I attended a workshop today organised by the Parliamentary Outreach Service on engaging with proposed legislation. It was an incredibly useful event, but it did highlight some of the issues we still face when it comes to our political system’s accessibility to “ordinary people”.
There were five speakers at the event, covering a range of topics. James Rhys talked about the basic procedures a Bill follows as it goes through Parliament, as well as the specifics of Public Bill Committees and the Committee Stage. Matt Ringer took us through some of the amazing functionality on the parliament.uk website. (You can find out what stage a Bill is currently in, see all proposed amendments as well as those selected for debate, find out the timetable for the Bill and if/when a Public Bill Committee is calling for evidence to be submitted, see all the written evidence, as well as the research on the subject produced by the House of Commons Library for MPs.)
There were also three more “practical” sessions – people sharing their personal experiences of engaging with Parliament, from both sides. Kevan Jones MP and Lord Shipley covered the Parliamentarian perspective, while Yetunde Adediran shared her experience of submitting evidence to Parliament.
By this point, you should be noticing something: out of five speakers, four were white and male. (The audience, in contrast to the speakers was actually reasonably diverse for the North-east.) Not only were the speakers unrepresentative of British society, but so were their stories. Kevan Jones in particular shared his experience of getting a Private Member’s Bill on the statute books – and there was nothing in that story that made me think that Parliament was anything other than an Old Boys’ Club. Lord Shipley’s stories, while making the House of Lords seem slightly more approachable (paradoxical, I know), also failed to feature any persons who were not white, probably straight, men.
I fully appreciate the spirit of the event, and as I said above, I found the information very useful. However, at times it did feel a little like we had come to be lectured by our betters. While the organisers could have put more effort into making the speakers more representative of society in general (we do have female MPs in the region!), we also need to recognise that this is only a symptom of the general state of our politics. There are still not enough women in Parliament (either house!), or people of colour, or representatives of various other minorities. Political careers (elected or otherwise) are increasingly closed and inaccessible to the working class. Take a look at the people who last year decided the fate of the country in the coalition negotiations: there wasn’t a single woman among them (though interestingly there were three or four gay or bisexual men).
Workshops like today’s are a great start to getting people more engaged in politics at all levels – but we need to do more. Political parties as well as institutions like Parliament need to do more to get minorities and disadvantaged groups engaged and participating in politics at all levels.