The Conservative candidate for the Selby and Ainsty by-election opposes new housing in “green spaces” in the constituency based on government targets. In doing so, she is no different from many of the Tory MPs who she seeks to join: after all, a backbench revolt last year forced the Government to make these advisory.
Indeed, she is in much the same place as Labour has been for most of this Parliament. It isn’t very long since Mike Amesbury, then the Shadow Housing Minister, denounced Ministers’ previous plans as “a developers’ charter”. Readers must judge for themselves whether Keir Starmer’s about-turn on his previous policy represents serious intent or temporary positioning.
And don’t forget the Liberal Democrats, who used quotes from those rebel Conservative MPs to help them win another by-election – the one in Chesham and Amersham which helped to precipitate the fall of Boris Johnson. That the seat was inside the Green Belt, and would have been unaffected by the Government’s original plan, made no difference to local voters.
This consensus of MPs and candidates from all the main parties over housing is also evidence of change – of which the third party I quote was a pioneer, opening up a path for the other two to follow. Fifty years or so ago, the Commons was made up almost entirely of representatives of capital (the Conservatives) and labour (Labour).
The House sat from the early afternoon in late at night – indeed, often until the early morning. It considered legislation line by line. MPs worked harder at scrutinising law (it is now the Lords that sometimes sits until the following day) but were freer to earn outside. Speeches in the chamber were longer.
Barristers went to court in the morning, financiers to the City. Nigel Lawson was the most impactful Chancellor in modern times, with the possible exception of Gordon Brown, but was kept on his toes by Tory MPs: an appearance then before the backbench committee of the 1922 which covered Treasury matters was serious business.
There were no Westminster Hall debates and no elected Mayors; no Scottish Parliament and no Welsh Assembly; no IPSA, fewer caseworkers and researchers; no Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Government was smaller, the lobbyocracy was weaker.
Rising consumer expectations, the collapse of the old trade union movement, social change and the expenses scandal ended that world. And the Liberal Democrats did most at a local level to speed it on its way, championing the ideal of the local MP who would be “your man in Westminster” and not “Westminster’s man here”.
It is no more possible to recreate that vanished age than to disinvent the internet. And it would be undesirable to do so in many ways: for example, the old Commons was essentially an all-male club – gentlemen’s club, so-called, on the Conservative side; working men’s club on Labour’s.
But if one wants a Parliament that works better, it’s necessary to grasp the scale of change. ConservativeHome publishes an assessment of new Tory MPs at the start of each Parliament. At the last election, half of them had been former councillors or mayors. In 2017, the same proportion. In 2019, three in five.
Claims about the decline in the quality of MPs are as old as the hills – and some of the staple backbenchers of the 1970s were no great shakes. Any Parliamentary Party which contains (say) Neil O’Brien, Claire Coutinho, Lee Rowley, Jesse Norman, Jeremy Quin, Laura Trott, Alex Burghart, James Cartlidge and above all Nick Gibb is no less bereft of talent than previous ones.
But it’s essential to grasp that the Conservative Party is now, first and perhaps foremost, selecting candidates to be local campaigners. So, too is, Labour: read this site’s recent interview with Michael Crick, the only journalist taking a detailed interest in that party’s selection processes.
Which raises big questions about the county’s future. You may or may not agree with those Conservative rebels about housing targets. But there can be little doubt that they are behaving differently from their predecessors: to cut to the chase, representatives of heartland shires and leafy suburbs with 20,000 majorities believe that their seats aren’t safe.
They revolt more and conform less: the Commons of James Graham’s This House saw a golden age of debating. But the Parliament of Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, of Denis Healey and Keith Joseph, was also more subservient to the whips. That the Commons is less so may be a plus for the legislature but it’s a minus for the executive – and, arguably, for the voters.
For what happens when local interests trump national ones? Britian stops building new nuclear power stations. Or new resevoirs (an undercovered aspect of the current debate about the water companies). Or, some argue, enough new quarries. And, above all, new housing – wherever it might go.
Conservatives should be especially concerned about this direction of travel. Covid and war have driven much of the increase in the size of the state and the scale of tax. However, the reform of public services and a scaleback in public spending can only be postponed, not prevented – since it will forced on the country, sooner or later, by demographic change and borrowing costs.
The Party should be asking itself some hard questions about the candidates’ list. Yes, the old ways were unsustainable. Given the demands of voters, it has had to adapt. But does the Parliamentary Party really require such a high proportion of former councillors?
And isn’t the current debate about the effects of David Cameron’s A-list a bit beside the point? One can argue back and forth about whether a list that contained Suella Braverman, Howard Flight, Andrea Leadsom, Esther McVey, Priti Patel and Liz Truss was or wasn’t a compendium of what John Hayes once called “the pseuds and poseurs of London’s chi-chi set”.
But, either way, it isn’t credible to suggest that the presence on the list of these, and others, has kept a golden generation of Tory men and women out of Parliament. For the truth is that many of those who might make it up aren’t putting themselves forward for selection in the first place.
Why would a new generation of high-earning barristers or business people want to enter the Commons and so cut their salaries – or, more to the point, have less freedom to earn outside? Grapple with the snakes and ladders of the new regulators? Be harried by social media stalkers? See their families dragged into the limelight?
Perhaps MPs should be used as staple workers during by-elections. Maybe it was right to deny them the automatic place at the last coronation that their predecessors had in 1953. But there is a cost to the change in the role of Parliamentarians in terms of the range of recruitment.
Radical solutions are mooted. One is to detach the Executive from the legislature altogether. Another is to localise more – so turning the Commons into a chamber focused on national security and foreign affairs. A third is proportional representation (as if politicians of the same party competing for local votes would be a solution to the problems I describe.)
None of these are convincing and all have downsides. “More money, more power, more privacy. The deeply unpopular recipe for getting better people into politics,” Henry Hill wrote recently on this site. But until or unless that unlikely prospect is realised, the parties themselves must take the strain. Which means a good long hard look at candidate selection and procedure.