Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Zanza]

Liz Truss Nearly As Unpopular As Prince Andrew As She Plummets In Polls

One more:

Tory MPs considering reinstalling Theresa May as PM
"She's competent. She's boring. She'll calm things down."

[Valmy]

If anything, we should should scrap our artificial limit and go back to the original US Constitutional ratio of House Reps per persons. 

Yes. And give each of the five inhabited territories plus DC one Senator each plus at least one House rep (depending on population). I don't see any issue with having a large number of House reps, even over a thousand, in today's modern technological society.

[Sheilbh]

I think she's on 77 disapproval and 7 approve. So a little bit to go, but not far.

[Valmy]

Liz Truss Nearly As Unpopular As Prince Andrew As She Plummets In Polls

One more:

Tory MPs considering reinstalling Theresa May as PM
"She's competent. She's boring. She'll calm things down."

I mean she has certainly been the best Tory PM of their amazing run since 2010.

[The Larch]

I don't really know how can one wax lyrical about the sacred link of MP and his/her constituency when most of them seem to be paratroopers sent to a safe seat they've probably never heard of by Party HQ.

[PJL]

Even a majority of Tory members now want Liz Truss to resign according to a snap YouGov poll. If even the true blue brigade wants her out, I can't see her lasting much longer. Had been thinking she might last 6 months, but 6 weeks is much more likely. She won't be PM by Xmas.

[Admiral Yi]

She won't be PM by Xmas.

I'll take the over.

[PJL]

She won't be PM by Xmas.

I'll take the over.

I never specified the year...

[Admiral Yi]

I never specified the year...

 

[Sheilbh]

I don't really know how can one wax lyrical about the sacred link of MP and his/her constituency when most of them seem to be paratroopers sent to a safe seat they've probably never heard of by Party HQ.

That's not really true. It's a common perception but most MPs are "local" - they were born, educated or have lived within about 20km of their constituency. But even the parachuted MPs still live in their constituency and will be doing surgeries in it Friday-Sunday so will get to know it. It's actually been increasing for years and is far more common than it used to be in the past. Tony Blair representing a mining community in County Durham, Roy Jenkins in Glasgow, Tony Benn in Derbyshire etc. I think it's less common to have a local link in the South-East, East and London - but to an extent I think that probably just reflects those areas with lots of commuter towns and London.

The Tories are worse at this than Labour - but then there are, for example, a number of weirdly prominent Tory scousers (Nadine Dorries, Esther McVey, Therese Coffey) and needless to say there's not much point in going for a seat in Liverpool. To be honest I think it's probably swung back too far in the other direction. So just this week I saw a video for someone trying to get selected for a safe Labour seat in the North-East boasting about his local links - his great-grandfather was a miner in the area - he is actually an Oxford grad who's been working for, I think, Sadiq Khan

Again there's been loads of studies that MPs are doing more constituency work than ever - the MP as social worker is a relatively recent trend. MPs firmly think it helps them buck the trend of party polling (evidence is it makes no impact). It perhaps reflects less scope for MPs to be legislators, so this is a good use of their time. But also failing capacity in other bits of the British state like councils that make people go to their MP in desperation. Perhaps, also that voters have less tolerance for the old type of MP (say, John Smith) who'd prosecute a murder for four months and really be a part-time but effective MP (in the Commons). I think the rise of social worker model for MPs probably coincides with the decline of great "House of Commons" MPs.

My MP is a Labour grandee - former Deputy Leader etc - in a seat that votes over 70% for Labour, but she sends out annual reports and in the last two years her office worked on 10,000 cases. A lot of it is really people getting nowhere with bureaucracy so they go to their MP who sends out a letter with 'The Right Honourable Harriet Harman KC' on the letterhead and gets a response. But it goes from the seemingly trivial like a man who was being charged for too many garden waste bins and got a £165 refund from the council to really significant stuff on people's housing and immigration status.

I'll take the over.

Regret to inform you that you've now been fired and all your decisions are being reversed

[The Larch]

That's not really true. It's a common perception but most MPs are "local"

Boris Johnson first ran for MP in a Welsh constituency, before running in a London one afterwards and finally in one in Oxfordshire. Truss, born and educated in Oxford, is MP for some place in Norfolk I doubt she could place in a map. Kwarteng, born in London and educated in Cambridge, is MP for somewhere in Surrey I doubt he's ever set foot in except for campaigning. Sunak is MP for a Yorkshire constituency when he was born in Southampton and I guess he'd prefer to be the MP for Malibu instead. Starmer is MP for a London constituency I have no idea if he has links to, but he grew up in Surrey despite being born in London. Hunt is MP for a Surrey constituency near from where he actually grew up, while the MP for the place he actually grew up in is a guy from New Zealand. Nigel Farage contested 6 different constituencies between 1994 and 2015.

Looking at a LSE blog post from 2018 on the issue it gives that roughly half of Labour's MPs can be considered "local", while only 35% of Tory ones can. Looking at older articles it says that only about half of the MPs in parliament were born in the region where their constituency is located. In one of those older articles (from 2013) they have a quite illustrative map, showing the % of MPs that were actually born in the region they represent:



There's another map for the same relationship, but taking into account where the MP finished secondary education, but the proportion is roughly similar, with slightly higher % across the board.

It's not a perfect metric as people move around in life and may very well be brought up and end up living their adult lives in places different from where they were born, but working in large numbers it's what we have. The theory for individual constituencies represented by MPs tied to the local community is all nice and good, but the practice doesn't look that good to me. IMO, both FPTP and the individual constituency should burn in a metaphorical political science bonfire.

Edit: Another interesting factoid from the 2013 article. From the Top 100 safe Conservative seats, only 17 were represented by locals to the constituency. In Labour safe seats it was 58 out of the Top 100.

[Sheilbh]

Boris Johnson first ran for MP in a Welsh constituency, before running in a London one afterwards and finally in one in Oxfordshire. [...] Nigel Farage contested 6 different constituencies between 1994 and 2015.

I don't think anyone would say Johnson was a good local MP or that it was their pitch. They are more a variation on the Gladston, Churchill, Roy Jenkins tradition of figures with a national profile looking for a constituency. It's relatively rare.

Truss, born and educated in Oxford, is MP for some place in Norfolk I doubt she could place in a map. Kwarteng, born in London and educated in Cambridge, is MP for somewhere in Surrey I doubt he's ever set foot in except for campaigning. Sunak is MP for a Yorkshire constituency when he was born in Southampton and I guess he'd prefer to be the MP for Malibu instead. Starmer is MP for a London constituency I have no idea if he has links to, but he grew up in Surrey despite being born in London. Hunt is MP for a Surrey constituency near from where he actually grew up, while the MP for the place he actually grew up in is a guy from New Zealand.

Yeah I think these examples are interesting. Surrey is stockbroker belt - it's a county next to London, where well off Londoners live in commuter towns. So Kwarteng's constituency is about 10 miles from the centre of London. I think for him and Hunt it's why I'm not surprised at the lack of local connection in London and surrounding areas - because I think it's a place people move to (as are the commuter towns). "Being local" matters less because it's an area people move to and where probably most people can't claim to be truly "local" - I suspect it's similar with every thriving city and hinterland like Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh etc. My guess would be those seats have people MPs from all over, while the "localness" matters more in rural and post-industrial areas because people don't generally move there.

I think that's exemplified by Starmer. He grew up in Surrey or Kent, became a very successful barrister and then Director of Public Prosecutions - he's the sort of person I'd say is more local to London than where he's from. The same goes for Truss - her parents are academics they worked in various universities as she was growing up. She lived in Oxford, Vancouver, Leeds and Glasgow. It's not clear to me where she's "from" or "local" to based on that, I think she's local to the constituency she has because that's where she's chosen to live since her mid-30s which is Greenwich in London and Thetford in Norfolk.

Sunak - richer than Crassus - obviously has a magnificent constituency home (and his constituency is beautiful and very rich):


It's worth saying almost all MPs have a home in their constituency like Sunak. Parliament sits Monday to Thursday, they all go back to their constituencies for surgeries (and canvassing) on Friday and Saturday. In general candidates are selected about two years before an election is likely to happen and are expected to be regularly campaigning in the constituency for those two years. That's also why so many MPs have a run in a seat they're never going to win - for example Blair ran in Beaconsfield which was a very safe Tory seat, before getting selected for Sedgefield which is a safe Labour seat. I think part of that is the party testing that candidates are committed and willing to put in the work. HQ can rig the game by massaging the long-list of candidates a constituency chooses, but it's down to the local party. From what I've read Labour tends to be factional/ideological and quite conservative in their choices - my MP is retiring and I'm trying to work out, of the possible candidates, where they are ideologically/factionally which is not easy (though they all have local ties). The Tories seem more aesthetic than anything else - there's one Tory MP with a safe seat who was told by the local party chair that they chose him "because of the lovely way you talked about your wife"

I know someone whose dad was a Labour MP in the 90s and 00s for a Lancashire seat and that's how it worked. Him, his brothers and his mum lived in the constituency. The dad was in London Monday-Thursday and then back Friday-Sunday for surgeries, canvassing etc. But people would also come up to him in the street with their issues, sometimes to say thanks for some help, sometimes to abuse him (which my friend has said is really weird as a kid just walking around town with your dad).

As I say I'm not convinced on being "local" because I think most MPs become local in the same way most of us do - they move for work. Some may have ties to the area already, others don't. I'm not sure on recent numbers but somthing like 5% of MPs were born overseas (including Johnson) - from the US, Pakistan, Australia, Germany, Kenya, India, Ireland, Bangladesh, Uganda, Iraq and Poland.

But looking at those stats - the 2013 one has 51% of MPs going through high school in their area and the LSE has about 75% having roots in a region or an adjacent region which seems a fair distinction. So I think most have some local tie - and it is really valued when getting selected by the local party - those that don't, I think, acquire them.

Also worth saying on the parachuting thing - I think it reached a peak under New Labour and has been reined in since. You still have some of those MPs like Ed Miliband for Doncaster. I think part of the reason MPs are more "local" now is the example of what happened to Scottish Labour which was filled with big, serious "national" politicians who were perceived to have lost their connection to their constituency and having let their local party campaigning muscle atrophy.

It's one of the reasons Welsh Labour say they've thrived (despite Wales being far more pro-Brexit and pro-Tory than Scotland) is that they always kept up the constituency work - and, less positively Wales has a really big history of local party bosses who kept the machine going even with a national figure like Bevan, Foot or Kinnock. It's also why I wonder (hope) if the Tories will get into a bit of a doom loop because I'm not sure how well they've kept up their campaigning muscle in traditionally very safe seats.

It's not a perfect metric as people move around in life and may very well be brought up and end up living their adult lives in places different from where they were born, but working in large numbers it's what we have. The theory for individual constituencies represented by MPs tied to the local community is all nice and good, but the practice doesn't look that good to me. IMO, both FPTP and the individual constituency should burn in a metaphorical political science bonfire.

I am, of course, a full supporter of FPTP now that Labour are on course to win a massive maority as it is the best electoral system for wiping out the Tories and salting the earth There's been the stuff about the UK being on a banter timeline since 2016 - and applying that heuristic we have to face the possibility the Tories introduce a form of PR to prevent a wipeout

As I say all MPs and ex-MPs including people who strongly support PR say that the constituency link is something they find really valuable and important. I think that's worth listening to. Similarly political science studies are that MPs are doing more "local" work now than ever before. I suspect that's actually linked to the decline in quality of MPs as legislators. I don't think voters have made the connection but I think there's probably an unacknowledged trade off between MPs doing lots of "local" casework and being constituency focused v MPs doing legislation, debates and national politics well. 

Edit: Apparently Truss closed one of her exchanges with Starmer today with "I'm a fighter not a quitter". I yield to no-one in my fondness for Lord Mandelson, but I'm not sure that's the cliche I would have gone for

[Sheilbh]

Government's made the vote on lifting the fracking ban a confidence vote - which probably means they were going to lose it.

Labour already have leaflets ready for areas that might be suitable for fracking to target the Tory MPs in those areas (I think there's about 150 or so) and Truss has now removed the pressure valve of those MPs just voting against the government. That's because she'd lose but she's now putting her own MPs in a position where they either bring down the government and get the whip withdrawn, or they are even more likely to lose their seat.

And there's no real upside that I can think of because fracking isn't going to happen. I don't really get why they're taking so much pain on this issue given that you can allow fracking at a national level as much as you want but I think there's nowhere in the country where it would survive contact with local politics/planning permission.

[mongers]

I think the only germane fact we need to know about Truss is she 'studied' PPE at Oxford, , the reast is, as they say history.

[mongers]

Government's made the vote on lifting the fracking ban a confidence vote - which probably means they were going to lose it.

Labour already have leaflets ready for areas that might be suitable for fracking to target the Tory MPs in those areas (I think there's about 150 or so) and Truss has now removed the pressure valve of those MPs just voting against the government. That's because she'd lose but she's now putting her own MPs in a position where they either bring down the government and get the whip withdrawn, or they are even more likely to lose their seat.

And there's no real upside that I can think of because fracking isn't going to happen. I don't really get why they're taking so much pain on this issue given that you can allow fracking at a national level as much as you want but I think there's nowhere in the country where it would survive contact with local politics/planning permission.

Well it's a strange hill to die on.

As you say, it won't survive any contact with local politics/NIMBYism.; more evidence that people want magic energy at all costs, too bad those costs are carried by pool rural US commuities or people struggling to survive in the wastelands of the Niger delta.