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A campaign to increase the number of MPs from working-class backgrounds is gaining traction.
The initiative, Blue Collar Parliament, aims to address the lack of representation in Parliament for people from working-class professions.
The campaign’s organiser, David Littlefair, has previously worked in frontline housing and homelessness services. He’s now taking his call for a boost in working-class representation to party conferences.
Littlefair argues that the current political landscape fails to represent a significant portion of the UK workforce.
He has compiled figures suggesting that approximately 75% of the economy is represented by only about eight MPs, with the majority coming from legal, governance, NGO, and lobbying backgrounds.
The campaigner points to a range of factors behind this, including a potential bias in candidate selection processes across political parties, favouring those with professional backgrounds.
But he also points to a need for mentoring programmes to support potential candidates from working-class backgrounds.
And he wants to see an expansion of the Government’s Access to Elected Office fund, which provides support to disabled candidates to run for election, to provide financial support to those without significant means to stand.
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Large sections of society feel unrepresented in Parliament – and the makeup of MPs plays a role in this, Littlefair argues.
The initiative has apparently attracted interest from across the political spectrum, with the organiser engaging with Labour, Conservative, and Reform UK politicians. Littlefair, a Labour member, is clear that the campaign is non-partisan, arguing that increased working-class representation would benefit all parties and improve the overall quality of British democracy.
While there was considerable fanfare about the educational background of the new Labour cabinet this year, there was less attention given to the class background of the cabinet and MPs as a whole.
As Jack Brown from King’s College London wrote recently: “Of the 25 ministers currently listed as attending cabinet, only two were privately educated for most of their schooling, meaning that eight per cent of current cabinet attendees were educated mainly in independent schools. That is close to the national average, which is around six or seven percent.
“It stands in stark contrast to the 23 percent of current parliamentarians overall who attended private schools, and the over 30 per cent seen in every single post-war cabinet to date. It says something about British society that, in being broadly reflective of the rest of the country, this administration is highly unusual.”
But of the 25 Cabinet ministers, 40% went to Oxford or Cambridge, according to the Sutton Trust, compared to less than 1% of Brits.
And for Littlefair, the issue extends beyond mere statistics about state education, arguing that the focus should be on representing people from a variety of professions, including nursing, logistics, and factory work.
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In a message to supporters, he writes: “The number of MPs joining parliament from blue collar careers in industry, care, health, retail and manufacturing has declined dramatically since the 1960s. We want to make parliament a place that people from every walk of life can be elected to.”
At Labour conference next week, Blue Collar Parliament will bring together MPs and activists to “discuss how to build a new generation of working class and blue collar professional MPs within Labour” – and ask: “What can Labour do to make parliament more representative of Britain and the 35% of people that work in blue collar and working class professions?”
In an interview with Byline Times, Littlefair said parties “aren’t really picking anybody with a blue-collar background.”
“I’ve lined up a bunch of MPs for Labour conference this year, and they come from careers in nursing, the NHS, or policing. They represent a vanishing minority of the people who have been picked to be the next MPs for Labour in this Government.”
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It’s called Blue Collar Parliament rather than ‘Working Class Parliament’, partly as there is still huge debate about definitions of class.
“After hundreds of years of academic study, nobody can still really agree what working class means. I didn’t want to have that discussion. British people love to pontificate about class….
“I thought it would be better to characterise the kinds of jobs that people instinctively know are underrepresented in Parliament, like nurses, people who work in logistics and factories – huge sectors of the economy.”
He points to Office for National Statistics data categorising the British economy by sector. “There are huge swathes of the economy – in my estimation, something like 75% [of jobs] – that are covered by about eight MPs.
“The vast majority of MPs come from legal, governance, NGO, and lobbying backgrounds, or PR. In the House of Commons Library, that’s referred to as ‘instrumental careers’”.
And while some are pushing for employers to give time off for people to run for office, for Littlefair that misses the point.
“Most of the candidates who’ve spoken to me say it’s not really about time, it’s about resources and money.
Expanding Access to Office funding for candidates from Blue Collar jobs would be cost effective, he argues.
If 650 constituencies were given up to 10 grants each of £4,000 per Blue Collar candidate selected, it would cost £26m per election – a fraction of the cost of a General Election. (The 2017 snap election cost the public purse £140m). “It wouldn’t be expensive and could dramatically change who’d be able to run,” Littlefair argues.
Nor does he believe it would be about shifting politics to the left. It’s about the principle: “If you are a participant in British democracy, you should be able to become an elected member of parliament, even if you don’t have the means.”
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“It’s about a broader amount of life experience. What tends to happen is professional cadres of people begin their political career in their 20s, through [think tanks]. They get onto the insider political track, and come election time, they get picked for a seat because they’ve got everyone’s phone numbers and contacts. This results in a massive amount of groupthink,” the campaign founder adds.
He puts Westminster politicians’ failure to understand the push for Brexit – and public support for it – partly down to that.
“It really depends on how you conceive of democracy. Do you think the political class needs to manage a set of clubs that the purpose of a nation is, or do you think the people who do all the work in society should also have a political stake in it at the legislative level? I think it would make for a better functioning democracy if we had the latter.”
What most frustrates him, however, is the argument that putting more working-class candidates forward would be somehow ‘punishing succes’.
“When I’ve suggested that instead of having another barrister, we have a frontline nurse or nursing staff member [as candidates], people have said: ‘Well, why should we punish success?’”
“If you’d said that in the Labour Party in 1945, you’d have been punched. The modern sort of professional middle-class type who decides who gets to be an MP sees nurses as unsuccessful people. I think that’s a really toxic mindset for the country.”
Blue Collar Parliament is holding an event at the Labour Party’s conference in Liverpool on Monday September 23, 10:45am – 1pm, at The Quaker Meeting House, 22 School Lane Liverpool L1 3BT. For more details and to sign up see here.
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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.
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