There are few people in Westminster who won’t admit to being concerned (at least privately) about the calibre of people entering public life. From the declining standards of parliamentary debate to town-hall scandals, our institutions suffer for it.
Yet despite widespread acceptance that there is a problem, there seems to be precious little idea of what to do about it.
Writing in City AM, Adam Hawksbee described the stigma that has built up around standing for office. He argues that we “have to usher in a complete cultural shift” around getting involved in politics, and facilitate that with policy changes such as “more family friendly hours for parliament and council chambers”.
Whatever the merits of the diagnosis, it is a strange prescription. In the two decades since Robin Cook first overhauled its arrangements, the House of Commons has already taken major steps towards making its sitting hours “family friendly”. Has this given us a better class of MP? Not obviously.
I think Hawksbee actually gets to the heart of the problem elsewhere in his piece. Unfortunately, it doesn’t point towards an easy or fashionable answer: “Even worse is the suspicion that someone could only possibly be doing it for selfish reasons – for power, or money, or fame. In truth, politics offers little of all three.”
Well, quite.
There are plenty of good people prepared to get involved in politics for noble reasons. But it is very often a miserable job.
Power is an easy motivation to deride in the abstract. But the pursuit of the power to change things is literally what politics is. Yet as Peter Franklin noted in his recent column about Caroline Lucas’ decision to stand down from Parliament, many of our politicians don’t have the power to change much.
Indeed, changes such as family-friendly hours have arguably made the problem worse. Programme motions and time-limited debates have transformed the role of MP. With far less scope for debate and the detailed scrutiny of legislation, super-councillor busywork has ballooned in its place.
Meanwhile shorter hours – never really “family friendly”, as most MPs’ families are not in London – simply leave one with more time to get into trouble.
Then there’s pay. It’s true that being an MP (if not, usually, a councillor) commands a decent salary, at least by the standards of a low-wage country like the UK. But it isn’t close to what many of the sort of people we want in Parliament can earn in the public sector.
As for fame, well. Most politicians might not be famous, but in the era of social media they can nonetheless end up in a goldfish bowl, and are much more directly exposed to abuse. And in general, the politicians’ role now commands, if anything, negative public esteem.
Given all that, it isn’t at all surprising that many people are reluctant to go into politics. The sacrifices, both in terms of money and privacy, can be great, and the odds of getting much done often slim. Nor that many who do don’t stick around: the average length of a Commons career is declining, with obvious implications for its institutional memory.
If we really wanted to woo more people into public life, we really would need “a complete cultural shift”. But it would be about making being a politician more congenial: some combination of better pay, more power, and more privacy.
One can well imagine the public response to any such campaign. We get the political class we deserve.