In 2013, at its annual conference, Labour ran an event titled What is a Working Class MP and How do we Get More of Them? It sounds like a strange parody – the political party purporting to represent the views of the working classes running talks for its members on exactly what a working-class person looks like. But unfortunately, it’s not.
And while I presume the event itself was more well meaning and properly coordinated than a checklist of offensive stereotypes (“If it’s not immediately obvious by their Primark attire, then look out for one of the following: regional, preferably northern, accent; flat cap and whippet; pile of celebrity magazines rather than coffee table books on minimalism in the sitting room; repeated references to one’s evening meal as ‘tea’; lack of university diploma on the wall; cold, hard look in the eyes developed from years of attending comprehensive school”), forgive me if it doesn’t exactly warm the cockles of my heart.
Last week, the author Irvine Welsh wrote passionately about his decision to support the yes campaign in Scotland. He argued that, surrounded by a sea of political disillusionment across the generations, there has been an inspiring resurgence of drive in the yes movement. People, especially young people, who across the UK are quickly becoming even more cynical about politics than their elders, are beginning to care again, and that in itself seems reason enough to be pro-independence. Welsh wrote that he believed in “standing beside our comrades from England”, but that he fails to get how “‘standing alongside’ somebody involves trudging to the polling booth every five years and sheepishly sending down a cluster of political class lobby-fodder careerists to Westminster”.
This isn’t exactly a new problem in politics – but in the Labour party, especially, it’s a surprisingly persistent one. Having spent the past couple of years in the company of a great many wannabe MPs of my own age, many of whom have already professed that they are “definitely standing in 2020”, I’ve been shocked by the almost complete lack of any motivation to shake up the system.
These are 24-year-olds who openly talk about the safe seat they are hoping for in the future, the one in a constituency they have probably never given a second thought to in their lives, let alone visited. They laugh and joke over expensive pints of real ale in London about how the Labour party is an excellent choice for a political careerist, how they could stand a pig for election in the north and it would get voted in. These ever-smiling, nakedly ambitious graduates straight out of PPE at Oxbridge are the faces of future Labour, lecturing me weekly on why local people in the north usually don’t know what they really want and need a representative who knows how to work within the Westminster elite to decide for them.
The policy of parachuting in candidates from Westminster to a safe party seat somewhere so that that person is essentially guaranteed power is poisonous. Labour already suffers from a shameful problem of nepotism, one so widely acknowledged that the media refers to the children of prominent Labour politicians – Euan Blair, Will Straw, David Prescott, Emily Benn, Joe Dromey – who are now making it in politics themselves as the Red Princes. Most of them were on campaign trails with their parents as pre-school children. Londoner Will Straw is a Labour party candidate for the constituency in Lancashire adjacent to his father’s.
What I have seen from the twentysomething Labourites who will follow in the footsteps of these Red Princes is profoundly depressing. These are people who fervently believe that they are best positioned to lead because they are right for the job. They believe that their smooth conveyer-belt ride from private school to elite university to party politics – usually with no real-world job in between – happened because they are the most naturally inclined to lead, rather than the most successful in a system that was built around them. They believe that they are a special core of people whom locals in Labour areas should revere for their cash- and-connections-bought knowledge. They believe they are necessary to the Labour party.
I am going to the Labour party conference this weekend, and I can’t stand silently at another official event while an upper-middle-class smooth operator tells me why the system just won’t work without him. If that’s true, then the system needs to change – structurally, radically and above all quickly.
