How does the answer to this question vary from country to country?

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The legal status and role of parties varies considerably by jurisdiction. In some (corrupt) countries, membership of the ruling party can be a prerequisite for doing business, getting considered for state contracts etc.

In most Western democracies, whether you join a party or not is purely a private matter, and parties can also make up the rules of membership pretty much as they like. Most are struggling to get people to join in large numbers, so expelling dissidents or embarrassing members can be a low priority. Expelling Blair would be problematic as many of the leadership figures are still broadly Blairite in their views.  a More likely candidate for expulsion would be someone like Ken Livingstone for expressing anti- Zionist views...

In Ireland and the UK Unions can affiliate to the Labour party which means some of their members contribution goes to the party whether individual members like it or not. Generally speaking contributions from lobbyists, businesses and wealthy individuals are tightly controlled in terms of transparency and amounts but who knows what goes on under the table? Most political parties are also in receipt of state funding to help defray election expenses generally in rough proportion to their share of the popular vote but that can come with strings attached - such as minimum quotas for female candidates etc. The idea here is to reduce their dependency on corporate or wealthy benefactors.

In polities with proportional representation there are generally several viable parties and so if people don't like how one party is run, they have several other options to choose from.  In countries such as the US and UK with first past the post systems, the two main parties are enormously advantaged and privileged in many ways and people have little choice if they don't like how they are run. Insofar as they receive public funding it can also be argued that they should be more subject to public regulation to assure transparency and fairness etc., but basically they make up their own rules as they see fit, often at a local level with little public oversight.

My own view is that first past the post systems are primitive and polarising, that all corporate donations should be regarded as bribery, and that any parties in receipt of public funding (which I support) should also be subject to strict regulation governing membership entitlements, transparency, funding limits, fair procedure etc. with judicial oversight of same.  Other than that, the more and more diverse, the merrier.

Index of Frank's Diaries

I think you are mixing two issues here: preventing people from joining and kicking existing members out.

In Europe, kicking someone out is common in populist parties when leaders clash (recent example: Marine Le Pen kicking out his dad). In mainstream parties, it usually happens when prominent members cause a scandal or openly campaign against the party. But kicking someone out is usually difficult and those kicked out can sue in regular courts against the decision. Some cases:

• In the UK, Labour expelled George Galloway for his comments about the Iraq War in 2003.
  
• In Germany, CDU member of parliament Martin Hohmann held an anti-semitic speech in 2003. Merkel quickly kicked him out of the CDU parliamentary faction, but it took more than half a year for his local party branch to also expel him from the party.
  
• Also in Germany, the SPD had a string of high-profile cases. The first was Wolfgang Clement, former economy and labour super-minister under Schröder, a complete corporate sell-out who began to attack his own party from the right. The expulsion proceedings started when he openly called against the election of the SPD in the 2008 Hessen regional elections for being too leftist. His local party branch decided against expulsion, which was over-turned at regional level, which was reduced to a mere admonishment at federal level, but Clement then left on his own.
  
• Another scandalous SPD member is Islamophobe and upper-class racist hate-monger Thilo Sarrazin. Two successive attempts at expulsion failed at the level of his local party branch in Berlin, the second time just because he pledged himself to Social Democrat values. He is still an SPD member and still publishing new books full of racist theses.
  
• In 2013, the SPD wanted to expel Sebastian Edathy over a child pornography case. It didn't get to that, only to a five-year suspension of membership by mutual agreement.
  
• Italy's most famous party expulsion was when the Italian Socialist Party kicked Mussolini out for supporting Italy's entry into WWI.
  
• There was a similar case in France: in 1934, the French Communist Party kicked out Jacques Doriot for supporting the idea of a popular front coalition, which he responded to by turning a fascist (and opposing the actual Popular Front government when PCF made its about-face).

In Europe, preventing would-be members from joining usually comes up when the party establishment becomes afraid of entryism. The most recent example is attempts in the UK's Labour to block the surge of new applicants who came because of Corbyn. There was a similar case in Germany, when a student movement started in 1998 with the actual explicit intent to take over the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), but the party establishment reacted by raising the bar on joining. So several thousands joined, some rising high in the ranks later, but there was no real re-orientation of the party.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Thanks to all who contributed to this diary. I was genuinely ignorant of the details of this subject and am now much better informed.


"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The 5* movement kicks out some members if they stray from their agreement of solidarity with the platform. They can also be fined E150,000.
As can be expected a few grifters joined for their own career benefits, some were kicked out because they didn't report to HQ that they were under judicial investigation, if they didn't donate half their salary to a fund for small businesses or if there was the slightest suspicion that mob votes played a part in their success.
This kind of moral probity is unheard of in Italian politics, and they consistency has won them a lot of voters, peeled off from disenchanted citizens from right and left persuasion.
The prestigious position for Mayor of Rome is going to ballot in a week, with Virginia Raggi in pole position after primaries placed her 10+ points ahead of her closest rival. Chiara Appenndino is also showing very well in the race for Torino's mayorship.
Rome is so thoroughly steeped in corruption that governing it will be harder than a job as a minister of a department such as the economy, so much so that it is suspected the other parties want the movement to win, so they spectacularly fail at this Herculean task.

Oops, I strayed off topic, my apologies!


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty