Career Politicians, They Need To Go !

I was reading an article recently with the headline:

“A lack of commercial experience among politicians is holding back British business, say FTSE 100 leaders.”

It appears that the latest "Boardroom Pulse" survey, conducted by Korn/Ferry Whitehead Mann, shows that 89% of chairmen agreed that a lack of commercial experience among our politicians is inhibiting British business. One FTSE 100 company chairman stated “Our standard of political assistance to businesses is truly appalling and the major parties should ‘sub-contract’ this element to tried and tested business professionals (retired if necessary)”. Another put it more bluntly: “This is a wider concern than just about British business. The current crop of politicians has very limited experience of the world outside the corridors of power.”

They’re absolutely right !! We have a breed of politician today that is worse than all the others and that’s the career politician. A particularly untrustworthy, ruthless and self obsessed individual, they have never had a job outside of politics and treat conviction like it’s a contagious disease. The poll was right; they are the worst type of people to run our country.

‘Real World’ Experience

There is a trend these days towards politics being seen as a career move rather than the more traditional call to public service. What this leads to is a lack of ‘real world’ experience amongst our leaders, and when I say leaders I mean this goes right to the top.

One in seven MPs has never had a proper job. Many more have worked only briefly as lobbyists, speech writers or PR advisers. Lots of good people do go into politics with a desire to benefit society. But the recent trend for career politicians has changed the makeup of the House of Commons and ultimately diminishes the standing of Parliament.

Mr Cameron went straight from university into a job at the Conservative Research Department when he was 21, and has held only one job outside politics, with Carlton Television. Ed Miliband joined the Labour think-tank, IPPR, when he was 24, and went from there to Tony Blair's private office before being selected for Parliament; he’s never worked anywhere but in politics. I can’t be the only one who feels a party that purports to represent the working class should perhaps be led by people that have actually worked in real jobs?

Our modern career politicians now leave Oxford or Cambridge; serve their apprenticeship at a think tank or an MP’s office and then graduate into Parliament at a relatively young age. Gone are the days of Mrs Thatcher, who worked as a chemist and a tax lawyer, John Prescott working in the merchant navy or John Major, who not only worked in business and banking but worked on the buses.

There are the odd exceptions around today, Vince Cable was chief economist at Shell, Theresa May worked for the Bank of England, Chris Grayling was a lawyer, Michael Gove was a journalist, Philip Hammond was involved in manufacturing and consultancy and Ian Duncan-Smith served in the armed forces. 

George Osborne may have gained some experience with his family’s wallpaper business but does that qualify him to be Chancellor of the Exchequer? We need him to lead us out of the economic crisis but his policies don't create the growth we desperately need, he’s already lost us our AAA rating. Therefore it’s not just a lack of experience and competence that’s the problem. It’s fundamentally a lack of judgment born through not having lived in the real world. 

Liars

A particular trait of the career politician is the ease with which they lie to us. We’re almost resigned to the fact that they lie about their policies these days. However career politicians who change their minds with every new focus group are the worst culprits. It’s strange how believing in nothing and an insatiable lust for power can do that to people isn’t it? 

Sometimes they are just unashamedly blatant about it. Take the Lib Dem’s election broadcast that had Nick Clegg promising an end to broken promises, only to set about breaking as many of his policies as possible, as quickly as he possibly could. Add that to the expenses claimed for moats, duck ponds and other such ‘necessities’, and they wonder why, us the people don’t trust them.

Incompetent

Why do these career politicians who’ve never even worked let alone run a company, think they’re competent at running our country? They’re not! It shouldn’t come as a surprise to them that basing their policies around what their chums in Notting Hill think isn’t a reliable way to run a country. That’s how you end up with enormous debt and a school system that’s worse than Egypt is at crowd control. It’s the combination of a complete lack of experience of the real world outside Westminster and their general disregard for the concerns of ordinary people that makes career politicians so bad at their jobs. I mean how else do you explain how otherwise bright Oxbridge-educated individuals keep messing up so badly?

No Party Distinctions

It used to be that the Tories stood for one thing and Labour usually the opposite, but you knew who they were and what they believed in. You respected their beliefs because you knew they actually believed it.  Today you can’t tell the difference between any of them. I’m not just talking about the fact that they all went to the same schools. But they all sound the same and act the same. They’re more interested in their image than in ideas; more interested in the polls than what is actually best for the country. This could be written off as the inevitable result of a lifetime spent crawling up the slippery slope of politics, but there’s more to it than that. They’ve all climbed the same slope, and come out the same tired political product, all as a result of not working in the real world before moving into politics.

What this ‘sameness’ has created is a political bubble outside of reality. Whatever party they’re in, the politicians in this bubble mix in the same social circles and get invited to the same events. Inevitably, this has the effect that they start to care more about what these social circles think about them than what the voters think. It’s all about what policies will impress the host of the next dinner party. This means that not only do they sound and look alike, but they start to think alike too. And they don’t think anything like the rest of us do.

Pleb-Gate

The whole Andrew Mitchell scandal and Cameron’s protection of him went along way to showing the true colours of the career politician. That is the simple fact that they think they’re better than the rest of us and that they simply don’t like us, us the little people, us the plebs. Yes, they need us to vote for them but they don’t like us. Again it’s cross-party. It’s not just Cameron’s thinly veiled disgust for all those ‘unimportant people’ demanding EU referendums. The same disdain for the ordinary man on the street is just as prevalent in the Labour leadership, which contains its own fair share of small-minded millionaires; you must have heard Harriet Harman preaching to us how she knows best.  Us ordinary people have an annoying habit of holding different, often not politically correct opinions to them and that, they just don’t like. 

What We Need

We need a sanity check. That’s what we need. We should legislate that before entering parliament a prospective MP has worked outside of politics for a minimum of ten year. This will allow young new blood to enter but they would bring with them that true ‘real world’ experience and an element of common sense we’re sorely lacking in today’s parliament.  

We need people from a range of backgrounds and experiences representing us in parliament, we need them from business, the armed forces, scientists, teachers, the NHS, shop workers, these are people who have that real world experience and who know what living in the UK today is like and know the common sense laws we so dearly need. And it’s not just the rich and/or educated we want. We need more MPs in Parliament from a wider pool of backgrounds; people who know what it is to worry about the rent collector's knock, or the fear of being laid-off, so that the decisions taken reflect the realities people face. 

It’s deeply unhealthy for our political class today to be drawn from such a narrowing social base and range of experience. Career politicians can’t empathise with the lives of the electorate because they don’t know about ordinary working life. To me, their engagement feels false and undermines any trust we might have had in them. They need to go !