The story drew smiles and laughter from around the tables and encouraged others to introduce the odd anecdote, so that in the end, although nobody had addressed the original question, it was clear that people were at least feeling comfortable. The ice had been broken, or at least cracked a bit.
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’Good afternoon everybody’.
George Ling was a handsome old man with a full head of silver and an engaging presence. He looked like a little boy who had just been given ten pounds to spend on sweets and an airfix kit. And with good reason. He had been one of the architects of the new Parliament and had never grown tired of the pleasure it gave him. For him to deliver these little lectures every couple of years was a great honour and privilege, as it was to meet the product of his work.
‘My name is George Ling. I was one of the founder members of CTD. I know that John Parminter has been giving you his potted history of the new Parliament and I would now like to address you on other matters which I hope you will think important for the way you spend your time here. At some point in the next day or so you will be given a set of rules and procedures, and a provisional timetable for the work of the house. This will, of course, provide you with a diary of things you are absolutely required to do, but it will also describe how you can get involved in issues of particular interest to your constituents or yourselves. Although there are no longer ‘party politics’ there are plenty of pressure groups trying to promote one policy or another, and you will probably all develop your own sense of what you think is right or wrong with these proposals.
Everything that you do from now on must be down to you. If you feel strongly enough about something it is possible for you to present your proposal for change to your colleagues and, eventually, to have your idea presented for approval by the house or even by referendum to the country.
What I want to talk about is the relationship you have with your constituents, and to do that I need to talk about how things used to be done in what I think of as the bad old days.
Up until 2015 we had a party-political system. By some definitions it was a democratic government. About half of you here today will have voted in that system and have your own opinion of the value to you of that process. The method was that the voter was presented with a multiple choice of candidate, only one or two of which would have a chance of winning in their constituency. If you voted for a minor candidate who stood no chance of election you might think it a wasted vote.
The usual result of a general election was that the winning party would command just under a half of seats but would take overall control by coming to terms with parties from Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland. Sometimes a government had a clear majority, but not often. A winning party generally gained between forty and forty five percent of the overall vote, which was itself about sixty five percent of the electoral roll. This meant, of course, that any government of whatever colour was only directly supported by about thirty percent of the electorate. The opposition parties, owing to the mysteries of the system, could even sometimes claim to have a greater support in the country than the government of the day.
You know that, over the next four years, you are going to be asked to contribute on an almost daily basis to the proper running of our country. Imagine, though, that you had been elected on the losing side of the old system. What was your role? how were you going to contribute? You could sit on the odd cross-party committee and nibble around the edges of power but you could never really influence the important decisions. Most of your time was going to be spent opposing, for the sake of it, the other party’s government. As far as you were concerned, if your leader told you black was red and green was blue and you had to vote for it, you would vote for it.
If half the MPs of that day were completely powerless then that also meant that more than half of the electorate had been disenfranchised. Their vote had been wasted for another four or five years.
Even worse, in some respects, was the effect of ministerial government, whereby MPs of the ruling party elected a leader, or had a standing leader already, and he appointed a select group of like minded MPs to be responsible for particular management roles. Because all MPs thought they would always be an MP, their single-minded desire was to climb the greasy pole to the heady heights of cabinet, as it was called, to share in the power, influence and financial rewards that would come with it. All he or she had to do to ensure their chance at this great prize was to look intelligent and show undying alliegence to the party bosses.
This meant, if you apply a critical analysis to the subject, that of the six hundred and thirty elected members perhaps only two dozen, or even fewer, had a direct influence on policy and actions taken. The country was, effectively, ruled by a self-appointed elite.
In those days, if you wrote to your constituency MP about a truly local thing, say, asking why the light at the corner of your road hadn’t been working for the last six months, despite your calling up the council about it six times, there was a very good chance that the light would be working two days later. You will find yourselves that you have great influence locally. But, if you wrote to your MP suggesting a change of policy in some department of government, you would receive, some months later, an anodyne non-specific thank-you for your letter which had been ‘passed on to the department’ of whatever. As a constituent, because of the structure of government, it would be impossible for you to either have your voice heard or, if it were heard, respected.
I’ll tell you about my own experiences at that time, and the events that led to the formation of CTD.
Back in 2008 or so the country was just entering yet another recession. This time it was caused by the astonishing behaviour of the world banking industry backed up with some truly eye-watering government borrowing and spending. Although it was obvious that the huge financial losses and the need to repay public debt must have a significant effect, in the main everybody went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. While many observers felt that the writing on the wall was going to be huge new unemployment the government appeared to do nothing to address the situation. What policies they had just nibbled around the edges but, whenever a senior politician was interviewed about economic matters, and particularly about unemployment, the same old mantra was, ‘We are confident that we are heading in the right direction and we are doing all we can to promote jobs.’
It took no genius to know that, if an economy shrank in size by ten percent, then the overall effect on employment would be far greater than that, given that the only real option for any business whose profit margin was three or four percent would be to reduce the only cost that it could easily control - the workforce.
Against this background I came up with a scheme that I felt could be useful for employment, particularly employment in manufacture.
Whether or not my ideas were good ones is a discussion that we could have another day. That is not what I want to address. What I want to talk about is the difficulty in getting heard. I was just an ordinary guy. I didn’t have any influence or connections and I wasn’t involved in any special interest group. The same as most of you sitting here. All I had was an idea and an absolute certain belief in it. My idea was well documented and a model and business plan well developed. All I needed was an audience with government and, I felt sure, the overpowering logic of what I had to say would be absorbed and reflected into an exciting opportunity.
