It would appear that the ‘local’ credentials of the candidates proved to be something of a talking-point in the recent Henley by-election.
Certainly, in Crewe & Nantwich it was a constant theme in the election literature. The Conservatives went so far as to claim that their man was “the only local candidate” – despite the fact that he lived further from the constituency than his Lib Dem rival, and that one of the ‘fringe’ candidates had lived all his life in Crewe! But, as a rather more experienced campaigner put it to me – with a shrug of his shoulders – there is no legal definition of the term ‘local’.
Now I can fully understand that ‘being local’ is a plus. As an agent I have enthusiastically produced Focus newsletters complete with maps highlighting the fact that our candidates live in the ward, with a great big X to mark the spot, and a sometimes vaguely-directed arrow to indicate that the Labour/ Tory rival lives “somewhere, out there, far away”. And when our candidate doesn’t live in the ward, well I’ve emphasised their other virtues.
But I have never felt the need to claim a local residency where one doesn’t exist, nor do I see the need or purpose to elevate ‘localness’ into the prime – and it sometimes seems the only – necessary qualification for elected office. I was closely linked to the Crewe & Nantwich campaign, and totally comfortable with the fact that our candidate lived in a neighbouring constituency, served on a neighbouring local authority, and had a realistic – but not necessarily detailed – knowledge of our local issues. And I viewed with a mixture of dismay and anger Tory attempts to portray her – “a councillor from the West Midlands” – as though she was a stranger from distant Worcestershire or Warwickshire!
But there is a deeper issue. Yes, campaigning to preserve the Snodbury Minor post office may be important, and the petition to reinstate the bus service to Flagfold, or to have traffic calming on the B5678. But for goodness sake we are electing a member to what is still supposed to be the ‘Mother of Parliaments’.
A quick flick through a daily paper today produced the following current issues:
* significant increase in cocaine smuggling into Britain via Venezuala;
* an IPCC report on the failure of police to protect a woman subsequently killed by a murderer released on licence;
* personal savings hit a 50-year low;
* reductions in some key NHS services (eg, elderly and mental health care) to focus on target-driven areas;
* cancer appointments being cancelled at random because of computer system glitches;
* families of service personnel killed in Nimrod accident seek to sue;
* gun crime – evidence of under-reporting;
* crisis in childhood diabetes services;
* dispute over West Shetland gasfield development.
It crosses my mind that I would quite like an MP who can think intelligently about issues like this, and perhaps make a telling contribution to decision-making. Is it not possible that such abilities might be more important attributes than ‘local’ credentials?
I am not suggesting that our election literature should be transformed into detailed manifestos of every conceivable matter of public policy. I can accept that “Lib Dems speak out on West Shetland gasfield issue” probably wouldn’t be a huge vote-winner in Henley. But I cannot help feeling that a positive account of Mr Kearney’s experience in the charitable sector, or of Mrs Shenton’s track record in issues of pensions protection, would have been more persuasive than this seeming obsession with the golden calf of ‘localness’.
* Gwyn Griffiths has been a Liberal and Liberal Democrat Borough Councillor for the Delamere Ward of Crewe since 1983. He has never lived in the ward.
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18 Comments
I agree that we overemphasise the local credentials of our candidates. It shouldn’t matter where someone is from, what matters is how well they can do the job. By all means, if someone has a strong track record in an area, it’s perfectly fine to play that up.
However, I would say that our attacks on Edward Timpson in Crewe and Nantwich for living a whole 17 miles from the constituency were both over the top and unnecessary, given that our candidate also didn’t live in the constituency. I doubt whether many voters in C&N gave two hoots about where the candidates lived.
We also made the false claim that Elizabteh Shenton had a strong track record as a local councillor “here”, which gave the misleading impression that she was a Crewe and Nantwich councillor rather than a Newcastle-under-Lyme one. I hope we will avoid such crass statements at future elections.
Excellent Points but from a Lib Dem perspective have we being hoist by our own petard?
1. We are as bad as anyone, if not worse, in running these sort of campaigns
2. We pioneered hyper localist community politics which makes where you live more relevent.
3. you can’t get away from the fact that we have a geographicaly based constituiency system. If localities are the basis of democratic legitimacy then surely the localness of who you elect is a legitimate issue?
4. realistically this is much less of an issue in urban areas with mobile populations and where seat boundaries make litle sense often. However in more rural areas, where social stability is far higher surely its upto voters what they do and don’t value in a candidate?
5. While these comments make perfect sense in the context of By Election campaigns and some of the nonsence that goes on in them what about the finished product. Does anyone really think the problem with the current set up is that we have too many “Local Champions” in the Commons and not enough career politicans?
I did 8 years as a Councilor in an Inner City ward I lived in. I could counte on the fingers of one hand the public sector leaders who lived in it or anywhere near it. If just 50% of the relavent politicans,civil servants,senior police officers etc had to live in such communitis then a hell of a lot of intractable problems would become tractable over night
Excellent post.
I’ve never got the who ‘local’ thing myself. I mean, if it an potential MP had to face a private sector interview, whether they were ‘local’ would only come into it when asked how they’d get to work because their ability is more important.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some in the party who would rather a candidate was local than good at the job.
The name of the game is ‘local’, whatever the issues that will be discussed during a person’s time at Westminster. Complaining about this won’t change it.
To the question of whether we have been hoist by our own petared the answer is a resounding yes.
Spot on, I have been waiting for someone to come out and say this. If you become obsessed with local candidates then you may not end up with the best person, but a provincially minded light weight. We are electing someone to debate all issues, local, national and international.
I spot the reference to the Midlothian Campaign. I feel its worth remembering Glasgow Kelvin and Crosby as well- neither Jenkins nor Williams were local.
Gladstone, as a former PM, had a rather higher starting profile in Midlothian to Stephen Kearney in Henley, as I’m sure Stephen would admit!
One suspects that the previously selected Lib Dem candidate for the next election, who was not selected, would also have had a higher starting profile. What happened to her? Ought not PPCs to be automatically the by-election candidate?
The Tories chose a local candidate because they knew it would help them win. Ask Chris Grayling.
I don’t mind a reselection in the event of a by election- its free publicity for us, so we need to have the best national face.
But I am sad that the local issue has now come round and bitten us, and I think that we should acknowledge that public debate is all the poorer as long as it is constrained by the ‘where are you from’ question.
The reason that localness is an issue at by-elections is because it is an issue for voters. That doesn’t mean it should exclude all else, of course, but the reason all parties make an issue of it is because they have done the research and found it is a persuasive factor with voters. Personally I would prefer it if it were less so but that is the way it is.
One other reason why the kinds of hyper-local issues mentioned by Gwyn (no relation) tend to be prominent in Westminster elections is that local councillors – who should properly be the ones to deal with such matters – are often powerless to act. Greater devolution would alleviate this.
Many thanks for the various kind comments.
For clarity, I was not arguing that we should disregard local cerdentials where they exist.
BUT
I am strongly against “inventing” localness – it won’t work and will end up with us, frankly, looking shifty;
If our candidate doesn’t have a “local” qualification then for goodness sake talk about his/her other attributes instead [presumably they have strengths or why did we pick them ???].
Play to your strengths!
George, can you provide us with any figures as to what percentage of voters consider a ‘local’ candidate to be an important factor in casting their votes? And what do people actually mean when they say they want a local candidate? Someone who lives or works in the area, someone whose family have been there for 17 generations, someone who will tackle local issues, someone who will be a good constituency MP, someone happy to be a backbencher concentrating on constituency issues, someone who will open every fete and gala but won’t sully themselves with actual politics – what?
And it seems to me that when asked about the localness of a candidate, it’s one of those things that everyone agrees would be a good thing, just as when you ask people if they want higher public spending, lower taxes and borrowing to be kept under control. There are very few people who when asked will say: “Actually, I want someone from the other end of the country because no-one round here is good enough to be in Parliament.”
Bernard Salmon,
I think you’re entirely right. Localness [whatever that may mean] is clearly “a good thing”, but not the only thing.
I was part of the approval and selection process in Crewe & Nantwich. Ironically, the candidate we chose – who was derided by some as “an outsider” “parachuted in” “West Midlands councillor” – lived closest to the constituency of all the applicants!
That she lived close, and had a record of action in a neighbouring authority, was probably a factor in her selection, but by no means the clinching argument.
Perhaps our campaigning would have been “easier” if we had chosen the leader of the Liberal Democrat Group on the Borough Council :-
40+ years a local resident; has lived in Crewe and its rural hinterland
25 years experience as a borough councillor
noted local campaigner
went to two local schools [and no, not because he was expelled from the first!]
worked for 20 years in a major local industry [the railway]
etc etc etc
But he would have been streets adrift of the person we actually chose in terms of doing the job of being the local MP, and isn’t that the key question ????
p.s. the group leader in question won’t sue ; it’s me!
If localness is such a deciding factor, we didn’t do to badly in Christchurch where our candidate was a “councillor from Southampton”.
HOwever IIRC (the by-elections literature website links to that campaign are broken) we didn’t make such an issue of localness as we did in Crewe
The importance of localness depends on the constituency.
I’d say that in Crewe it was useful being from nearby (as both Elizabeth and Edward Timpson were) but it wasn’t vital.
In Hartlepool, I think we did lose out though because the Labour candidate was local and Jody Dunn lived all of 15 miles away!
In Sheffield, the majority of councillors do not live in their ward and so not being local does not usually make a difference. However, when we had all-outs and people had three votes the local candidates did noticeably better than those who weren’t.
The thing that can beat being local though is being well known. Back in 2000 when I was a councillor in Derby I was re-elected in the all-outs ahead of a local candidate because I’d already represented the area for two years and she hadn’t, even though I lived nowhere near.
On the whole I think being local matters much more if people feel that where they live is remote or off the beaten track. If you feel more in the centre of things then it matters less. That should probably guide us on whether we use being local as a campaign theme or not.
So much head scratching and hand wringing about a simple question. Three points make the case.
1) A truly local candidate wins substantially more votes;
2) We didn’t have a truly local candidate in Henley, we had one for the General election and some misguided people chose someone else who wasn’t local (Oh yes and if any party member wants to debate the legal meaning of words like “local” they are part of the problem, because voters know the old saying “Argue the facts; if the facts don’t work argue the (meaning of) words, and if the words don’t work, pound the table and shout like hell!”)
3) We lost (very badly).
Q.E.D.
Crewegwyn makes an interesting point, if the best local candidates don’t want to stand, it is obviously a problem. There could be a million and one reasons why they don’t, but not thinking they are up to it, is probably undue modesty. We (i.e. the Liberal Democrats) need people like that in Westminster. There are too many lawyers, barristers and (sadly for us, because most of ours are very good) ex public schoolboys there already.
David Evans,
My saying that I (40 year resident, 25 year councillor etc) was an inferior candidate to the “outsider” we selected was not “undue modesty”. It was factual.
At the heart of my concern is that our obsession with “localness” could see us putiing forward [and perhaps electing] inferior MPs.
As I said in my original article, I’d quite like to have an MP who can analyse significant issues and contribute to the political life of the nation – even if they haven’t “campaigned to save the Little Snodbury sub-post office”.
Crewegwnn,
Thanks for the response. My comment was aimed in general terms, not with any specific individuals in mind, though it was raised as a rallying call for those with real local experience. You are obviously the best placed to consider your own merits against that of other candidates.
However, I would clearly say that if you’ve been a Lib Dem Councillor for 25 years and probably a Lib or Soc Dem longer than that, from my viewpoint, you would be just the sort of person we need in parliament. The ability to “analyse significant issues and contribute to the political life of the nation” is doubtless important, but we all know of well meaning grand schemes that have been an embarassing failure due to a lack of eye for detail. A prime example would be the desire to make the Post Office more profitable – which due to incompetent government target setting resulted in the closure of multiple “Little Snodbury sub-post offices”. People who have lived and campaigned at the sharp end for years know this; those who consider themselves to be deep thinkers may be good at what they do, but they often miss the point that any good intention can be messed up by insufficient planning, monitoring and control over what the people they give the job to actually do.
We’re not electing somebody to the Mother of Parliaments. The Mother of Parliaments is England. “England is the mother of parliaments”. John Bright, 1865.
We are not electing somebody to England, but to Parliament.