Parliamentary Representation

Simon Danczuk Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)]

I, too, thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) for leading this important debate. I apologise for being absent for the opening remarks; I was called to an urgent meeting with the Opposition Chief Whip, the details of which I will not bore Members with.

I have found the debate interesting and helpful. At times, it has felt as if it has been quite therapeutic for some hon. Members. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed it and I want to add my two-penn’orth, as we would say in Lancashire, and to concentrate on some of the issues mentioned by the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) about working and social backgrounds. I agree that we need to make more progress as regards gender, race and disability, but although we are doing so a little slowly, we are making some progress nevertheless.

As for social background, in 1979 nearly 100 MPs had backgrounds in manual work, which was about 15% of all MPs at that time. If we fast-forward to today, 22 MPs have a background in manual work, which is just 4% of all MPs. To put that in context, 20% of the country’s work force are skilled or unskilled workers. To get a House of Commons that reflects the working lives of people in this country, we would have to sack 105 hon. Members and replace them with manual workers. I have no doubt that you, Mr Speaker, could identify some of the people up for dismissal and replacement.

This is an important point. I do not want to enter into some sort of Monty Python sketch with the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole about background, work experience and life experience, but like him I come from what would be described as a humble background. It is important that there are more people in this place who represent the wider communities out there.

My worry is that we are getting too many politicians from white-collar professional backgrounds, and too many politicians effectively come from what is known as the Westminster bubble. Many of those hon. Members are very good at their job, I hasten to add, but we need more of a mix. The journalist Peter Oborne has talked about the idea that there is a closed shop, or guild, for politicians, and I worry that that is very much to the fore at the moment. All political parties need to do more to dilute that.

The final area that I want to talk about is business experience. The Labour party has been very good at diversifying the make-up of those on the Opposition Benches, but it has been particularly poor when it comes to getting Members with a business background. Figures from the Library show that just 20 Labour MPs out of 257 have a business background. We could do more to encourage people with business experience, particularly experience of micro-business and small and medium-sized enterprises, to stand for our party.

There are no easy solutions, and I will not go into lots of detail, because of the time, but we need to put more effort into encouraging people to come forward for selection, and to change the culture in our political parties. Earlier this week, I wrote a piece for the Manchester Evening News about having a turnout threshold for elections of, for argument’s sake, 20%, so that if not enough people voted in an election, there would be no political representative. That is quite controversial, but it would concentrate political parties’ minds on who they selected and whether that person related to the community that they were trying to represent. It would certainly make candidates work harder. Also, if MPs in safer seats perhaps relaxed too much, there would be an emphasis on them to get out and do more. There is also an argument for looking at primaries.

To conclude, there is a long way to go before we can really say that we have a Parliament that reflects the people of this country. There are steps that we can take to address the problems before us; only by taking those steps will we get a Parliament that looks like the country that it represents—male and female, black and white, rich and poor. Hon. Members might even call that a one nation approach to representation.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—