Rag-Bag Issues

Many of the Party's current difficulties are the result of the sort of membership it attracted. Youth politics in recent years have been strictly issue politics - Vietnam, South Africa, the Security Service, cannabis etc. The Values Party, in seeking and attracting youth membership, built into its structure this sort of approach and adopted a markedly liberal stance on most of these questions. It attempted to tie up this rag-bag with a central but negative policy of zero economic and population growth, a policy of insufficiently imaginative and scientific proportions to secure a philosophical base by which the Party membership could be sustained during the waiting between elections. Party membership seemed to regard the 1972 election as an issue of a kind, perhaps with good reason. The bankruptcy of the National Party was apparent, that of the Labour Party suspected. A gulf, tenuously spanned in one direction by the law and press propaganda, in the other by an increasing state bureaucracy, was discernible between Parliament and the people.

Into this gulf the Values Party wished to pour the festive resources of participation, democratisation and decentralisation. In short, new directions were up for consideration. But with the election gone the issue was settled and thus membership tended to drift away. The result has been the waning of Values fortunes and it may have been this that produced divisive bickering in the Party and some challenge to Brunt's leadership — Brunt has consistently refused to anchor his political philosophy to anything more than an eclectic liberalism, fearful — as he admits — of the appearance of dogma that a consistent, scientific, global critique can sometimes take. Other members of the Party, aware of ebbing support and conscious of the difficulty of working reforms in the face of Brunt's possessive disapproval, have advocated and attempted to institute a flexible Party structure that could cope with the need for a new and more sophisticated policy.