Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The rise and rise of the career politician
An interesting article by former politician and now academic, Tony Wright, on the increasing prevalence of the career politician who goes straight from a life of student politics to a life in the party of their choice with little experience of knowing "where the shoe pinches" as he puts it. Some of those career politicians, of course, start in local government and are often propelled upwards after a spell as a councillor.
Wright highlights the collapse of membership and the increasingly small pool of people who select candidates:
The collapse of membership and attachment not only concentrates power at the top of the party, but also narrows still further the already small group of people involved in the selection, and re-selection, of politicians. The number of participants is now so small in many cases (the exact numbers are not disclosed by the parties for obvious reasons) that we are approaching a crisis of representative legitimacy.
With elections coming up and large numbers of new faces being presented to the electorate, does it matter if the prospective candidates have had a bit of experience or not beyond the party office?
Tony Wright also champions the idea of local primaries for selecting MPs. Would this improve the quality of candidates for political parties?
Read the whole article here
Tags for Forum Posts: primaries
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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I commented over on the St Ann's fraud post that Tim Waters, Peter Morton and The Secretary of the St Ann's Branch of the Labour Party were all at Oxford together and involved in student politics. I presume that this local Labour councillor, is the mother of Tim Waters.
Join your local Labour Party NOW if you live in a predominantly Labour Ward. It's fine that these people choose to get into local politics but it's not fine that they basically select themselves as candidates! Ever wonder why your councillor ignores you? This is why. They only need to pay real attention to the dozen or so people who select them. Of course I know that some have principles and go out of their way to represent their electorate but at the same time they still need to get selected first.
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Permalink Reply by Philip on
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I think many people feel completely left out of the political process. Our local authorities have less and less power and all recent govts have been happy to restrict it further. Councils now are little more than agencies to appoint private sector contractors and are now in the firing line for carrying out cuts forced on them by central government. Many now despair of the Labour Party which stuck two fingers up to the millions who opposed the Iraq war and continues to accept privatisations and indeed the dreadful break up of local authority education and the hiving off of finances to 'free schools' with no democratic controls at all. I've joined Haringey Left Unity along with other lefties who see no future with Labour. I mean is Ed Milibean the most pathetic creep you ever saw? I respect the many good people who fight for positive issues within the Labour Party but there has to be a line in the sand even for them........
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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We get the politicians we deserve. If you cannot be bothered to vote, hard to complain if you don't feel that those elected represent you.
It seems like an anti-intellectual argument to me. What, politicians should not be allowed to go to Oxbridge because it makes them less "human"? How is that going to work then, introduce a "what is the price of a pint of milk" test to select the candidates? Who should Oxbridge be for if not politicians, aristocrats?
Would the St Anns crap have happened had more residents turned up to vote? To prevent it continuing, please go along to the meetings!
Surely the most serious problem is this apathy - with UKIP adopting the BNP "Love Britain" slogan, our indifference to the political process really could bite us hard.
When we consider how out of touch politicians are, I would much rather have my Oxbridge masters in the Labour party than the ConDems. I would like to see more top-level graduates involved in politics, not fewer, if only to abolish Oxbridge. We need better politicians and we are not going to get them by some magical process that keeps them away from the elite - politicians will always be part of the elite, even more so if their numbers fall below 600 as has been mooted.
One of my local Labour candidates is Jason Arthur - he is not wealthy yet went to Oxford, is a school governor and there's nothing wrong with him as fas as I can tell, even though he is young and an Arsenal supporter. He was fairly selected. I've talked to him and he is just what Crouch End needs. How did he manage to be both an Oxbridge graduate and a "real" person?
Rather have him representing me than an independently wealthy Lib Dem. Down with millionaires in politics!
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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But what if I don't want to join a political party? Perhaps I'd rather not spend my time wearing rosettes and gritting my teeth? What if I would rather not be forced into a tribe in order to get decent candidates (no matter what their education)? Is is fair to suggest that I must join a party so that once every four years I get to turn up to add my 2p to a meeting to select candidates? Or that I have no right to be interested in politics if I'm not prepared to support the red gang against the yellow gang, the blue gang against the green?
I'm getting a little tired of the 'if you're not with us, you're not deserving of a voice' attitude which seems defensive and divisive. There are people who do amazing community work outside of the political parties and who don't seem to waste quite so much time on in-fighting and factionalism.
What about the idea of primaries which formed the second part of this post? I know there are some in your party including I think our local MP, Chris, who support them and who feel that they are a fairer way to select candidates?
The point is that an ever decreasing pool of talent is partly caused by this kind of hectoring attitude, "you get what you deserve". I don't want to be told what to do by anyone's 'masters' and I've seen close up what happens to people who aren't prepared to toe the party line and cover up abuses and injustice. It ain't pretty and it certainly doesn't attract people to get into politics.
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Sorry Liz - must have struck the wrong tone as I really didn't mean to hector anyone, or to give a negative impression or demean anyone who doesn't agree, nor accidentally de-voice them.
I too would like a world where the many contributions made by people who do not belong to a political party are better recognised but it's not about "with us or against us" it's about responsibility.
The reason we have the world we have is because we have collectively created it so as people can be free but that freedom has a price. In order to not to have to get involved in politics we have to trust others to do it for us, but we retain the final responsibility if things go wrong.
The right-wing view of "laissez-faire" leads to ideas like "trickle down" and austerities that do not work, imposed on people who do not want them. The Occupy movement tries to give a non-political voice to something we all feel -that there is a lot wrong.
If we want a changed world, the only fair way to achieve it is though the political process, agreed?
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It's not about being "laissez-faire" and it's not just the right that impose things on people that they have never asked for. The left have been guilty of paternalism time and time again - believing that they know what people wanted and needed but forgetting to ask them and frequently imposing a middle-class default model. In the dazzle of bringing about free health care post 1945 a VERY GOOD THING, it is sometimes lost on the idealists that policies on education and housing both assumed a lot about the working classes which later proved to be false. Some have suggested that what is happening in Tottenham fits the same mould. Imposed from above on a community that isn't asking for what they are giving.
There is no other process, so far tried, that has proved to be as fair as democracy and the democratic process is by far the most effective form of governance but if we are not being given a diversity of candidates that reflect the make up of the population but are represented by people who are overwhelmingly privately educated, from political families and/or who increasingly have done no job outside the political parties, is this democracy not in danger of becoming something that more increasingly resembles an oligarchy in the sense that all the power is concentrated into the hands of a privileged few?
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>>power is concentrated into the hands of a privileged few
Twas ever thus.
How can we reduce imposition on people who do not want it? This excellent website often has complaints from people about what the Council has decided, so should those decisions be quashed based on the number of posts objecting or simply the quality of the furore?
If only people would be more politically active things would surely improve. Most of the Lib Dems candidates have stood down here in Haringey before the May elections in 9 weeks time - they simply cannot get their ideas implemented, yet I am sure that there are enough Lib Dem voters who want them to stay and fight.
Not only do we need a good set of representatives, we also need a strong opposition so that makes the well-liked and experienced among the Lib Dems giving up the ghost even worse.
We've always had a minority legislating for the majority. In every election since the war the govt is elected by less than 50% of the people - the problem runs deep.
Few voted for most of the ConDems current policies, yet they are running riot. They are thinking of charging people to appeal against the withdrawal of their benefits. The conDem ideology that leads to developers getting an automatic, unstoppable right to develop is partly why the ugly plans for Hornsey Depot will go ahead regardless. Their support for fracking is particularly dangerous, yet people still do not seem to want to stand up and get things changed even in one of the most unequal boroughs in the UK. How bad do things have to get with the planet before people will react?
Completely agree about paternalism - enjoyed Christine LaGarde's 2010 comment that the economic crisis would look quite different if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. Glad that it was the Hornsey and Wood Green Labour Party that pioneered women-only shortlists but it's far, far too little - it's mostly men who are in power (and in prison). You only have to look at the ConDems front bench to see what they think of women and power.
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First of all thanks Chris for engaging with this thread. I was afraid that no one was interested in the issue of representative democracy. However, you are sidestepping things to make party political broadcasts and not acknowledging that the problem runs deeper than the colour of a politician's rosette.
First of all, paternalism isn't gender specific even if the root is "father" -it actually means
the policy or practice on the part of people in authority (my emphasis) of restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to or otherwise dependent on them in their supposed interest.
so you are missing the point that elites (that may be made up of mainly but not exclusively of men) drawn from an ever smaller pool will have a narrower and narrower perception of what is in the interest of those they govern as their knowledge of others lives is increasingly based on hearsay and narratives filtered through hostile media.
The assault on the benefits system began under the Labour government and images of "scroungers" were perpetrated from ad agencies employed by a Labour-run DWP. The housing crisis was not ameliorated by a Lab government that had 13 years to build council houses but believed that the poor would be better off with private landlords. Prescott was not above a bit of social cleansing with his disastrous Pathfinder scheme - this is paternalism and I believe that the Blair government had plenty of women in it, but maybe not enough from the communities being ruined?
Would these ideologies get so much traction if the politicians and the media was not so full of people that are so far removed from the electorate's lives that they couldn't see where it would all lead? Who no longer believed that those to whom they were doing all this had a voice, an opinion, an alternative view which was worth hearing?
So we get to the ugly sights we see in Parliament today, to ruined lives and blighted futures which you rightly condemn (or condem as you seem to prefer?). But make no mistake Chris, this didn't start with the Tories who in the first years were merely implementing the cuts planned by Alistair Darling and there is absolutely nothing from Ed Miliband to suggest that apart from getting rid of the bedroom tax (a right and just thing to do) that there will be any reversal of the damage being done to the poor and vulnerable. This all comes from a politician class that have most in common with each other and increasingly understand nothing of ordinary lives.
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Thanks Liz - these are important topics and am glad we disagree - I feel as if I am in an ivory tower and the chance to have my views corrected is precious.
>> drawn from an ever smaller pool
The world is more plural than it has ever been. There are more sources of power than ever. The elite is becoming more varied with a wider range of people involved. If anything, the power of the elite is steadily reducing as it grows.
There was a time when you could not go to university if you were not male, and a member of the church of England. London University was formed to allow non-believers and women in. What followed has been a huge range of measures to flatten our society and they have worked. No, it's not perfect and yes, there is loads more to do, but it is so much better than it was.
>>The assault on the benefits system
Shurely shome mishtake? Labour has always been the party of the working person and came into being to fight for benefits as a right - the National Insurance of a safety net, workers rights, the welfare state etc - in the teeth of determined opposition from the owners of the satanic mills and their property-owning cousins, all of whom died-in-the-wool Tories, to a man.
Maybe we can agree that the Labour government is on the side of the majority of voters (those in work) and the Tories represent the bosses? (I leave out the Lib Dems because they have few MPs and have only been a junior member of the govt for the last few years, were previously irrelevant, because I am not sure who's side they are on, or what they stand for really and because the polls say they'll be gone next year.)
It is the right wing who claim that people should be left to fend for themselves. It is the right wing that claim that the left wing will ruin the economy and yet it is the right wing business empires that brought the world to it's knees in 2008.
Yes, politics is not fair, yes politicians are roughly as corrupt as the society they are drawn from.
The main difference between right and left is that the left believe that something can and should be done to right equality, and that it can should be done using the full force of the law and that it should be "progressive" - the poorer you are, the less you are obliged to contribute.
The right wing follow the American libertarian view that the market is best left alone and rules must only be imposed to protect business owners from a mutiny by the wage slaves in benefit street, to give the already rich in parasite street more subsidies in tax breaks that far exceed the welfare paid out to those too poor to eat properly.
Hence the savage Tory privatisation plans during strike-breaking Thatcherism, devising a 30-year project to fully privatise the NHS, currently in it's final phase. Hence the right-wing's hatred of the minimum wage, taxation, workers on the board, public ownership of schools, hospitals, prisons etc etc. So many examples from every period of the (now-declining) right-wing set of paternalistic attitudes.
A good example is the recent revelation that Councils all over the UK are paying millions every month to private landlords, often wealthy land-owners, property companies, the Duke of Grosvenor etc. Many properties are in terrible condition - people are living in homes that are fiendishly expensive to heat. The poor do not see the benefit of this public money, the rich hide the income offshore whilst trying to force the government to "reduce red tape" so as to save them even more. This is not some remote pool of money earned gambling that the price of commodities that feed the world's poor will go up two points on the stock exchange, this is money you and I have paid in Council Tax here in this borough that goes directly in the pockets of the landlord, sentencing a generation to end up poorer than their parents for the first time in our country's modern history.
The left wing believe that we can use government to legislate to reduce social injustices like this. The right wing rely on the market to take care of things.
You seem to be saying "a plague of both your houses" but where does that lead us? You complain of our unrepresentative democracy but do not seem to want to lay responsibility on voters - according to you, it's our rep's fault. What do you want?
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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From everything you write, Chris, I get the impression that you're not in any ivory tower. But a very nice, highly principled, ultra-optimistic kindly, old-fashioned left-wing socialist, who wears the rosiest of rose-tinted glasses.
But also someone who somehow hasn't noticed that leadership of his local party has been taken over by Tories or - as near as makes no difference - people with right-wing views who believe Margaret Thatcher's TINA - there is no alternative to such economic and social views. Including no alternative to cuts and privatisation, to "rolling back" the welfare state. (Well, perhaps a slight disagreement about how far and how fast.) With undiminshed faith in markets markets markets and did I mention markets? Despite the banking crisis.
Endorsing John McMullan's point and the wider issue raised by this thread: In Haringey whoever you vote for the Party apparatchiks get in.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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>>In Haringey whoever you vote for the Party apparatchiks get in.
I really don't think so Alan - the candidates I know are not like that. What you may be concerned about is the fact that whoever is elected of whatever party, has to tow the line by following the party whip.
So, do you mean:
Whoever you vote for in Haringey, they will have to follow the party line?
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You're right Chris. My suggested slogan for an election poster is far too crude. In the light of your criticism I have amended my advice to voters.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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