The MP for Peterborough wrote to the new Leader of Peterborough City Council, re-stating his issues about the recent change of leadership in the cathedral city
You can read the full exchange and the commentary by John Elworthy of the CambsNews here
Above – Mr Bristow’s letter to Cllr Farooq, 02 Jan 2024 via CambsNews
This resulted in a response from Peterborough Liberal Democrats and their leader, Cllr Hogg below.
The future of Peterborough matters to Cambridge – perhaps more than many Cambridge residents recognise
I wrote about this a year ago here. This was prior to the local politics in Peterborough being blown wide open by a combination of election results and internal political party differences – ones that paralysed the work of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority at which point I said that ministers needed to intervene. (For the record I was on the Queen Edith’s ballot paper in Cambridge City Council’s elections back in May calling for the abolition of the Combined Authority and the creation of a pair of unitary councils to replace them – something that has emerged independently as the https://www.cambsunitaries.org.uk/ campaign.
Those involved in party politics – especially of those parties opposed to the Conservatives – are likely to take the view along the lines of one/some/all of:
- “Here’s a photograph of the Prime Minister – who elected him?”
- “How can you possibly not know how local government works?” and/or
- “You wouldn’t be saying that if it were the other way around!”
For this blogpost, that’s not the bit I’m really interested in. I’m more concerned about the lack of political legitimacy that various decision-makers seem to have in politics and high public office (locally and nationally) and where its roots are.
“Citizen engagement with political power – democracy education”
In part because of how Parliament has evolved since the Great Reform Act 1832, we’ve become familiar with politicians every so often referring to the concept of MPs representing all of their constituents. Hence in the Commons you’ll often hear backbench MPs saying things along the line of:
“My constituents in [name of constituency] have been contacting me over [bad stuff happening]…what is the minister going to do about it?”
You don’t hear them saying:
“My local party members and no one else are delighted with the Government’s proposals on our manifesto commitment of [headline policy].”
Yet in the world of image consultants and big media, more people are familiar with the image of the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, or the general/historical political line of the big political parties, than they are with the name of their MP and the policies that their MPs stand for. This then begs the question: In the mind of the electorate collectively, which is more important?
- National level politics (Candidate for PM / Political Party)
- Calibre of the candidates
The other consideration is the convention that manifesto commitments in the winning party’s manifesto are not blocked by the House of Lords ‘because it is the will of the people’. That convention relies on a very strong assumption: That a critical mass of, if not the majority of the electorate have read the manifestos of the main political parties and have considered them when casting their vote. I put it to everyone that this is *a very strong assumption*
At the same time, the other convention is that the Members of Parliament are not the delegates of a constituency, but the representatives of a constituency. There is a subtle but very clear difference between the two words:
Delegates
In the context of large organisations such as trade unions, a delegate is someone selected by a local group/branch to go to a regional/national level meeting and do as instructed by their branch. Hence local branches will have ‘mandating meetings’ to ensure the delegate reflects the opinions of the collective branch having thrashed out their differences beforehand. You see this for Labour Party annual conferences too.
Representatives
A representative in principle has much more freedom because they are there to represent the interests of their constituents rather than carry out the instructions of a local branch. Therefore the big duty that MPs owe their constituents is their sound judgement on what are inevitably complex and contentious issues. Former Cambridge MP Dr Julian Huppert explained this really well at a meeting nearly a decade ago of Cambridge Skeptics in The Maypole Pub. It’s impossible to know everything about all subjects, so all an MP can do is to form a view based on their political values – which in the case of Dr Huppert were a combination of liberal and scientific reasoning. Other contexts/dispositions could be:
- ‘small state, personal responsibility’, or
- ‘deity, monarchy, nation state’, or
- ‘internationalism, pacifism, environmentalism
- ‘anti-poverty, cradle-to-grave free-at-the-point-of-use public services, equality’
Hence also why you hear politicians talking a lot on telly about values – and you’ll hear more of this in the run up to the general election too.
‘No one voted for you as a [non-Conservative politician]’
This stems from the mass resignation of Conservative councillors from the Peterborough party on the city council, which formed a separate grouping called Peterborough First. The implication being that all of those councillors that switch party allegiance should resign and trigger by-elections. Are councillors the delegates of political parties that endorsed them, or the representatives of the constituents that elected them? Or something in between? Take your pick.
As the system stands, what Cllr Hogg, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats Group on Peterborough City Council stated, is factually correct.
Councillors switch allegiances on a much more frequent basis than perhaps we appreciate – but there are relatively few loud calls for by-elections to be triggered as anything more than a scripted response. When a Member of Parliament crosses the floor, it can often be a very dramatic thing – as dramatised by the late Tom Wilkinson in Crossing the Floor (1996)
The most recent local example we have in Cambridge is former Conservative MP Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire 2015-19) crossing the floor as one of the ‘Change UK’ group of MPs, before switching to the Liberal Democrats when it became clear that CUK was imploding. And as she said in one TV interview at the time she left the party, there was a very high risk that the CUK project may not work. It’s also ever so easy to forget the local and national context of the time – this Newsnight interview a few days after the EU Referendum. Note that when Ms Allen won the South Cambridgeshire seat in 2015, she had a majority of over 20,000. The majority of the current incumbent MP Mr Browne is just over 10% of that figure. Combined with population growth and massively-changed and oriented boundaries, the seat is now a marginal one – a top Liberal Democrat target for the general election.
“Should MPs and councillors that change party political allegiance automatically trigger a by-election?”
I can see the merit in it, and don’t have a particularly strong opinion either way other than it would need to be considered as part of a wider overhaul of the system. For example if we had some form of proportional representation and a candidate was elected specifically on a party list, and it was *the party* that the electorate was being asked to indicate a preference for, then automatically triggering a by-election would make sense. (Alternatively having the quitting MP/representative having to leave and make way for the next person on that party’s list might be a cheaper way).
Before we get to the point of any constitutional convention, any future government needs to begin a massive democracy education programme so that people can take a meaningful part. The challenge of disinformation makes this task all the more important – and urgent.
Food for thought?
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