12 Comments

• Chris Richards 2nd Apr '13 - 10:16am

  This progress makes the Cabinet stick out like a sore thumb

• Ian 2nd Apr '13 - 10:32am

  I think you’re mixing up progress on the demographic indicators with the issue Chakraborrty is raising, which is that there are growing numbers of politicians who have spent their entire careers as advisors, lobbyists or politicians and who are therefore increasingly cut off from people outside in the non-political world. It is of course great that more women, ethnic minority and non-Oxbridge people are getting elected, but if many of them too are people who have come through the same intern-advisor-lobbyist route then surely that would be a very limited form of progress?

• Stephen Tall 2nd Apr '13 - 11:14am

  @ Ian – I’m not mixing them up. Aditya Chakraborrty has a valid point about the increasing number of ‘professional’ politicians and the decreasing number of MPs from manual worker backgrounds. I agree. But I don’t think that justifies his assertion that the House of Commons is “ever more remote” (though the cabinet may be, as Chris Richards points out). I think he’s also wrong to suggest MPs are less local: MPs now are far more concerned with being effective constituency advocates than they were, and are far more rebellious than in the past.

• paul barker 2nd Apr '13 - 1:00pm

  One fascinating & to me, unexpected point is that Labours promotion of women MPs seems to have had only a temporary effect, pushing the graph above trend but not keeping it there. At the present rate of “steady” progress it will be the middle of the century before women get equal representation & that is unacceptable. Clearly AWS wasnt the solution on its own.

• Christine Headley 2nd Apr '13 - 1:00pm

  I was very irritated by the way he went on about this on the Today programme in attacking IDS, whose background is clearly not the sort he is actually aiming at. And no one pulled him up on it.

• Jonathan Hunt 2nd Apr '13 - 2:33pm

  How can we comment when we fail so miserably on basic diversity. There is no Lib Dem Black or ethnic minority MP, or a member of any of the other parliaments and assemblies at which we stand for election.

  We have had two BAME MPs in the last 130 years. At this rate it will be 2068 before we have another. When Parmjit Singh Gill was elected, the party our failure to support his re-election was appalling. I was one of the few ouitsiders to go to Leicester South, and while the few volunteers from outside strived hard and well as did masses of local members, the lack of resources was all too obvious.

  And there are few signs that the Leadership, given the immigration speech, or so-called Diversity Engagement group really wants to see an Lib Dem BAME members in the next parliament.

• Tony Dawson 2nd Apr '13 - 4:15pm

  I fear that Stephen has got totally the wrong end of the stick regarding public perception of ‘remoteness’. It has little to do with his ‘background’ indicators. There is greater range and standard distribution of backgrounds, sexual orientation, race, than before. But the power of the sub-modal group who are ‘professional politicians’ far exceeds its numbers and the attitude of the majority of Members of Parliament towards poverty, as reflected in recent legislation, is shocking and reflects a lack of any genuine familiarity with the subject across a wide range of Members of all parties.

  Meanwhile, the gross over-representation of lawyers and people from just two universities is still pretty appalling.

• A Social Liberal 3rd Apr '13 - 2:48am

  Further to Tony Dawsons post.

  60 % of government ministers, 40% of Lib Dem MPs and 54% of Tory MPs went to fee paying schools – as opposed to 7% of the general population. The number of MPs from working class backgrounds has fallen through the floor and those with disabilities is nowhere near representing the countries statistics.

• A Social Liberal 3rd Apr '13 - 2:50am

  I should stop posting late at night – my grammar is terrible

• peter.tyzack 3rd Apr '13 - 9:58am

  I think this whole discussion is at ‘the wrong end of the stick’, in that our ‘mother’ of Parliaments is itself deeply flawed.
  The discussion about improving the representation is like arguing over the colour to paint the living room when really the place needs something more fundamental than a splash of paint. Our parliament is not designed to get the best out of this representative democracy when it is exercised through an entirely adversarial set-up.
  Our programme of reform should include a plan to replace the old boys school debating society, with all its artificial trumped up oppositional arguments, with a collective consensual approach to working on today’s problems. The voters elect our representatives to work together to make things better, not to spend time arguing for the sake of it, talking down the efforts of others and behaving tribally.
  No wonder that the people have no respect for parliamentarians, and the very members of society who would make good politicians won’t touch the job with a barge-pole.

• Lester Holloway 3rd Apr '13 - 11:35am

  Jonathan Hunt is right. Progress on diversity needs to be measured against our own party’s record, especially on this site. And our record across all diversity strands is very poor and actually pulls down the average figures for parliament. Progress on gender is largely down to Labour embracing the need for action not talk, realising that merely wishing for more women was not going to bring this about. The concept of positive action in selections is something our party has rejected out of hand for too long without practical alternatives. As for BAME representation, part of our failure is the fact that our canteen culture is not bothered about reaching out to BAME communities or designing policies that appeal more to them beyond the odd weak token measure. Sal Brinton of our Diversity Engagement Group did actually do some work on barriers to selection for diverse groups, which included a couple of useful suggestions; regional targets and more zipping for PR lists, how ever this report – hardly radical – appears to have been buried. Says it all really…. My point? Let’s get our own house in order before claiming someone is wrong for asserting that parliament isn’t representative.

• Richard Harris 3rd Apr '13 - 2:31pm

  No good complaining that the cabinet is more remote than the commons if the commons rubber stamp everything the cabinet come up with. It follows then that if the cabinet are remote, this parliament is just as out of touch. Perhaps more would feel a connection if the commons did its job and held the government to account and prevented bad ideas getting into law – let’s start with the crazy temporary lifting of planning laws which could only come from people with no experience of the real world,