Whatever happens at the next election, one thing is guaranteed. There are going to be a lot of new MPs in Parliament. So far, 100 have said they are standing down. Many of them are Conservatives who are either jumping before the public humiliation of losing a seat, or trying to avoid the slow grinding humiliation in opposition. When they go, they’ll take with them a combined level of expertise amounting to hundreds of years.
Mostly, this loss of experience is a bad thing. Having older hands who’ve been through a few political cycles and know the rhythms of the job is a comfort to the newbies who aren’t sure what’s normal. Some of the longer-serving MPs even have a decent chance of knowing their way around catacomb-like corridors of the Palace of Westminster.
All that said, the loss of the old guard is also an opportunity for a big change in the way MPs operate. Over the past few decades, members have found themselves working harder and harder. The parliamentary sitting hours have become more “family friendly” (though the House still sits until 10pm on Mondays and 7pm on a Tuesday and Wednesday, which is hardly useful if you have school-age children), but the overall hours haven’t shrunk at all.
Constituency duties have more than filled any gaps left, almost without anyone noticing. While this local advocacy work is hugely important for keeping MPs in touch with the people they represent, it is also often an example of the inefficiency of our current political system. Politicians are working harder, but they aren’t working smarter.
When I wrote my first book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, I spent several months in 2016 following MPs around in their constituencies as they held surgeries and attended events. There were marked differences, of course: Cumbrian constituency surgeries have more problems with buses (or no buses), while inner-city ones are full of complex immigration cases. They have a great more in common. Most are held in slightly cold buildings, whether churches or libraries. Most are led by MPs who apologise for the state of their cars. All have people arriving with carrier bags full of misery.
Those bags are the thing that stayed with me the longest after the surgeries. Bags stuffed full with papers mapping out a crisis, often made far more complicated by the state itself. The MP and their staff have to rustle through the bags, work out which letters are important, and which agency they then need to chase.
Life is complicated, and we have a big state in this country which complicates it still further. But too often the reason the carrier bags started to fill up in the first place is that something went wrong, not in the constituent’s own life, but back in the corridors of power.
MPs are spending too much time trying to fix problems that were created in Parliament. Maybe they were badly designed policies which had massive unintended consequences. Maybe they were systems which were set up by someone who would never have to use them.
Either way, MPs are among the few people who can stop those mistakes making contact with the real world. They could have spent a still smaller amount of time earlier on, when that legislation was only in paper form, and saved everyone a lot of time and carrier bags of paper.
We all end up in these cycles of only addressing the important and urgent, rather than fixing the important before it becomes urgent. This is where MPs are now, and they have got so used to working this way that they haven’t realised how inefficient it is.
They are also led by the incentives within Westminster: if you are ambitious, you don’t want to annoy your seniors by reading their legislation and pointing out it’s a dud. You want to join them in government, and so you do the things that get you up that career ladder. You’ll get far more reward for building your media profile than you will for scrutinising bills.
There are signs that the balance could shift if the new generation of MPs wants it to. It is now far more prestigious to become a chair of a select committee than it is to be a junior minister. Committees are the best bit of the parliamentary system, but they could be far better resourced. The more powerful they become, the more MPs will want to be scrutineers. Then their years of experience will be filled with the policies they improved, the bad bills they revised.
And the less time they’ll have to spend in a draughty church hall with the consequences of bad bills in human form, clutching a carrier bag full of misery.
A new generation of MPs is just what Westminster needs
4
1
14.04.2024
Whatever happens at the next election, one thing is guaranteed. There are going to be a lot of new MPs in Parliament. So far, 100 have said they are standing down. Many of them are Conservatives who are either jumping before the public humiliation of losing a seat, or trying to avoid the slow grinding humiliation in opposition. When they go, they’ll take with them a combined level of expertise amounting to hundreds of years.
Mostly, this loss of experience is a bad thing. Having older hands who’ve been through a few political cycles and know the rhythms of the job is a comfort to the newbies who aren’t sure what’s normal. Some of the longer-serving MPs even have a decent chance of knowing their way around catacomb-like corridors of the Palace of Westminster.
All that said, the loss of the old guard is also an opportunity for a big change in the way MPs operate. Over the past few decades, members have found themselves working harder and harder. The parliamentary sitting hours have become more “family friendly” (though the House still sits until 10pm on Mondays and 7pm on a Tuesday and Wednesday, which is........
© iNews
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
