Not long ago, it was fashionable to debate why membership of political parties in Britain had collapsed. “One of the central facts of recent British politics has been the decline of the political party,” wrote the Labour MP-turned-academic Tony Wright in 2013, describing it as “a recipe for a crisis of legitimacy.” “End of the party” was how the Spectator magazine headlined an article on the phenomenon that same year. “The masses have deserted the political parties, and no wonder,” declared the Telegraph.

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Who now can make such a claim? First, Scotland: in the aftermath of the referendum on independence, one in 50 adults joined the Scottish National party. Then the Greens: after their repositioning as a party of the anti-austerity left in the run-up to the 2015 general election, they attracted more members than either Ukip or the Liberal Democrats. But who can have predicted Labour’s re-emergence as a mass party? In 2014, Labour had only 190,000 members; it now boasts over half a million.

With Labour currently in the throes of an existential crisis, a false dichotomy is being debated: is it a party of government or a social movement? Labour was undoubtedly founded because of the limitations of social movements. Winning concessions from Britain’s rulers was not enough: those rulers had to be displaced by the political arm of the labour movement and, more broadly, working people and those without a voice.

After all, having a vision that cannot inspire enough people to transform the country is an exercise in self-indulgent futility. But social movements play a crucial role in forcing issues on to the agenda and turning the impossible into the inevitable, from workers’ rights to equal marriage. Labour as a force that is rooted in the community could attract wider support and encourage more people to vote.

But a mass membership does not automatically translate into a social movement. In the aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory, I suggested that dealing with the inevitable establishment hostility required both a sophisticated media strategy and mass community organising. So far there is little evidence of a surge of activity on the ground.

One challenge is that the Labour party membership is simply unrepresentative of the population

One challenge is that the Labour party membership is simply unrepresentative of the population. That has always been the case: it’s the trade union link that grants Labour any right to self-describe as a workers’ party. According to ESRC-funded research by the academics Tim Bale, Monica Poletti and Paul Webb, around half of Labour party members belong to the social group AB: that is, middle-class professionals. Yet only 22% of Britain’s population belong to this group. Those deemed to be working-class represent 47% of the population, but they make up just 21% of the Labour party membership. Nearly half of members live in London or southern England, and a large majority have university degrees.

Bale and Poletti’s research identifies only 6% of Labour’s members as being aged under 24 – around 30,000 young members, or an average of 47 in each constituency. In contrast, half of members are over 55, the same proportion as the pre-Corbyn era.Parties in university towns have certainly experienced a surge in membership. In Oxford’s Cowley Road ward – dominated by students – around 200 new members have joined since the general election. But in the city’s solidly working-class Blackbird Leys ward, only a couple of dozen members have joined. In working-class small town Britain, local parties are much smaller thanin university towns or London: around 400 members in Great Grimsby, between 480 and 515 members in the Barnsley constituencies, 500 members in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. In Bath, meanwhile, where Labour won just 13.2% of the vote at the last general election, there were 1,322 members at the beginning of the year; while in London’s Hornsey and Wood Green, Labour now has an astonishing 4,600 members.

Why is this an obstacle to becoming a social movement? The idea of leftwing middle-class professionals descending en masse on working-class communities to campaign at election time is fraught with issues, mostly arising from contrasting experiences and different priorities and outlooks. But this is merely a hypothetical problem because it simply isn’t happening. Political rallies may brim with enthusiasm, as do many local party meetings when it comes to debates about the party leadership. But some constituency Labour parties have grown three-fold yet experienced little or no increase in door-knocking; some even report a decline. When it comes to campaigning, Labour has a very large paper membership. There is a clear danger of it being reduced to voting fodder and a source of funds.

If Labour is to have a future, that has to change. A mass membership offers immense potential that, as of yet, is untapped. Labour needs to adopt a strategy – led by trade unions – to recruit and give leadership positions to underrepresented working-class people, particularly in the north, whether they work in supermarkets or call centres. There needs to be a concerted effort by long-standing experienced members to get new members to knock on doors.

Partly this is about giving members confidence: some feel uneasy knocking on strangers’ doors for the first time. A scheme for community organising, backed up with sophisticated training, needs to be instituted. Setting up credit unions; creating food banks that organise recipients; social events for young people; schemes to organise private tenants and the burgeoning self-employed; volunteers to provide company for lonely pensioners – these are just some of the things a social movement could do. And what of mechanisms to feed in policies from the grassroots? The risk is of a movement united by total loyalty to one leader, rather than bubbling with ideas for policies to change society.

Understandably, any movement that feels under siege from the establishment will be defensive. An obvious danger is a retreat into the company of those with similar views, and the lashing out at those who dissent, even mildly. On issues from immigration to social security, there is an obvious chasm between the views of Labour members and the general public. But this divide can be bridged.

That won’t be achieved by intolerance for differing opinion on the left, let alone the wider public. An optimistic, understanding, empathetic, inclusive, outward-looking movement needs to be built. All of this must be part of a wider strategy for gaining power, of course. The Tories won the last election with few footsoldiers on the ground. Without a clear plan for power, the history books will refer to the left only as an explanation for how the Tories were able to rule for so long. Enough of the false dichotomies: Labour doesn’t have to choose between being a social movement and a party of government. It can be both.