Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
With all the MPs that have quit since, the resignation of Caroline Lucas last week has been forgotten. But despite Boris Johnson’s best efforts, hers was the most interesting.
That’s not because she’s the only Green MP, but because of the reasons she gave for stepping down.
“I’ve always prided myself on being first and foremost a good constituency MP”, she said in an open letter. She goes on:
“But the intensity of these constituency commitments… mean that, ironically, I’ve not been able to focus as much as I would like on the existential challenges that drive me — the nature and climate emergencies.”
Whether or not you agree with Lucas on her policy priorities is beside the point. Whatever an MP’s burning passion might be, entering Parliament should serve as a platform, not a diversion.
Unfortunately, the prevailing narrative is that constituency matters should be an MP’s number one priority. This is wrong-headed: the House of Commons is a legislative chamber and our MPs are, first and foremost, legislators.
Furthermore, they’ve been elected to a national representative body and should be prioritising national issues – including Britain’s place in the world.
That’s not to say that they shouldn’t represent the interests of their constituents. But the way they should do that is in the course of fulfilling their proper role as parliamentarians.
We wouldn’t expect a police officer to serve the public as anything other than a police officer, or a doctor as anything other than a doctor. But, for some reason, our MPs are now expected to attend to local concerns as if they were glorified district councillors.
That’s not what an MP is for. I want mine to use his presence in Parliament to raise matters of national and international importance, not the potholes on my street or my neighbour’s benefits muddle. There are – or ought to be – other people for that.
So, no, the good folk of Brighton Pavilion should have not distracted Lucas from her climate crusade. To draw upon Edmund Burke, what she owed them as their representative was her judgement – which an MP should never sacrifice to mere opinion. Or, to adapt the rumoured last words of King George V: “bugger Brighton!”
Of course, you can imagine what would happen to any MPs who did tell their attention-grabbing constituents where to go. They’d be pilloried in the local press – and probably the national press too.
No matter how brilliant their contributions to parliamentary debate, or painstaking their work in scrutinising legislation, or forensic their questioning in select committee hearings, the offending MPs would be condemned for refusing to dance attendance upon the biggest time-wasters in their constituencies.
The case for constituency work is that it roots our high-fallutin politicians in the real world. After all, what better way to understand the true impact of a decision made in Westminster or Whitehall than to see how it plays out in the lives of real people in a real place?
However, there’s a point after which immersion in the parochial is more likely to shrink an MP’s mind than expand it. Just look at the corrupting effects on nimbyism on the ability of Parliament to solve the housing crisis.
Then there’s the inordinate amount of time that MPs offices spend answering letters and emails from constituents who just want to vent.
Contrary to the approved narrative, an MP’s postbag is not a vital conduit between people and politicians. Only a small proportion of constituents ever contact their MPs – and, within that number, the most obsessive and peculiar personalities are over-represented.
These regular correspondents, as they’re diplomatically referred to, suck up a disproportionate share of parliamentary resources, which the rest of us pay for.
The same goes for the NGOs (most of them left-leaning), who exploit the system by getting supporters to spam Parliament with campaign material. Because these still count as constituency correspondence, MPs feel compelled to answer them.
Of course, constituents also get in touch with genuine problems, often because they have nowhere else to turn. One can hardly criticise MPs who go out of their way to help desperate people.
Yet we ought to remember that MPs are neither social workers nor ombudsmen. Nor do they have any direct power over the failing bureaucracies that haven’t done their jobs. All MPs can do is use their public standing to knock heads together. Some of them get pretty good at it.
But do MPs really make the best bureaucracy-busters? Wouldn’t this role be more effectively entrusted to powerful elected mayors within a fully-devolved system of local government?
There are only 24 hours in a day. Every minute spent on answering correspondence, holding surgeries, and all the other performative rituals expected of a good constituency MP is a minute less for scrutinising legislation, ministerial work, or taking a stand on the great issues of the day. It’s no use blaming our politicians for not fixing the country if we keep distracting them.
So, how did we end-up burying our MPs beneath their postbags?
Because the job has no fixed description, expectations have evolved over the years. The age of the MP as gentleman amateur is long gone and never coming back. For most members, it is already a full-time job – and so, not unreasonably, we expect them to do more than their predecessors.
To that we can add the contemporary obsession with transparency and accountability, and platforms such as TheyWorkForYou, which leaves MPs terrified of appearing at the bottom of a performance league table. If you don’t want to be named-and-shamed, then just make sure you respond to your constituency mail on time!
There are deeper societal changes too. Deference hasn’t just disappeared, it has been inverted into a culture of entitlement. We expect our politicians to listen to us, and act accordingly – not the other way round. In this respect, TheyWorkForYou – which enables users to contact and monitor their MPs as well as collating league tables on speeches and so on – is well-named.
This is all to the advantage of a political system that concentrates power at the very top. It suits those in charge to keep our MPs busy-busy; actual politics and policy-making is the last thing they want their foot soldiers focused on.
Just consider the few MPs who do command national attention, outspoken figures like Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates, and Robert Halfon. If all of our MPs were like this, then the media manipulators who run Downing Street (and the office of the Leader of the Opposition) would find the competition intolerable.
Note that I’m not talking about rebellion here, just the ability to influence the news agenda. Therefore, as well as keeping their foot soldiers obedient, power-hoarding party leaderships need to keep them quietly occupied. From this perspective, constituency work as makework is just the ticket – the more demanding and distracting the better.
We should be grateful it wasn’t always this way. If Margaret Thatcher had been preoccupied with parking issues in Finchley, she might have never challenged Ted Heath in 1975; had Winston Churchill spent all his time opening fetes in Epping, who’d have warned us about Hitler?
And as for William Wilberforce and the good people of Hull, I’m glad that he also found a moment or two for the abolitionist cause.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for pavement politics. But there are limits. It’s time for our politicians to literally look up from the gutter.