In praise of backbenchers

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

In recent years, there has been an established career path in the Labour Party. Work as a SpAd, get elected to a safe Labour seat, and spend a relatively short period of time on the backbenches before graduating swiftly to the front bench. It is a path well worn in recent years by our current leader (and his brother), shadow chancellor, shadow home secretary and shadow foreign secretary (to name but a few). Many of the 2010 intake – former SpAds or not – have also bypassed the backbenches, finding themselves in shadow ministerial roles in just a matter of months.

Yet recent events have brought back into focus the crucial, and often ignored, role of the backbench MP. Tom Watson’s crusade against News International (and for once that adjective isn’t an overstatement) has been a masterclass in the use of the house and the mastery of a brief that is so often overlooked in the modern day house of commons. While decades ago being a knowledgeable backbencher might have been a perfectly acceptable career path, the desire to move forwards (literally) has meant that many MPs see committee work and the development of broad knowledge in a particular subject as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

Hopefully Tom has shown some new (and future) MPs that there is an alternative way of achieving success in the house, and making your mark. When shadow cabinet elections came around last year many assumed that Watson would be standing. Yet he decided that what he was doing was more important – and that’s a decision that has borne fruit of late in a way that few suspected it ever would.

Of course Tom is only the most recent (and high profile) example of this phenomenon (after after all, he has been a minister before). Elsewhere on the Labour benches there are other examples. Jeremy Corbyn, for example, has spent much of his career standing up for causes that others might have ignored. It’s somewhat unlikely that many Labour leaders would have chosen Corbyn for a ministerial role (or that he would have accepted one), but only the most churlish of observers would argue that his career had not been worthwhile. Another example is Stella Creasy, elected only a year ago – and tipped for greatness – she wasn’t shepherded into a shadow ministerial position like many of her peers. And yet within a matter of months Creasy is likely to have had more impact on the lives of ordinary working people when (rather than if) her campaign against legal loan sharks ends in success.

Perhaps, if the commons are ever reformed, a lesson could be learned from the US House of Representatives, where there is a clear alternative career path (on Congressional committees) that is separate from the executive branch. But for now, being a backbencher is what it is. It can often be lonely. It can often seem fruitless. It can often mean shouting into the wind, and feeling like no-one is listening. But when a backbencher is successful, the joy of that success is all the sweeter, and the success itself is all the more impressive. They can change people’s lives for the better.

And after all, isn’t that what people get into politics for in the first place?