Sunday thoughts: Why are MPs standing down, and should we care?
Sajid Javid this week became the twelfth Conservative MP to say that he’d be standing down at the next election.
Is this just rats fleeing a sinking ship, and jumping before being forcibly deselected by the voters? Maybe. But there’s a number of reasons to suggest it might be more complicated than that. Data from James Blagden at Onward (even before the Javid announcement, with his 23,000 majority) suggests that at least half of those standing down are holding very safe seats:
There’s also twelve Labour MPs standing down, which doesn’t fit with a thesis of people jumping before losing an election. And, although this won’t be a defining feature for many, there’s a strong financial incentive as an MP to hang on even if you think you’ll lose your seat, as ‘loss of office payments’ from IPSA (redundancy payments for you and me) only kick in for MPs who stand in an election and lose.
But what’s really clear if you look at the different groupings of Tory and Labour MPs standing down is that the Tories are much younger (an average age of just under 50, compared to an age of just under 70 for Labour MPs), have served less time as an MP (14 years vs 26 years) and were elected more recently (typically 2010 against 1997).
In other words, it’s Labour MPs who are retiring, and it’s younger Tory MPs — and some, like William Wragg, Chloe Smith, and Dehanna Davidson, really young MPs — who have proactively decided that they don’t fancy the next period of their life in Parliament, especially if it’s in Opposition.
That’s both rational, and sad. For most MPs being in Opposition is a really thankless task, even as a Shadow Minister (which most won’t be). My learned colleague Rachel Wolf makes a point that most MPs are wasting their opportunities on the backbenches, and could be having more of an impact in policy while also sitting as an MP, and I think that’s very true. But her argument for unused flexibility is true only to a point — you’re ultimately limited from taking much other paid employment, you’re constrained in what you say and (to an extent do) while also an MP, and your life is still run by whipping and divisions. It’s possible to do both, but for many it isn’t long term practical or effective. So if you can’t actually make change happen, why serve?
This pessimistic thesis of the role of MPs extends to those thinking about standing. The package on offer isn’t great: spend upwards of two years and tens if not hundreds of thousands from your own back pocket trying to get elected; if you do, you only have a statistically 50:50 chance of forming government; even if your party is in government, you only have a small chance of being a Minister; and as a backbench MP even in government, your influence is minor. Meanwhile you’re often away from your family all week; hours are long; you get horrendous abuse on social media (especially if you’re a woman, or from an ethnic minority), and — most controversially — the pay isn’t that spectacular (£84,000 for a backbench MP) — to be clear, nothing to be sniffed at, but comparable to a headteacher on L27 of the pay scale (of a scale all the way up to L43 or £123k). Isabel Hardman’s excellent book, “Why we get the wrong politicians”, sets this out in exhaustive detail.
I worry, too, that broader public service suffers from this same disillusionment. The Civil Service Fast Stream, when it’s not unwisely being suspended and then unsuspended, is still one of the most competitive graduate positions available. But civil service exits are the highest they have been for ten years, and morale is low. Again, part of this may reflect particular circumstances at the current time (low pay awards, a feeling of being attacked by successive Ministers, redundancy programmes). But Amy Gandon’s work is likely to show a deeper seated discontent about how the civil service and public sector manages staff, and a recent Institute for Government paper from Jordan Urban detailed how the state struggles to recruit, retain and deploy specialist external talent (full disclosure: I was one of the external interviewees for this paper). Using purely the example of Public First, a company that literally thrives because of a staff of thirty or so who are deeply enmeshed in public policy, I reckon that at most, three or four of my colleagues would actually want to be MPs, or special advisers, or work in government, across all parties, in the next few years.
My intuitive thesis, from what I see working in education, is that twenty years ago, when I was graduating, ‘top talent’ (an awful phrase) was attracted to top tier management consulting, or finance. Then it shifted to big tech. Now, talking to young people in schools and colleges, they want to join start ups — many of them with a social purpose.
That’s a positive shift. I’d far rather people were designing new innovative products and taking on grand challenges than they were selling derivatives. (And obviously, I think some consultancy is brilliant, but not all of it.). And it’s never been the case that politics and policy roles (in the civil service, in politics, in charities, or in academia or think tanks) appeal at scale alongside those.
But if the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that also we need talent in government, in regulation, in policy design, and in implementation. We need geniuses and entrepreneurs and innovators to solve social and economic problems and drive growth, and I don’t care if they become billionaires on the back of it. But we also need an ecosystem that helps regulate and manage enterprise; that addresses social problems which the market won’t; and which legislates smartly and precisely where needed. And we need politicians to set a vision, to create an environment in which people step forward and — yes — to create hope.
If people who are in principle attracted to these roles are opting out, or never standing up in the first place, then we will be worse as a country because of it.
