Yesterday, I took a look back at some of what has happened over the past decade. Today, I want to start to explore some of the general barriers that prevent many perfectly capable people from playing an active role in national politics.
Let's start at the beginning (as Julie Andrews put it, a very good place to start). To be a Parliamentary candidate, one rather needs to be a member of a political party - the almost total lack of success of independents since the introduction of universal suffrage (and political parties were relatively loosely affiliated until the mid-nineteenth century) demonstrates only too powerfully that, if you want to be an MP, you need friends, supporters and, most importantly, a structure which makes use of resources effectively.
There was a time when people joined political parties in large numbers. In the 1950’s, Conservative Party membership peaked at nearly 3,000,000, whilst Labour Party membership was just over 1,000,000. Liberal Party membership data appears only to go back to the beginning of the sixties, but at that time, the Party had a membership in excess of 250,000. Many more people were at least affiliated to a political movement, regardless of the level of their active involvement and, theoretically, the pool of potential candidates was much larger.
Those membership figures have declined so dramatically over the subsequent half-century that, if replicated in most other volunteer-based organisations, the word ‘crisis’ would barely cover it. Conservative Party membership is now about 134,000 – down more than 95% from its peak – and Labour claim 190,000 – down more than 80% - whilst the Liberal Democrats claim about 45,000 – down more than 80% as well.
So, a much smaller pool of potential candidates is one reason why ‘ordinary’ people don’t enter Parliament – ‘ordinary’ people don’t join political parties any more.
Being a Parliamentary candidate is resource intensive. Attending meetings, campaigning, organising, developing strategy – all of these things take time, and in our increasingly hectic world, many people are time poor or. With both elements of a couple now working in most cases, all of the other stuff that needs to get done, childcare, housework, shopping, for example, falls more equally than it did in the fifties, when a wife was far more likely to be at home to do all of those things, and there is far less time to do it all.
At the end of a long day, the idea of going out to meet strangers, some of whom are likely to be less than entirely welcoming, and persuade them to vote for you is a tough sell. And, as membership levels drop, your party has less support to offer, so you’ll be doing more and more of yourself.
Increasingly, the expectation is that candidates will be more and more full-time as a campaign approaches, which means giving up income, if you are lucky enough to be self-employed, or perhaps your job, if it is impossible to combine extensive campaigning with it. That means a significant drop in household income, which may require you to have significant savings to tide you over, or for your partner to earn enough to tide you both over, or the accrual of debt. I know of candidates who have taken years to repair their finances after an intensive campaign to win a Parliamentary seat.
I remember one former MP remarking that, before he won his seat, he had spent over £30,000 of his own money campaigning, and that he didn’t think that he was alone in that regard. Travelling the country to approval and selection meetings, attending training sessions and party conferences, buying clothes that make you look the part – the public can be so shallow like that – none of these come cheap, and that’s before you become the candidate for a winnable seat.
There aren’t many 'ordinary' people who have the means, let alone the will, to spend that much money just to create the possibility of becoming an MP – how many people do you know who have that much money to hand, and how representative of the wider community are they likely to be?
And, if you belong to a political party which is less likely to have safe seats, the risk/reward calculation is even less promising...
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