The constituency link gives MPs their second role, as ‘local champions’. Before becoming an MP I had little understanding of or involvement in local social activities. Life had revolved around family and work. Twickenham was where we lived: a commuter town and shopping centre, not a community. Olympia had once tried to become involved in the local arts world, but the conservative, middle-class women who dominated it had made it abundantly clear that they did not welcome a clever, argumentative Indian who upset their racial stereotypes by singing and playing Bach and Mozart rather well. We retreated into a laager of family and friends. Local party activists whose lives revolved around church, council, Scouts, charity fairs and school governorships found our lack of engagement troubling.
Everything changed the day I became an MP. Doors opened. Charities asked to me to be their patron. My wife, who had hitherto been treated as an alien from outer space, was greeted everywhere with bunches of flowers and beaming smiles. The diary quickly filled up with school visits, charity fairs, the inauguration of new vicars, concerts, Rotary dinners, annual general meetings of residents’ associations, and allotment open days.
After exhausting the pleasures of flattery and of scattering gold dust in all directions, I began to appreciate that behind the endless whirl of activity and mutual back-slapping was something solid and serious; that the cluster of urban villages that I represented – Teddington, Whitton, Hampton, Hampton Hill, Hampton Wick, St Margaret’s, Twickenham – had a dense and vibrant network of social activity. Mrs Thatcher’s (probably mis-quoted) claim that ‘there is no such thing as society’ was palpably untrue; this corner of London suburbia was throbbing with enormous energy and spontaneous voluntary endeavour. Some would dismiss this activity as the preserve of the middle classes, often inspired by Nimbyism and scarcely concealed self-interest. But I took the opposite, view. I quickly appreciated, too, that there is an important role for an MP as a catalyst for all this endeavour, speaking up for community concerns with the benefit of a national platform. This has proved to be the most rewarding aspect of my work, personally and politically.
Looking back after twelve years it is possible to see where I was able to make a difference. Early on I met a local vicar in Whitton with a vision of providing respite in his church hall for local carers of elderly people. His spiritual and organizational qualities did not extend to breaching the defensive ramparts around the NHS and local government bureaucracy and the funds they controlled. I was able, with a few well-aimed cannon shots, to open them up, and the project has subsequently grown and flourished to meet an acute local need. Shortly afterwards I met a determined woman, Kate Turner, who had just embarked on a campaign to raise £6 million to build a children’s hospice. Her conviction was absolute and she would have achieved her goal in any event, but having a friendly local MP promoting events, publicizing the issue of children’s hospices and the lack of government support for them, probably helped.
A popular heated open-air swimming pool had been saved from closure by a community campaign in Hampton, but the campaign committee had tried unsuccessfully to elicit funds from the sports Lottery for restoration work, and I led delegations to see the sports minister, Kate Hoey, and the sports tsar, Trevor Brooking (getting his autograph while I was at it). The answer everywhere was a polite ‘no’, and I thought I had failed. But the enthusiasm generated by the campaign and a mass meeting had opened other doors and mobilized local fund-raising and the project succeeded, for which I received (perhaps excessive) credit. This particular experience developed in me a strong hostility to big national prestige projects – like the new Wembley and the Olympics – which, via the Lottery, suck money out of local community projects, many of which, unlike Hampton Pool, wither and die as a result.
As a result of such activities, I acquired formidable expertise in a wide, eclectic range of subjects. These included bees – campaigning for research into bee diseases; sewage – there is a particularly smelly plant nearby; military music – my constituency hosts the Royal Military School of Music at Knellar Hall; and scientific education – as MP for the government laboratories which lead the world in standard-setting for physics and chemistry.
The local champion role sometimes took me in the opposite direction from the approved party line. It was clear to me from my earliest contact with the Twickenham electorate that, despite my borough having the lowest crime rate in London, law and order was a massive local concern, mainly because of late-night violence and vandalism, connected with drink, and the explosion of graffiti in public places. The Conservatives had given me an open goal in the 1997 election when Michael Howard came to Twickenham and was quoted in the local press as saying that the area had too many police officers, when numbers had already fallen to their lowest level in many years. Having taken up the position that the Conservatives were too soft on crime, I stuck with the theme, despite the reservations of some nervous party activists. It also seemed to me the correct position to take. The wealthy could, and did, hide from crime (or imagined crime) in gated communities; the less well-off had to put up with vandalized, graffiti-scrawled estates. The police are a public service, then seriously underfunded and understaffed, no less than nurses and teachers. I combined local and national campaigning, established an all-party police group in Parliament, worked closely with the Police Federation, secured the first-ever (I think) parliamentary debate on graffiti, encouraged the build-up of police numbers locally, and organized a code of conduct for local publicans to challenge binge-drinking.
I am perhaps best known nationally for economic issues, but locally I focused on crime. This involved working with a pressure group, the Victims of Crime Trust, founded by two local police officers. One of them, Norman Brennan, was a brilliant publicist who claimed to speak (and probably did) for the gut prejudices of the Met’s rank and file. They took up the cause of murder victims’ families, some nationally known like Denise Bulger and Sara Payne, others more local and less famous. I discovered that in Twickenham’s quiet streets there were victims of crime so appalling that a horror movie would not do justice to them. I began to understand some of the rage and frustration the victims’ families felt as a result of official neglect and, in some cases, the leniency accorded to the killers. In due course, I established a parliamentary group to support victims of crime. The campaigns sometimes veered into vigilantism, but I took the view that it was better to be on the tiger’s back than gazing into its mouth. And the campaigners are right to claim that victims deserve far more attention and sustained compassion than they normally receive.
Local and national campaigning for victims of crime was balanced by championing efforts to improve the local young offenders’ institution, Feltham, which lies outside but very close to the constituency. A constituent on the staff urged me to visit, which I did several times before the extent of overcrowding, lack of exercise, self-harm, suicide and violence came to light. On one occasion I took Olympia, who noticed things that I overlooked: the lack of personal hygiene, showers that didn’t work, inmates eating meals a foot or so from the cell toilet. My upbringing among the respectable skilled working class and lower middle class of York, and my later work in international roles, meant that I had probably had more exposure to village life in Africa and India than to Britain’s criminal underclass. Some of those I met and talked to were hardened, uncompromising, violent young men, but others were confused children, often mentally ill, functionally illiterate and completely hopeless. Many were merely remand prisoners or minor offenders who had somehow been swept into Feltham, to be dominated and educated by established career criminals. I may have played a small part in exposing some of the inadequacies of the place, which is now somewhat improved.
The role of local champion has its dangers. Grass-roots community campaigning, on planning applications, for example, runs the risk of Nimbyism and the subordination of the wider public interest to protecting property values. On balance, I think the risk is worth taking. The bigger risk is that the
wealthy and mobile vote with their feet and everyone else reacts with fatalistic apathy to changes decreed from above or generated by markets. By banding together and working collectively, neighbourhoods can exercise some control over their local environment. There will always be a mixture of motives – of low and high politics, of selfishness and idealism – but that is the nature of all political activity. The biggest meetings I have ever attended in Twickenham are those I have convened to mobilize protests against house building on public open space – recreation grounds and playing fields – and I would strongly defend the right of local communities to fight to preserve their environment against overdevelopment. Similarly, south-west London is much exercised by a campaign against the expansion of Heathrow, which is no doubt in part motivated by self-interest, but is also based on a wider and deeper concern for rebalancing environmental against narrow economic considerations and challenging the vested commercial interests of airlines and airport owners.
While local champions excel at catching fish in small ponds, sometimes bigger fish inadvertently stray in. When I first compared notes with a local Catholic priest about reports that had reached us of alleged neglect at a residential home for the elderly, Lynde House, we had little idea that we were dealing with one of the tentacles of a large business empire owned by the health entrepreneur and Labour donor Dr Chai Patel. Following a public meeting, I was able, working with a relatives’ group and the press, to direct a spotlight through the murky waters of a poorly regulated sector to illuminate some of the abuses. These were subsequently confirmed in an official report, which I highlighted in a parliamentary debate. The affair, however, still rumbles on in the disciplinary hearings regarding the nurses involved. It is one of the more shameful features of British legal process that it can take not just years but decades, as Dickens would have recognized.
I have started, at some length, with the personal casework and local issues that dominate much of an MP’s life and have only now reached the doors of Westminster. The emphasis is deliberate. The story of Parliament – certainly post-1997 – is of an august institution much diminished in status and influence, its powers having drained away to a mighty executive, to structures of international governance, notably the European Union, and to new bodies like the Scottish Parliament and the London Assembly. Successful MPs have had to reinvent themselves.
My own experience of Parliament went through a cycle familiar to many MPs: initially awestruck and intimidated by the tradition, the big occasions, the architecture and the reputation; then profoundly disillusioned by the pettiness, the tribalism, the time-wasting and arcane, archaic procedures; then gradually discovering that Parliament provides a unique platform for those who are patient and creative.
I remain to this day confused by parliamentary procedure and in awe of those who understand it. Legislation seemingly couched in the linguistic conventions of medieval scholars I have coped with, much as I cope with travelling on the Continent with my pidgin O-level French. In my first year or so in Parliament I was lost, relying on whips and friends to tell me how and when to vote and what to do. I had only one advantage over my peers: I was comfortable on my feet. I could speak spontaneously without notes, handle interventions without getting flustered, and ask ministers reasonably penetrating questions. I was surprised to discover how few MPs and ministers know how to speak in public without a script prepared by civil servants or a researcher. I realized how much I was indebted to the schoolteacher who had pushed me on to a stage at sixteen years old, and to my experience in the training ground for debaters at Cambridge.
But it didn’t take long for a freshman MP in 1997 to realize that beyond the set-piece occasions, like Prime Minister’s Questions and the Budget, there is little drama in the main chamber. With an enormous government majority, votes meant very little. We learned what was going on from Tony Blair’s comments in the media and from press leaks, not from Parliament. With the Conservatives demoralized and inward-looking, buoyed up only by William Hague’s wit, debates lacked urgency and energy, while the restrictions of parliamentary convention meant that my own party had few opportunities to shine.
Nonetheless, there are important rites of passage and one is the maiden speech. I spoke in the debate introducing legislation for the independence of the Bank of England, and spoke in support of a policy that my party had advocated for some years and was now being realized. Following Ruth Kelly, another new MP with an economics background, and after the traditional compliments to my predecessor, I was able within a few weeks of becoming an MP to have spoken, I think sensibly and positively, about a policy that, until the recent economic crisis, was the most successful and enduring of New Labour’s years in office.
Opportunities in the chamber for a newcomer are limited, but I was asked by my colleagues to introduce a debate on the euro, which invited interventions from John Redwood, Bill Cash and other sceptics. Another opening was provided by a ten-minute rule bill (which has no legislative force) on age discrimination, a subject I took up after being visited at my advice surgery by an ex-boxer, of remarkable physique, who had been refused a job in the Royal Mail because, approaching sixty, he was ‘too old’. (The Royal Mail has since revised its policy.)
I discovered that one of the most useful parliamentary devices is the adjournment debate which can be obtained by winning a ballot of MPs and usually involves a thirty-minute exchange with a minister, without a vote being taken. In my first session I was able to gain confidence (and good publicity) with a succession of these: on MRSA (I think the first in Parliament), after a constituent with breast cancer had had her treatment seriously disrupted by this hospital infection; Equitable Life; security of tenure for residential-boat owners; airport expansion; compensation for a former POW who had been subjected to slave labour in Germany; and a questionable post office closure. These debates were a chore for ministers, most of whom read a prepared response without listening to my speech at all, but some of whom were helpful and compassionate (like Chris Pond, who ensured that the parents of a badly disabled son whose cause I had taken up were properly compensated for debts they had run up as a result of incompetence by his department).
But for the most part debates in the chamber had – and have – an empty, ritualistic quality, particularly after the opening speeches, and on an issue of major importance one can well be addressing an audience of a dozen, most of whom are waiting to speak and paying no attention. I plumbed the depths of disillusionment in a debate on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. I had attended the inquiry hearings with my colleague Simon Hughes, had read the report carefully, had strong views, and had already acquired a reputation for contributing to discussions on London policing. I notified the Speaker that I wished to be called in the usual manner. I then sat for more than six hours waiting in vain, while an interminable succession of Tory and Labour MPs, mostly from outside London and who had never read the inquiry report, burbled on endlessly. Such experiences are common and help to explain why the chamber is usually empty. I vowed thereafter to use parliamentary time more productively.
One very productive use of time is the select committee. It was a rare privilege as a new MP to have ten minutes to interrogate the Chancellor or the Governor of the Bank of England, and the Treasury select committee did good work on economic policy issues, though necessarily constrained by the party make-up of the committee, with an in-built government majority. One issue that I persuaded the committee to investigate was the demutualization of building societies, having helped to lead a national Save Our Building Societies campaign. Even at the time it seemed obvious to me that good, solid institutions were in danger of being destroyed by the greed of their managers and ‘carpetbagger’ shareholders. I did not, however, fully anticipate at that stage the scale of the ensuing disaster or the key role that these converted building societies would play in destabilizing the financial system.
The large government majority also meant that the legislative function of the Commons was drained of co
ntent. This was (and remains) especially true of financial legislation – notably the Finance Bill, whose technical complexity is such that few MPs understand it. As a consequence, ministers read from a prepared script and opposition members from material supplied by lobby groups. For the most part, the immense and increasingly complex tax legislation is passed, scarcely touched by Parliament or understood by those who troop through the voting lobbies.
There are times when Parliament comes to legislative life: when the whips are off and MPs can exercise their judgement. The 1997 parliament had some serious and ethically difficult issues – stem-cell research was one – but by far the greatest passion was generated by fox-hunting. There was a genuine issue of principle at stake: the value to be accorded to animal welfare versus the freedom of hunting people to pursue a hobby of their choice. I came down on balance for abolition, but not without some liberal heart-searching, and consistently voted accordingly, though I have never fully understood the intensity of feeling generated by the issue on both sides.
For Liberal Democrat MPs the dominant issue of the 1997 parliament was our relationship with the Labour government. Paddy Ashdown’s memoirs describe in detail his expectation of entering a coalition government and his attempts subsequently to play a role in the ‘big tent’ offered by Blair. Since all but three of our forty-six MPs had defeated Conservative opponents, it was clear who the main enemy was and who it would be at the next general election. But beyond a mutual interest with Labour in tactical voting at general elections, the attractions of continuing Paddy’s close partnership with Blair in government were less obvious for those who were not sitting in joint cabinet committees. There was a steady stream of constitutional reform, particularly devolution, although these changes would probably have occurred in any event. There was a growing list of potentially damaging policies (like the abolition of dividend tax credits), follies (like the Millennium Dome) and cronyism (like the Ecclestone affair), where strong opposition was required. I was attached to the Treasury team, whose leader, Malcolm Bruce, was an uncompromising economic liberal and who pulled no punches in attacking Gordon Brown.
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