Making parliament great again

To get better MPs, we must first build a different kind of state

Today on Arguably, Martha Dacombe explains why the real problem with Westminster isn’t our MPs. This piece is paid but you can read it – and all our post-election coverage – by becoming a full subscriber now or signing up for a seven-day free trial.

Image: Sven Hansche/Shutterstock

A standard diagnosis of Britain’s political ills has settled into something close to consensus. We have, it is said, a generally poor cohort of MPs and if we got better ones, our politics would improve. There is some truth to this, and it generates a familiar set of proposals: more open selection procedures, restrictions on phones in the chamber, tighter rules on outside interests and, most recently, an alcohol ban. But what this analysis misses is the question of why our politics requires and produces the MPs it does. The reason too few talented people enter parliament is not that they are excluded by the selection process (though some are). It is that the current incarnation of the British state does not need them.

In other words, the change in the MPs being supplied is downstream of the change in demand. The more MPs have legislated their authority out of existence, the more that, consciously or not, politics rewards a different kind of talent than in previous decades. The Britain we live in now was shaped by Blairism and Thatcherism, which both diluted parliamentary sovereignty through privatisation, the establishment of quangos and the introduction of independent commissioners or “tsars”. Too often, MPs become mere narrators of state failure against groups of victims rather than active legislators. To understand why the system isn’t working, this is the place to start.