2024 UK politics - now with Labour in charge
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Likely narrow expertise and experience no?
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Better than PPE at Oxford.
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No need for rules around this - that is up for the voters to decide.
I'm not a fan of people doing two jobs at once. You can get your experience before you become an MP, but I think the role of an MP is really too important to be doing jobs on the side.
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I would generally agree, although I think there are some exceptions. Someone like Dr Rosena Allin-Khan who does A&E shifts during parliamentary recesses is absolutely fine I think.
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It should be relatively easy to exempt jobs that provide a public service like that plus allowing MPs to do enough to ensure they can continue their non-political occupation once they leave Parliament.
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Not a fan of MPs plopping out of pods into Russell Group University, then into lobbying and parliamentary research positions with a bit of uninformed local councillor experience, before becoming equally uninformed MPs.
The risk of vetoing seconds jobs is that you deter people who need to keep their hand in for when they are no longer MPs. This in turn deters people who do something else other than "politics" from being an MP.
Let's say you wanted to be an MP, Rick. Could you park your contacts and industry knowledge for 5 or 10 years and pick up where you left off?
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For Christ's sake, don't give him ideas...
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]1 -
I'm not sure politics is the place for Rick's binary view of the world...
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Computer programming then?
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]1 -
As you say, no need for rules, let the voters decide.
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I was amazed to learn that Geoffrey Cox is still an MP.
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Why?
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Well he's a Tory, for starters, so a 2 out of 3 chance he's not an MP any more for that reason alone.
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Competent with a massive majority would have helped the odds though. Seems to be liked locally as well.
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Constituency next to me. Average age about 75. Rural. He essentially has to be able to breathe to get elected.
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I don't think there is much of a correlation tbh between having had a non-political career and whether you make a good politician and governor or not.
And I could not do this job part time so that's easy.
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I quite like the idea of having an MP who has tried to be something other than an MP. Trust me, I went to Oxford and I know what the aspiring politicians and lobbyists are like.
Going to the bar in the Oxford Union was like being groomed to see whether you were malleable enough to be worth talking to twice. Urgh.
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You sound like clients of mine, who "quite like the idea of having an X Who has tried to be something other than X" and then when you present them with those people they hate them all and end up plumping for someone who has been X their entire career.
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If you pay them £250k upwards I think they become less in touch and their financial interests diverge more from the average person. They are representatives bit they'd no longer be representative.
I don't object to them getting more but not that much. I don't care if some top end law firm pays graduates more tbh I regard salaries like that as an unfortunate necessity of a free society.
[Castle Donington Ladies FC - going up in '22]0 -
I don't earn enough to be a client of yours I don't think.
Politics isn't what you do so I don't get the analogy. I do think having been in the real world is helpful of you are charged with making laws and policy to govern it.
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Genuinely, I think it's a waste of time. Politics is really about getting people around your vision and leading people towards it.
The civil service is there to execute the detail. Obviously you need to be bright enough to understand what's going on, but plenty of people are.
If you are an MP your important decisions are all macro decisions, and I don't think there are many jobs that actually help provide that macro vision - in fact, if anything, it anchors you in the micro.
You are better off learning the intricacies of which levers of power to pull and what works and what doesn't in terms of getting people around a vision and then delivering it, than anything you learn in a more normal job.
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There's a similar type of architectural client.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I'd say that wothout some real world experience, you have no idea what the impact of your decisions might be. Real world experience gives you a chance to see beyond the theory of the academic. Academics have generally never experienced life outside of school and university, and as a result , a bit like you, they only see things in binary, rather that the reality of shades of grey.
We really suffer from these sorts in financial regulation - a regulator that doesn't understand huge parts of the industry it regulates, because the experience is of only ever being a regulator, and no experience of being at the other end of their decisions.
The impression that i get from your comment about getting people around is vision, is that you think out and out salesman would be the best politicians.
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so
1) A politician is not a regulator. They do not need to be across the detail like a regulator does.
2) UK is a country of 70million. Most of our experiences outside of normal human experiences we all have are very limited and are very much a bubble. That bubble is barely more relevant to everyone else than their Westminster bubble anyway. The policies they vote on impact everyone. There is no way anyone's life experience is representative of all of that.
3) Yes politics is absolutely about corralling people toward a vision of how we run our society. That is leadership. You have a view on how society should be run, and good politicians get people to fall in line behind that. I'll give you an example - Remain was lacking a good politician to articulate the case for remaining properly, and get the public behind it. Populists play politics on easy. The best politicians convince the public their way is the best way.
4) a career politician is the opposite of an academic.
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He's a Tory who got himself all over the papers for doing huge amounts of work for insane amounts of money for while still representing his constituents. He retained half his votes and his seat.
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The Civil Service is subject to the same difficulties as politicians if those doing the micro details don't have a breadth of experience. Having worked with many Civil Servants, the most effective were always those who had worked across different sectors or had life experiences relevant to their policy area. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most effective person I worked with was working in the DfE overseeing truancy and behavioural problems in schools. He had various domestic issues growing up with led to school expulsion and a career in the army before joining the CS.
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There are 650 MPs. If they are all career politicians from the placenta, the collective bubbles will all be the same, more or less. That's called the Tory party. It's not pretty.
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