Listening to BBC Radio Five Live during the Conservative Party conference, waiting for the Prime Minister’s speech, I was very interested in comments made by Tim Montgomerie of the right-leaning Tory website Conservative Home. More than that, I found myself agreeing with him. 

Montgomerie was bemoaning the the changing face of party conferences over the last twenty years, the discussion being prompted by the empty seats in the conference hall just prior to David Cameron’s big finish. 

He’s right and, as he pointed out, the memberships of all the main parties are increasingly priced out of what was once their sole opportunity to have their voices heard on a national platform, outvote the leadership and grandstand their own local agendas or national hobby horses. 

Now, the party conferences are rehearsed, scheduled and choreographed to death. No policy is made, the Liberal Democrats pretend to it but even they were not allowed a vote this year on the protection of the NHS. Instead, speeches are made, supportive actors from the public and private sectors are allowed on stage to voice their support for the leadership’s policy and the debates are short. In the case of Labour, this amounted to five speakers from the floor after the education ‘session’ being chosen by the chair to give two minute speeches. Many more missed out. 

Now the priority is only ever to show unity for fear of presenting a party apparently in disarray. We are told the public will be forever turned off by any party that shows its membership having spirited debates on national television. There was once a time when we considered this to be the epitome of the democratic process. Now it is to be avoided at all costs. 

Each party is as guilty as the next, no disagreements (or at least if they come to light, they must be played down) and interviews with the press that will always contain the central office-approved phrases: ‘same old Tories’, ‘too far, too fast’, ‘the mess that Labour left us’, ‘the right thing to do’. It is a diet of soundbites and it is delivered to us, the voting public, on the assumption that we are too bovine to require anything more strenuous or nuanced from our political representatives. 

If even those people who can be bothered to join political parties are excluded from their own national conferences, how do the parties expect these expensive jamborees to do anything to engage the rest of us? Bring back the hurly-burly of old Labour conferences when the raging debates, grumpy interventions from the floor and angry but brilliant speeches were urgent tea-time viewing in the Seventies and Eighties!

But the dark truth is this: the hermetically sealed party conferences, filled with more journalists and lobbyists than party members, reflect our perverted view of government. We have forgotten that government belongs to us, that it is the act of electing other citizens to represent our views, that we have government to manage ourselves and our shared resources to achieve the best for everyone in our society. It is this collective act which defines our liberal democracy and demands our participation. 

Instead, a small group of people talking to themselves, treat government and governing as a career; they are to be found in an ever reducing pool of individuals who have the means or networks to advance themselves to positions of power. Only a small number now arrive through grassroots party politics, instead they arrive as researchers, bag-carriers and advisers to the parties, after achieving good degrees at the best universities and being lifted into the corridors of power through their contacts and networks. 

Now think back to those old party conferences, where the unions, grassroots organisations, constituency members and local councillors had the opportunity to cut their teeth at the sharp end of national policy and debate. Where are those opportunities now?

And, as the people who do politics look less and less like the rest of us (twenty-one millionaires in the cabinet), we disengage more and more, arguing that ‘they’re all the same’. We fail to turn out on polling days, just 65% of us voted in May 2010. 

Our Coalition government now proposes that, as well as changing the electoral boundaries and reducing the number of MPs, registering to vote should no longer be compulsory.  With this measure, at a time when engagement in politics is at an historical low, thousands will not bother to register and will voluntarily disenfranchise themselves. In response, as the roll falls, the Electoral Commission will be forced to redraw boundaries to equalise the numbers of voters in each constituency, thereby permanently disenfranchising citizens in their own communities. 

This move is a disaster for our democracy, a reverse gear that will have devastating and permanent effects. The Coalition espouses the importance of ‘people power’ and localism but it reveals itself with this move. Its fondness for localism is not about local democracy and accountability, if it were the Coalition would not be introducing this measure and instead would be launching a national campaign on the importance of voting and participating in local elections.  

We are on a path to a bleak future and we have been heading there for twenty years. We must urgently throw open the doors to power and remember that government belongs to us, it should not be done to us.