Tag Archives: members of parliament

What our new MPs bring to the political debate

By Lord William Wallace | Mon 5th August 2024 - 11:35 am

Liberal Democrats who are frustrated at the modest media impact of our 72 MPs in the first month since their triumphant election should remember how long it takes to recruit new staff, discover the intricacies of parliamentary life and the surrounding media, put their diverse skills to effective use, and decide which specific issues they are going to make their own. In the last Parliament our 11 MPs had to cover the full range of issues thrown at them, with a skeleton supporting staff, with each by-election winner making a welcome difference to the load. When our Lords group met together with our new MPs, Ed Davey generously thanked us for the policy support and advice we had provided (with our larger numbers, though very limited staff) in combatting Tory legislation in the past 3 Parliaments. A much larger Commons Party, with significantly-increased staff both in MPs’ office and attached to the Whips’ Office, will transform our capabilities.

Few of us will yet have discovered the wealth of experience and expertise our new MPs bring to their new, fulltime, responsibilities (I’m still discovering constituencies that I didn’t realise we’d won…). Clearing some papers today, I discovered a memo on the government’s data strategy that Tim Clement Jones and I had written four years ago with a Liberal Democrat expert called David Chadwick – and realised that I’ve already met our new MP for Brecon and Radnor, and that he’s an established expert in a delicate field of public policy. A rapid look through our MPs’ short biographies shows a wealth of local Council experience, with all that provides for grappling with issues of social care, public services, environment and housing. I see that Gideon Amos, our Taunton MP, is also an architect and town planner by profession.

Posted in Op-eds and Parliament | 14 Comments

MPs and other jobs

By Rob Parsons | Thu 1st August 2024 - 2:12 pm

I have a proposal for dealing with MPs who have other interests. It’s a solution I have proposed a number of times in different places, and in every case it has been very difficult to get reactions from others. This puzzles me. If there is something fatally wrong with my proposal, would somebody here please tell me, so I need not bother myself with it any more. If it is not fatally flawed, then I think it deserves a hearing.

I believe my suggestion is more liberal than the current free for all, and also more liberal than banning second jobs. My suggestion is not to ban MPs from having other jobs or other interests, but simply to ban them from voting on anything in which they have a financial interest (and maybe other kinds of interests as well). This is in line with practice in local authorities where representatives routinely recuse themselves from issues where they have declared an interest.

This might cause notable changes in the selection process. How eager would local parties be to appoint someone who had a directorship of a medical company and hence could not vote on any health issue? It might give rise to different, and more ethical, internal conversations among candidates. They would have to calculate their net worth as a candidate with and without their interests, and might thereby arrive at a more realistic assessment of what they can offer to the political process. It won’t in many cases; of course; people will continue to calculate purely in terms of political advantage, but it might change some conversations. Imagine all those Tory landlords who would not be able to vote on anything to do with housing.