The hollowing out of British politics

By Luke Bozier / @lukebozier

Between them, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition have no significant work experience which doesn’t involve politics or the media. Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband left university and ended up, more or less straight away, in jobs working for politicians or political parties. And we wonder why the population at-large feel that we are a disconnected, naval-gazing class of people unto our self?

Cameron took a break from politics to work for Carlton Communications, and Ed Miliband spent a little while as a visiting lecturer at Harvard; apart from these two glints of sunshine, the two men have absolutely zero experience of the world beyond Westminster’s borders. Most of the cabinet and shadow cabinet have similar CVs. What does this mean, if anything, for our politics and governance in the 21st century?

The professionalisation of politics has been going on for a few decades, but we are living in an era of concentrated political hackery and technocracy. This has created a bland, watered down political class. We live in an age of very low approval ratings of politicians and politics in general and voter turnout has been sliding for a long time. The public rightly don’t trust the people who run the country, or their political rivals who would like to run the country. How can we blame them? How can a politician claim to know what’s best for the country if he’s spent his entire life living in a way which the average citizen wouldn’t recognise?

The contest for leader of the Labour Party last year presented an indicative sample of the blandness and experience-devoid modern Parliamentary Labour Party. Not a single one of the five qualified candidates has ever, in their adult lives, worked outside of politics, the media or the think-tank community. How can they expect to be taken seriously in an age where the main focus of politics should be job creation, when none of them has spent a minute working in a private sector organisation?

The future doesn’t look much brighter. Power by its very nature creates heirs in their own mould. With the exception of a few talented young Labour MPs, the chances are that the next Labour leadership contest and the one after that, and the majority of any shadow cabinets or Labour cabinets over the next few decades will be stuffed full of people who have left university and gone straight into work at an MP’s office or who come from student politics and little else. It is a trend borne out of arrogance, lack of genuine regard for voters and the pursuit of power via the quickest route possible.

When I ask myself why we have deeply uninspiring, disconnected leaders, I know the answer. They’ve spent their lives running away from life experience, desperate to get a safe seat as early as possible in order to secure their political careers. Devoid of any real experience of life, they rely on think-tank reports and focus groups to try to figure out how ‘normal’ people live and how they should be governed. They live a life free of risk, afraid they might do something which could blight their chances or annoy the people at the top who could give them a leg-up. Through this process, they become bland, uninteresting people with no plan for themselves or our country except the pursuit of personal power and status.

It’s time we had a revolution of sorts; open the flood gates and let some teachers, doctors, small business people and the like be selected for winnable parliamentary seats. Hopefully one of them will go on to lead our country and our party in 20 years. Britain would be better for it.