Hamish Macdonell: Out with the old and in with the new politicians

Published on Monday 25 May 2009 21:30

WITH MPs of all parties scrabbling around for help during these desperate times, maybe they should turn to Marx for the answer – but Groucho, not Karl.

"I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member," he said. It was just a quip but maybe one that now carries a little more resonance than many of our beleaguered MPs would care to admit.

The trouble with the House of Commons is not the institution itself (which has done pretty well as a beacon of democracy for hundreds of years), it is the current batch of members. So maybe we should move to a situation where the sole qualification for membership of the House of Commons is a fervent desire not to be a member of the House of Commons.

That way we would get MPs who were not in it for their own advancement – political, financial or social – nor would we get representatives who owe greater loyalty to the party than to their voters.

It would, of course, never be possible to elect only those who didn't want to be elected but perhaps that isn't such a bad starting point in trying to work out where to go from here.

David Cameron has already seized the chance presented by the expenses scandal to get rid of some dreary old time-servers who had been there so long they had confused public service with self-service.

Out go Douglas Hogg (he of the moat), Sir Peter Viggers (he of the ornamental duck pond) and Anthony Steen (he of the 80,000 of repairs to his 1 million mansion). These are just three but many more from the old guard of Conservative benches are bound to retire to spend more time with their families after the next election too.

That is a start, but it does not go nearly far enough. The twin problems with party politics for the last two decades have been the rise of the professional politician and the burgeoning power of the party machine. Just take a look at Holyrood, a relatively new institution, which is packed to its decorative modern rafters with former researchers, trade unionists and people who have known nothing else but politics since leaving school.

I have written about this before and called for a bar on anybody becoming an MSP who did not have five years experience of work outside politics. After the last of my rants on this subject, a year or two ago, I was collared by Ross Finnie – one of the exceptions to the dead hand of professional politics as he entered parliament after a long career in accountancy.

Mr Finnie insisted that the political parties would love to get a more diverse candidate base but were finding it difficult persuading high-achievers in other fields to switch to politics.

It is just not an attractive option, he said, citing press intrusion, relatively low pay levels (compared with the private sector) heavy workload and long-term insecurity.

He is right. Politics does seem to attract many of those who really shouldn't be politicians in the first place – the ambitious, the ruthless, the selfish and the greedy. So how do we get entrepreneurs, farmers, doctors and scientists interested in politics?

For a start, politicians have to take responsibility for democracy itself and not just look after their own interests. Let's look at two examples. When the Scottish Parliament was created, Donald Dewar and the Labour Party had the chance to introduce an electoral system which would be fair, democratic and representative. What did they do? They brought in a mishmash of proportional representation and first-past-the-post, specifically designed to prevent the Scottish Nationalists from ever gaining total control of the parliament.

The list system adopted by the parliament is also one of the worst for dividing politicians from their electorate, with list MSPs owing their seats in parliament to their parties, not to the electorate.

Then, when the Scottish Parliament had the chance to change the voting system for councils in Scotland, what did it do? It adopted the single transferable vote system but trimmed it so much (by adopting only three and four-member wards) that it virtually destroyed the chances of the small parties at a stroke.

On both these occasions, politicians showed themselves so obsessed with narrow party advantage that they failed to see the bigger picture. Fixing and manipulating the system has become so part of the territory that nobody in politics seems to see anything wrong with it, as the expenses scandal has demonstrated so graphically.

Some people have suggested doing away with the party structures as a way of cleansing the system but that will never work. MPs have to represent a broad political viewpoint so they should still be elected on behalf of a party but the key to political renewal is that their ultimate loyalty should be to their electorate, not to their party whips.

If MPs want to earn back their 'honourable member' status then they have to show they are willing to stand up for their constituents' interests against the demands of their party.

Back in 1998, Scottish Labour managers vetted all potential candidates for the Scottish Parliament, throwing out all those who were too independent or uncontrollable, picking instead the most uniform and biddable bunch they could find.

If they want to start to restore some faith in democracy, then perhaps all the main parties should convene selection panels again but this time do the opposite of Labour in 1998.

This time the parties should select only those of independent mind: the individuals, the mavericks and the characters. Anybody who looks too much like a professional politician should be rejected.

It would not rescue politics on its own but it would show that our politicians were at last aware of their responsibility to the wider agenda of British democracy and not just to their own self-advancement.