Parliamentary Representation

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention; she makes an important point. I know that she does not mean to imply that the aspects of family life and child-rearing that she mentioned apply only to women; increasingly, young fathers are also involved in making such decisions.

It is difficult to combine a parliamentary career with caring responsibilities. While my parents were alive—they lived close to me in London—I would have found it possible to represent a London constituency but impossible to represent a constituency outside of London and many miles away from them.

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We need to tackle this issue, and the system of allowances and parliamentary hours, about which much progress has been made, needs to reflect the difficult decisions that people make. She is quite right, of course; I believe that there is only one mother in the Cabinet, and perhaps that has something to do with the point she made.

I will talk a little about some of the measures that have been taken and that have worked to various degrees. Clearly, the all-women shortlists that the Labour party introduced in 1997 have had a positive effect on the representation of women in Parliament, and I am sure that they have had much to do with why 33% of Labour MPs are women. Positive discrimination, if I can put it that way, has also benefited Conservative representation, perhaps not so much in this place as in Europe, where we have two or three very good MEPs who were elected at the last European elections because we were brave enough to say that in the primary system of election, whereby we were electing candidates, the highest placed woman went to the top of the list.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend accept that, although we of course want to have as many women as possible in Parliament—not least because they are as gracious as she is—it is still a fundamental Conservative principle that Conservative associations must preserve full independence to select the best people, whatever their sex?

[Margot James]

A system that does not recognise that some groups in society face greater barriers than others does not do Parliament a service, and I do not think that we can just leave things to what, in some parts of our country, are fairly small groups of people. If they are in a Conservative area where there is a large majority and effectively choosing the MP, I do not think that they can expect to have untrammelled choice, when we are acknowledging in this debate that many groups—including women and ethnic minorities, and especially people with disabilities—have particular issues they need to overcome. That needs to be built into a system in order for it to be genuinely meritocratic, and I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks.

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[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). I particularly agreed with the final part of her speech. She was entirely right to say that we do not always help ourselves in this place. For those of us who do not come from particularly political backgrounds—I did serve as a local councillor for a while, but that was very different from this job—the torrent of abuse that we often have to put up with and the invasion into what were previously perfectly normal lives can be difficult to take. It has made me question on more than one occasion whether I want to continue doing this.

This has been an interesting debate. As I intimated in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), I want to talk about social class. Much has been said about gender. This place is under-representative in terms of gender, race and sexuality, but it is also under-representative in terms of social class. That is not often spoken about. There is an intense debate about all-women shortlists. I have always come back at people by saying that there is little use in replacing a privately educated, middle-class man with a privately educated, middle-class woman if the person who misses out is, for example, a working-class, northern mechanic. That does not increase diversity in this place in any real sense.

The only tag that I am interested in applying to myself, apart from the Conservative tag for the purposes of the election, is a working-class tag. I am proud to be from a working-class background. I am the son of a school secretary and a foundry worker. My dad lost his job in the recession of the early ’90s and we spent a considerable period on benefits. He later got a job as a market gardener, which he still does at 69 years of age. I could not have asked for more loving or hard-working parents.

I attended a local comprehensive school in Hull. It was so bad that it was closed down twice. I am probably the one and only Member of Parliament who will come from that school.

I come from a completely non-political background. Most of my family voted Labour. I had a great-granddad who was apparently something of a communist agitator in the ’30s. He was the only political person in my family. The rest of them were Liberals, apart from my grandma, who was a Tory.

I am proud of that background. I am also proud to be the first member of my family to go to university. My parents were the first generation in my family to buy their own home. My grandparents all grew up and lived until they died in social housing or private rented housing. We are all the sum total of our experiences. I am proud of that background, not that I like to whine on about it too much.

I have also been a teacher, which makes me very unusual—a working-class, northern Tory from the public sector. My last workplace was a primary school and that was very under-representative as well, but in that case it was men who were under-represented. It is not only this place that needs to do more to be representative.

Without wanting to whine on, let me say a little about the challenges and difficulties of getting here for someone who comes from a normal background and does not have any money behind them. I was lucky in that I ended up on the parliamentary A-list. I always joke that it was because I turned up for the interview in a frock, but it was not. I hope it was because the party saw that I was working-class—I will not say normal; we will leave others to judge that—and from a profession that was not well represented on these Benches. However, that was largely irrelevant to me because I would have been able to stand in my area as a local candidate.

I was lucky that the selection processes for 2010 had changed somewhat, but in all parties our selection processes still favour people who come from a certain professional or educational background. At many difficult comprehensive schools, pupils simply keep their heads down and try to get on with surviving school, rather than putting themselves forward for things that might exist in other places such as debating societies—not at my school—or wanting to be something called a head boy or a prefect. We did not have anything like that. In many difficult inner-city comprehensive schools, pupils simply keep their heads down and get used to not raising them above the parapet, but the selection process for getting to this place is the complete opposite.

Selection used to be a case of having to make set-piece speeches—who does that benefit? As a school teacher, I was okay doing that; I just thought I was speaking to a load of five-year-olds—actually, they are more frightening that the selection executives of local Conservative associations. However, it certainly feeds into the fact that a lawyer or a barrister will be more used to doing that kind of thing and feel more comfortable with it. We must recognise that the processes sometimes have an in-built advantage for certain people.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My hon. Friend is not making a speech against the selection of old Etonians is he?

[Andrew Percy]

No, not at all. I am making a speech in favour of ensuring that we select the best people, and create processes that allow the best people—from whatever background or social class—to come forward and succeed.

A lot of the time, we end up with non-local professionals who come in and take the seats. They often do a very good job, but that sometimes disadvantages local candidates whose hearts may be a bit more in their local area. As somebody who came to this with no personal or family wealth, I spent three and a half to four years as a candidate fighting for a marginal seat and not knowing whether at the end I would achieve my aim of getting elected to Parliament. That is a big risk that would put off many people, particularly if they have small children.

The financial commitment is huge. I was lucky to have a very supportive association, and to get a lot of support from the Conservative party, for which I am grateful. I had a really good chairman and agent, Councillor Rob Waltham, who was there to provide support where necessary. One of my local councillors, Caroline Fox, lives round the corner from me, and I would not have survived the three and a half years without her constant support, whether in the form of meals or saying, “I’ll give you a hand in the house,” or whatever. I would not have got here without people such as them.

The time commitment and the impact it has on a career is massive. As I said, I was a school teacher, but I started teaching part time in order to try to achieve my aim of winning the constituency from the sitting Member. That has a massive financial impact, and an impact on my career. Had I not won the seat I would have been greatly disadvantaged and gone back to teaching part time in the primary school where I was when I was elected. That is a great job to have, but it would have left me financially much worse off.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

This has been a good debate and we all, even reactionaries like me, are desperate to have more women in Parliament. I am. I think women MPs are much more interesting in so many ways. Do we want legions of more young, grey, ambitious men in suits? No, we want more women. We are all united. But let me say a word of caution. We must move with society. We cannot impose structures and while we should worry about the lack of Conservative women MPs, we should have confidence in our own beliefs and in the way that society matures to ensure that we have more women MPs. Therefore, I am strongly opposed to all-women shortlists.

Ultimately, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said, there is no point in a constituency denying a strong local working-class man being the Member of Parliament by insisting that in that particular constituency, where perhaps he has worked for years, there must be an all-women shortlist. No, the way forward is to recognise, as my hon. Friend said, that society is changing. It is a mystery why Conservative associations, which have always been dominated by women, have selected so few women. There was some feeling perhaps in the past of “Where I cannot go, why should I send somebody else?” There was perhaps a feeling of jealousy. All that is changing, so we do not need to impose our centralising tendencies on our local associations; we need to have confidence that they will themselves want to select more women and the best candidates. One of the ways forward is through the open primary system. That is highly democratic. It takes power back to the local people. It takes it away from the Whips Office—dare I say?—because people will be more reliant on what people are saying locally, so the open primary is the way.

I do not think that IPSA has helped at all. For instance, would a successful woman doctor working in the north of England want to give up a successful practice to come and live under our present expenses system, to be stuck in a rented one-bedroom flat, and not just for the occasional business trip, but for half her working life? It is difficult. The problem is not so much that we have created structures that discourage women, but that women themselves do not want to come forward. I think that IPSA could help with that.

Lastly, we must not think that we will encourage more women by making Parliament more anaemic, for instance by sitting from nine to five. The fundamental job of Parliament—it might be boring and take a long time—is to hold the Government to account and to scrutinise the Government. That means that we must sit here for long hours, because that is our job.

Under the present system, some of our greatest Prime Ministers have come from modest backgrounds, as have many leaders of the Conservative party, including Margaret Thatcher, Ted Heath, Michael Howard and John Major. They were all committed parliamentarians. Many of our best parliamentarians, such as Ann Widdecombe and Margaret Thatcher, were women, and we should have confidence that we can go on throwing into the mix some wonderful women parliamentarians.