If we want better politicians, we need to break the precious 'constituency link'

Breaking the obsession with the individual constituency link might direct MPs’ attention to matters of national rather than local interest.

It was a comment from Labour MP, Jess Phillips that did it:

“...attend court to support scared rape victims, litter pick, run young people’s work schemes, organise job fairs, counsel poorly people, play bridge with lonely elderly constituents, do drives for food bank. Do weekly safe and well meetings with those you are worried about.”

It isn’t that all of these things are bad things, indeed they show Phillips to be a caring and considerate woman. But Phillips doesn’t need to be an MP to do any of them. Indeed, none of these caring and considerate actions are the reason we have members of parliament. In the most basic of terms we have MPs so somebody represents us in parliament. We can’t all cram ourselves in that crumbling old building next to the Thames so we send someone to do that job. While all of us can look out for the vulnerable, neighbours and the community, only an MP can vote in parliament.

In recent years MPs have spent more and more time careening around their constituencies chasing case work, attending events and generally being ‘seen’. Where once the constituency office was a party office, it is now a prominent and heavily branded MP’s office complete with a complement of staff. All paid for by parliament on the basis that it is essential for the MP to have such an office. And, as Tom Forth observed, the increasing centralisation of public services means that, where once it was local councillors who were the people to go to for fixing potholes or school places, now the MP is as likely a source of help. Especially with their prominent offices in the town centre.

But all this frenetic activity results in the wrong focus for many MPs. Not only is constituency work seen as more important than the work of an MP in parliament, this activity feeds the vanity of MPs about personal support based on that activity. The reality remains that MPs are elected and re-elected on the basis of party not person. And the job isn’t as a glorified social worker or conduit for regeneration cash, the job is to consider and debate matters described as “the collective national interest”. Robert Peel didn’t issue, as modern MPs do, “My Plan for Tamworth” but used his address to the electors in that town as an opportunity to present his vision of a future Conservative Party and government.

This shift away from working in parliament towards constituency activism and advocacy changes the skill set of MPs. Rhetorical excellence and the use of evidence has been replaced by a capacity for empathy and a preference for activism over considered debate. The truncation of debate in parliament, as well as it being televised, has resulted in parliament’s use as an adjunct to constituency work and campaigning rather than as a place where matters of collective national interest are examined and decisions made about those interests. This isn’t a unique feature of British democracy, P.J. O’Rourke, in ‘Parliament of Whores’ describes how US congressmen and women use the platform of congress to capture sound bites for campaigning. The member stands up, asks a question or makes a short speech then leaves for his or her office where staff urgently clip the relevant snappy bite for dissemination on social and local media.

When people talk about how we choose our political representatives, the stress is either on the need for fairness or else the vital importance of a ‘constituency link’, of connection to place. Of course, in a non-binary choice there is no fair system, just different degrees of distortion plus links to place are subject to (in some parts of the US, horribly gerrymandered) boundary decisions. I think too much is made of ideas of fairness and too little of our desperate need to have better politicians focused on the shared challenges facing the country rather than concerns better suited to local government.

While it is no guarantee of better politicians, removing or mitigating the constituency link might at the very least result in politicians giving more time to the work of parliament and less to charging around their constituency doing good things in exchange for (they hope) votes. There are plenty of alternative systems available that aren’t a simple party list system such as that in the Netherlands or Israel but I’m not going to recommend one right here. What I do know is that, while MPs should listen to the public, the emphasis on what, when Blair’s government emasculated local councillors, was called ‘community leadership’ is bad for politics and results in poorly focused representatives and bad lawmaking. 

The coming general election will reveal, not for the first time, the distorting effect of ‘first-past-the-post’ systems and looks likely to result in a huge governing party filled with inexperienced MPs with little or nothing significant to do. Almost all of them, and especially those elected unexpectedly, will fall back on the familiar thing they’ve been doing for a year or two - community activism. The high street office will be opened, the new MP will attend the opening of every crisp packet, and a huge bank of casework built up. When they attend parliament it will be in response to their whip’s instructions and these MPs will troop through the voting lobbies to pass legislation they haven’t read after a debate they haven’t watched. When they do speak it will be to raise issues of national importance - the drained duck pond at Little Binkley, the plight of their constituent Mrs Minny who’s been scammed by a large, probably foreign, corporation, or a terrible housing development planned for the back of the high street in the town they represent.

We can and should do better. Maybe reforming the way we elect MPs might help refocus those we choose onto thinking about and discussing how we resolve vital challenges such as a housing crisis, a collapsing health system, and an unpopular but some say necessary flood of immigrants. Maybe some MPs might switch from making populist noises about the importance of business and start talking about how we get more good businesses and more economic growth.

There are many reasons for the decline in the quality of our elected representatives (MPs, for example, are badly paid, work too many hours and face enormous stresses) and changing how we choose them probably isn’t a complete fix. But if we want to improve how our state and its institutions operate, we really need better MPs. I wrote about how I feel we have too many MPs expressing much of the same sentiment as I’ve written here. The constituency link is one reason we sustain that high number of MPs. When David Cameron tried to reduce the number of MPs by fifty, much of the criticism revolved around the amount of casework MPs had to deal with, not whether having 600 instead of 650 MPs would have any effect on the work of parliament. Maybe breaking the obsession with that individual constituency link might allow a reduction as well as directing MPs’ attention to matters of national rather than local interest.