Ignore constituents at your peril

While canvassing around Oxfordshire over the past few weeks, there have been a few things I’ve heard from a number of people. The most common was the following: “sorry, not interested”. Second to that, the response I received the most was “sorry chap - never going to vote again”, and in all honesty, I can’t blame them. For a lot of people, the referendum in 2016 was their first time engaging in the democratic process, and for a few it was the first time anyone in their family for generations have voted, and they simply feel as if parliament doesn’t care. That vote was in June 2016, and now here we are in the winter of 2019, having had a general election, 2 extensions, 3 failed attempts pushed by May to pass a deal, and now a failure of Johnson to pass his new deal as well. It’s no wonder a lot of the electorate are losing faith in the democratic system.

Just before I started to write this article, the motion for an early general election had been voted down again, with 299 in favour and 70 against. Johnson referred to it as Corbyn “holding the country hostage”, and I struggle to find a better description of what is currently happening. The Labour claim is that it is to prevent a no deal, but there is a deal on the table, something I think Corbyn did not expect. It’s clear that Labour fear a general election, and to find out why one must only look at opinion polls (though they are all to be taken with a pinch of salt). Looking at the BritainElects statistics, falling from 38% at the end of January, to 25.4% on the 25th of October (most recent figures at time of writing), and to be honest this is quite unsurprising. After writing this article a general election has been called for December the 12th, with Corbyn claiming this is because no deal has been taken off the table, when this was already the case previously, but I’m not complaining, as this feels like the way forward.

We have a government whose flagship policy is to finish Brexit, do or die, and we have the Liberal Democrats calling for the revocation of article 50. Meanwhile the Labour party seem to be against any deal that’s in front of them, while we also hear from Emily Thornberry that she would be able to get a better deal, despite the fact that she’s stated very publicly that she would then campaign against it. I don’t need to insult your intelligence by telling you how ridiculous this idea is. Through their lack of ability to compromise, Labour have turned their back on Leave voting Labour voters, and they will not be forgiving in the case of a general election. It’s bizarre to me how the official position of Welsh Labour (and Plaid Cymru for that matter) is remain, when Wales voted leave along with England. This is reflected in the fact that Labour have been falling back in Wales, from 28.15% in the 2014 European election down to 15.29% in the 2019 European Election.

One of the overarching issues with all of this is the nature of our democratic system. We live in a representative democracy, where we elect MPs to enact our wishes of what we’d like to happen to the country. It’s therefore unsurprising that voters are feeling irritated when we have constituencies that voted leave being represented by an MP who is personally pro-remain, and their excuses for doing so are wearing thin. 

While researching for this article, I looked at an estimate of Brexit vote by constituency. (These results do have a margin of error. The study was by Dr Chris Hanretty if you want to look at it.) In these results, we can see that:

2 out of the 3 Conservatives who joined Change UK came from Leave voting constituencies. Nick Boles, who became an independent, having been elected by a strong leave area. Likewise for Phillip Lee, who crossed the floor. 8 of the Conservative MPs who lost the whip came from a constituency that favoured leave, as did Amber Rudd - who resigned as well. Looking through this list of names, we can see some very prominent remain campaigners. Anna Soubry, Sam Gyimah, Phillip Lee, Sir Oliver Letwin and Rory Stewart were all on that list. It’s no wonder that constituents may not feel represented, if their constituency voted leave, and their MP fights not for them, but for their own personal views on the matter.

The same research also estimated that 64% of constituencies with a Labour party MP voted for leave. Though there may be a margin of error in the estimation of constituency votes, this is surely statistically significant.

Recently the prospective Parliamentary candidate for North Devon, Kirsten Johnson, when asked why she was so pro-remain is such a leave voting area, answered that “it’s 98% white”, and that “they don’t travel a lot”. Now, she was shortly removed from that position, and clearly with an attitude like that she would have never been elected, but that kind of attitude of “I know best” seems to be all too prevalent among our politicians.

A poll by Ipsos revealed that just over half (52%) of people surveyed believe that MPs put their own interests first, and 31% believe they put their party's interests first. I for one don’t think we are going to be able to persuade voters to trust their MPs to represent their interests again. I simply don’t think it’s right that some MPs were elected as a conservative in a pro-leave constituency, and now have switched parties and campaign against what their constituents want of them. In Phillip Lee’s constituency, 58.8% of voters voted Conservative, while only 7.5% voted for the Liberal Democrats, yet now they have a Lib Dem MP. Doesn’t seem particularly democratic to me.

Looking at where we are now, it’s clear to me that a lot of this will be solved by a general election. I’m not going to pretend it’s a silver bullet for all of our parliamentary problems, but it will give the people the chance to decide if their current MP really does represent their views, or if they indeed have no place in the commons any more; and in the same stroke we will also be able to break the parliamentary deadlock, and let the people decide through the election either in favour of leave or remain, so we can finally move on with our lives and pursue other policies that need pursuing.

Tom Foster-Brown (Committee member, Pembroke College) is an undergraduate in his second year of reading Engineering.