Being determines consciousness – Labour need to return to selecting representative, grassroots candidates

By Kit Leary

Labour’s currently at 20% in the polls.

Usually, I’d come up with some vein attempt to find a slightly comedic hook to carry you gently through the rest of the article, to cover up the ranting nature of what it is I’m trying to say. Well, sorry folks, but I’m stumped this time around. There is no way of cushioning that blow, I’m afraid. We’re going to grimace and bear it.

What that 20% means, in layman’s terms, is that we suck. Well, the public think we suck. Well, the public think that all politicians suck, big time, and who can blame them when it looks as if it’s now a prerequisite of being elected to Westminster that you have a piggy nose, a curly tail, go “oink” a lot and have your nose in the trough?

Now, those LabourList readers who know me will probably expect me to go into a flying rage at Labour MPs, calling them bourgeois deviationists and what not. Well, it might surprise you to find out that I’m actually able to keep an enormous amount of perspective about this. Of course, the actions which led to the suspensions of Morley and Chaytor aren’t excusable in any way, shape or form and there is no mitigation. But, while I’ve resisted joining in with some of the more populist suggestions on dealing with expense-grabbing MPs (I wouldn’t inflict Halls of Residence on anyone), I do believe that, compared to what some Tory MPs have claimed, Labour MPs aren’t actually too bad.

For example, Fraser Kemp claimed for 2 DVD players in as many months. Naughty boy. No Futurama box sets for you.

However, Tory MP Douglas Hogg claimed over £2,000 for the cleaning of the moat at his primary residence.

First off; whichever MP has a moat instantly loses any right to claim to be concerned about, in touch with, or able to understand the concerns of, ordinary working people. And, secondly, any Labour MP who wants to score some quick, cheap and no doubt popular, publicity should quickly move a 10-minute rule bill to make a law which stipulates that the next time Hogg has to clear his moat, he should do so by drinking the entire thing. And then video it. And then stick it on YouTube. (That one’s free, by the way.)

But that’s not why I’m writing this; there have been entire forests devastated to make paper for the sheer volume of words which have been written about the entire episode, and I’m sure it’s probably difficult to find breathing space at the Telegraph offices due the large number of overinflated egos which no doubt have grown over the past week.

No, I’m going to follow on from a theme started by Jessica Asato on this very website; and question just who exactly we need to send to Parliament. Jessica says that she thinks now is the time to send into Parliament what she terms “a new wave of next generation candidates, untainted by this muck and with a pledge to clean up politics.”

It sounds admirable, because it is. But what Jessica doesn’t say is who these candidates are. I’d have pretty much thought that any PPC selected by a constituency Labour Party for the next General Election is untainted by the expenses scandal, because they’re prospective parliamentary candidates and are therefore not currently MPs.

But just who are our PPCs? Wise elders, while sat around the fireplace in the pub, supping on their beer and eating their sandwiches, told of a time when Labour MPs were union shop stewards or community stalwarts; the party which said they stood for the working person sent working people to Parliament? (They also said that this was a time before Blackberries and the Internet but I don’t believe them – that’s just going too far.)

These days, your average PPC tends to arrive at that prestigious level by one of three routes: either by being a parliamentary bagcarrier for an MP; by being a policy wonk at the variety of thinktanks which exist, or, having worked for an NGO or the trade union bureaucracy.

Now, I’m not one of these old oafs that says that young people shouldn’t be candidates. But what it does point to is the over-professionalisation of our Parliamentary Party. The candidates coming through have only ever really known professional politics. I think that’s a bad thing. Not because I think they have nothing to contribute (it’s more what they’ve contributed in terms of policy that perturbs me) or that I think that they should just sit down and shut up. Nothing like that at all.

It’s because we’re called The Labour Party for a reason. Look at the Conservative Party front bench in the Commons; the party which has traditionally stood for wealth concentration, privilege and a secular version of divine right has people who are wealthy and privileged on their front bench. The representatives of the party which traditionally stood for ordinary people, however, are jammed packed with… ex-policy wonks, lawyers – in essence, the professional politicians which so repelled working people back in the 1900′s that they set up the Labour Party in the first place not just to put working people in Parliament but to express their hopes, fears and aspirations.

Others, such as my comrades in the Labour Representation Committee, have said that a major reason for the disconnect between Labour voter and Labour MP is because of the policies which the Labour Party has taken generally since 1997. I think they’re right. But I also think that Marx was right when he said that being determines consciousness; if you work your way up through think tanks, lawyers’ firms and the Westminster bubble, then the way you look at the world (and therefore the policy to change that world) is shaped by your environment; everything becomes a matter of policy, and the people you talk to.

Maybe if we did go back to having genuine grassroots candidates, rather than people who have been groomed for the role since their early twenties, we’d start to reconnect with working people again – the people which, as our name suggests, are the people we’re supposed to represent.