarchies? Especially after a near meltdown of the financial system that no party saw coming.

“Public confidence in leaders and institutions of democratic governance,” writes Naím, “such as parliaments, political parties and the judiciary, not only is low but shows a secular decline.” In Britain, he notes, the rise of Ukip is one sign of “the redistribution and scattering of power from established players to more competitors”.

A whistlestop tour of the Colne Valley constituency, which spans parts of urban Huddersfield as well as Milnsbridge and the beautiful villages of Slaithwaite and Holmfirth, suggests Naím is on the right track. As in the rest of the country, political loyalties are not what they used to be.

The MP, Jason McCartney, won the seat for the Tories in 2010. Although he is keen to emphasise the enthusiasm and community engagement he finds here, not least among members of Conservative Future, the party’s youth organisation, he agreed that times have changed.

“Young people are not free for meeting at the golf club between 7 and 10.30 in the evening these days. They have other demands and pressures on their time. Though I think that joining things, in the sense of taking membership, has declined across the board, not just in politics.”

In the meeting room of the Commercial pub in Slaithwaite, the views of the Ukip fraternity were less measured. “The mainstream politicians have forgotten that they are here to represent, not govern,” said one member. “We’re sick of being lied to.”

The nominated chairman of Colne Valley Ukip, Graham White, is a lifelong Conservative who switched because he felt his views on Europe were being ignored. Regional chair Mike Hookem, a carpenter in his forties, had spent most of his life voting for Labour stalwart and former deputy prime minister John Prescott in Hull. Enraged by the last Labour government’s approach to EU immigration laws, he “kept shouting at the television until my wife said ‘they can’t hear you, you know’. So I started looking around. If you look at Labour and the Conservatives, they are both led by a cadre of career public schoolboys. Same courses at university, same backgrounds.”

Ukip represents only one kind of insurgency against the established order. Elsewhere in the constituency, a group who once might have been natural Labour supporters are doing their own thing, outside old-school party structures. Matthew Jones, 41, is doing his bit for 38 Degrees, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to organising people online and campaigning on “progressive” issues, such as protecting the NHS and opposing changes to privacy laws. One of the new forces of “clicktivism”, which can assemble the online masses overnight, 38 Degrees mobilised more than half a million people in 2011 to oppose the government’s attempt to sell off part of the Forestry Commission estate. It won.

“I’m not party-affiliated,” said Jones. “I’m an issues-based person really. And though I hate it when people say all the parties are the same, what is true is that they have all adopted a centre-right, neoliberal position that makes it very difficult to get any different voice heard in our mainstream parties. Like a mug, I voted Lib Dem last time round, and look how that turned out! If there was a party where different things could happen, I would happily pay my dues and get out knocking on doors, giving up my time.”

Other locals, such as Vicky Minton, who once acted as an agent to the then Labour MP, are now running sophisticated single-issue campaigns, such as the one to stop a supermarket being built in the middle of Slaithwaite.From a different vantage point – one located in the ranks of Colne Valley Labour activists – Hester Dunlop, a GP and Paul Salveson’s partner, expresses a similar sense of frustration at a lack of voice and influence.

She resigned her membership over Labour’s introduction of university tuition fees (“I would never have done medicine if they had been around for me”) but has since rejoined. She will not be going to this month’s conference in Brighton. “I remember when there was such a sense of excitement in local branches about getting a motion in for conference. But that opportunity to make a difference went with the grey suits taking over. The local party still gets requests to put forward resolutions, even though they have no real power any more. But why pretend we have any influence? The political class at Westminster are a particular cohort of people who are very similar.”

Personally, she still feels loyal to Labour. But as the long-term decline in membership continues, she believes that the age of political deference, which has helped sustain Britain’s political hierarchies on both left and right, has gone for ever. “In the postwar period, people coming out of the war, out of two world wars, were used to being told what to do and they were happy with that,” she said. “In politics, as in other parts of life, they were happy to ‘doff the cap’. Now that’s all changed. It’s good that’s changed, but it’s now a different world.”

So where do the parties go from here? The simplest answer is to Glasgow, Brighton and Manchester, as the autumn get-togethers allow Clegg, Miliband and Cameron to address TV cameras over the heads of diehards and swarms of lobbyists.

More profoundly, there is a dawning realisation that parties that have become steadily more corporate, stage-managed and hierarchical are no longer reaching a target audience which has upped sticks and left to do something more interesting. Jonathan Isaby, formerly of the ConservativeHome website and now political director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “People have become far more consumer-minded about politics. There is still interest there, but people are getting involved on a smaller scale, in particular issues. The days of having to join the party to make a difference have gone.”

So Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems must, as Naím puts it, “adapt their structures to a more networked world. Just as relatively flat, less hierarchical structures have helped NGOs to be more nimble, so they might help political parties reach new members, become more agile.”

Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, a centre-left campaigning organisation, is already trying to put that approach into practice. On Tuesday, Compass is staging a pre-conference meeting on “Tomorrow’s Politics”. One of the themes to be discussed will be, ominously: “Parties: pros and cons.”

“We’re trying to develop the idea of an ‘open tribe’,” said Lawson, “a tribe has nothing to do with ‘the party’ as the bully in the room, setting the rules and in charge of command and control. Things need to be more egalitarian, open, subject to negotiation between people who come together on some things but not on others. Why even have whipping of MPs in parliament, for example?”

It sounds like the vision that Paul Salveson is hoping to realise, on a small scale, in Harold Wilson’s former stamping ground. A world where a civic culture of discussion and fellowship can preserve the best of the values of the old socialist club, but without structures of party discipline and hierarchy that now seem to belong to the past.

Last Thursday evening, an eclectic bunch of helpers joined Salveson in Milnsbridge to discuss the next steps in the creation of the new “Red and Green Club”.

Suzi Tibbetts, a young artist who has helped launch a hugely popular popup world cinema night in nearby Marsden, offered her expertise. A music and dance night was mooted. An architect outlined his plans for restoring the windows looking out to the canal and creating a new space for a bar. And an open political discussion group was planned, taking its cue from no party’s line.

Who knows what the suffragettes and Edwardian socialist heroes staring down from the walls would have made of it? But as our political culture searches for a 21st-century roadmap, it felt like a start.