Being ‘local’ might make for a good leaflet, but does it make for better MPs?

Our last two general elections have been snap elections, which saw candidate selections take place in hurried, opaque ways. Now, we are heading towards the next election in a far more orderly manner. We might not know exactly when it will happen, but the 80-seat Tory majority (eroded by a string of by-elections though it may be) provides a degree of ballast. We are not going to wake up on any random day and find ourselves watching the unexpected announcement of a snap election.

As such, we are experiencing our first full set of candidate selections in close to a decade. In many marginal seats and seats with retiring Labour MPs, the campaign is very much on. And there is one trait that most hopefuls stress in their videos and campaign materials as they seek the approval and endorsements: being local.

This is something any candidate who can will put front and centre. Labour took Wakefield last week. The new MP, Simon Lightwood, stressed his local credentials throughout, drawing more or less explicit comparisons to his Tory predecessor (although being a parachute candidate was very much the lesser of Imran Ahmad Khan’s crimes) and, also, to his main rival for selection Community doyenne Kate Dearden – who was quite local (her campaign material stressed she was a proud Yorkshirewoman), but not quite local enough.

In North Shropshire, Ben Wood made much of his local origins – to admittedly little effect at the ballot box. In a tight seat, having a local candidate can be what ultimately gives one party or another the edge. I am deeply sceptical of ‘personal vote’ as a factor worthy of much consideration in electoral analysis – nonetheless, having campaigned there, I feel sure that Labour only held Batley and Spen due to the strong community connections of our candidate, Kim Leadbeater.

Our MPs are more local than ever, and getting more so; more than half of MPs now represent the region in which they were born. This fits with a trend of constituency working becoming a more central part of their job. When you are dealing with more casework – when, in a post-2010 world, you are an increasingly active part of your area’s social safety net – it helps to know the area you are representing.

Being local, however, is not an entirely uncomplicated political question. There is, first off, the question of what we mean when we say local: do we mean born there? Or grew up there? Where their family is from, where they went to school, or to university, where they work, where their children go to school? How many of these do you need to tick off to meaningfully claim to be local? People don’t live their lives according to constituency boundaries. But this didn’t help Paul Williams at the 2021 Hartlepool by-election who, despite being very much from the area, suffered accusations of being a parachutee on the grounds that he had previously represented neighbouring Stockton South (and also, admittedly, on the grounds that he had had the selection stitched up in his favour by the central party).

It is easy to see the progressive case for a push for greater localism. It can serve to staunch public alienation with a political system that is seen as distant, uninvolved in peoples’ lives. Localism can ensure representatives who have a sincere stake in the places they represent, allow MPs to serve as a direct role model for people in the area they represent, the living embodiment of ‘from here you can go anywhere’.

But there are also downsides. Is this an apolitical approach, where ideology can become subsidiary to more granular concerns? No one worries that Lanarkshire born Keir Hardie did not understand the concerns of the people of Merthyr Tydfil, which he represented in parliament as the first Labour MP. The goal of the parliamentary Labour Party is to represent the class interests of working people in Westminster. Does insistence on localism – its implication that only those from an area can understand or meaningfully represent it – undermine the universalism of this principle?

It is my suspicion that the reason why ‘parachute’ is a dirty word has far more to do with class than with location. Consider the likes of Tristram Hunt, the Cambridge born former MP for Stoke on Trent Central; Tony Blair, Edinburgh representing Sedgefield; or either of the Miliband brothers, from London but representing South Shields and Doncaster North. Think, for example, of the infamous – and apocryphal – anecdote about Peter Mandelson and the “Hartlepool avocado” (mushy peas). The difference highlighted is in class as much as it is region (not, of course, that these two things are unconnected).

Ali Milani, in his new not very good book, talks a lot about Boris Johnson’s clueless and derisive attitude to his constituency, Uxbridge and South Ruislip – the place Milani grew up and lives. It is hard to argue with this, but then again I am assured in the belief that Johnson would not be better if he were from Uxbridge. There are lots of different ways to be from somewhere, after all, and the UK is a country that piles poverty and affluence very close indeed. Grenfell tower, for example, casts its shadow over the mansions and wide streets of Kensington and Chelsea.

Localism can be something of a procrustean bed when it comes to representation, stressing too certainly the need for one trait above others. I would hazard that it makes for better candidates – after all, you want all the positive traits you can list when you’re putting together leaflets and speaking at hustings – but probably not, in any measurable way, for better MPs. We have a politics that holds authenticity, often quite hollowly signified, as the ultimate currency and being local is an unusually assured token of this most sought after trait. The question, then, is not whether being local is valuable in this system, but whether authenticity is a reliable political currency in which to be operating.