MPs of fifty years ago were more representative of the country they led
Fifty years ago, most MPs sitting in the House of Commons had participated in one form or another in the Second World War. There was a natural bond between them that for much of the time overcame class divisions. The NHS, introduced by the Labour Party, had come of age under the Conservatives and was on its way to becoming an inviolate national treasure. Much the same was true of social housing, or “public” housing as it was known. Council estates dominated the rental market. There was an expectation that one of the duties of the government – any government – was to house the people. Secondary education was evolving. The comprehensive revolution was underway, but most towns and districts still had grammar schools, providing a vital step up for the children of the poor who, by way of examination, had shown themselves bright and hard-working.
There were clashes, of course, on levels of taxation, pension provision, public sector pay and the unevenness of the education system. Labour’s Left, though not the leadership, was opposed to Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and the party as a whole was disinclined to join the Common Market. Generally, though, the Commons was more harmonious, less confrontational. There was widespread support for the police and a general acceptance of the efficacy and rightness of capital punishment. The shared experience of resisting the Nazis and surviving post-war austerity, combined with the fact that every MP on both sets of benches was white and, for the most part, at least nominally Christian, meant that – allowing for the usual malcontents and extremists – there was less visceral resentment of the opposite side.
Needless to say, there were no “gays” in Parliament in 1969. Same-sex anything, even in the era of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, was frowned upon unless it was to do with drinking, football, cricket, the Church or attending Cabinet. Those, like Tom Driberg and Jeremy Thorpe – though not the blessed Norman St John Stevas – who chose to go “cottaging” were indulged by colleagues on the strict understanding that nothing of their off-piste peccadillos would ever be divulged in public. Today, that is all changed, changed utterly. By my count, the closet is now pretty well emptied. Some 47 MPs of all political persuasions are members of the LGBT community, with more joining by the year.
Astonishingly, there were no black or Asian MPs in 1969, and the only non-Christian religion represented was Judaism. There were 19 Jewish MPs, 14 Labour, five Conservative, none of whom, happily, had ever heard of Jeremy Corbyn. This compares with 20 today: 12 Tories (plus the Speaker, John Bercow) and six Labour – the latter not counting two members who left the party in the wake of the anti-semitism scandal.
Diversity in the 1960s largely consisted of class differences. Most Labour members were working-class and had entered politics by way of the trade unions or the cooperative movement, though their leaders, like Richard Crossman, Tony Crossland and Tony Benn, were often products of public schools and Oxbridge. The Tory benches were largely made up of bank managers, City slickers, lawyers, factory owners, army officers, academics and lesser scions of the nobility, including several Celtic peers and a sprinkling of baronets. There was one Scottish nationalist after the famous Hamilton bye-election of 1967 . Dissenters north of the Border or on the other side of Offa’s Dyke were Liberals, led by the affable Old Etonian Jo Grimmond. All honourable members from Northern Ireland, with the entertaining exception of Gerry Fitt, of the short-lived Republican Labour Party, were Unionists, often speaking with plummy English accents.
On the minorities front, the contrast between the class of 1966 and that of 2017 couldn’t be more stark. A total of 53 ethnic minority MPs sit in the current Brexit Parliament – a little over 8 per cent of the total. This is less than would be suggested by the 13 per cent of the general population classified as belonging to ethnic groups, but is clearly a step in the right direction. Of the 53, 13, including Fiona Onasanya (since expelled for perverting the course of justice), could be described as Black British; and the rest, with one exception – a Cypriot – as British Asians, chiefly of Indian or Pakistani origin. Labour take the lead here, with 32 MPs from ethnic minorities, compared with 19 Conservatives and just one Liberal Democrat (Layla Moran, described as a British Arab).
Women were the biggest minority in 1969, but not that you’d have noticed. Just 26 female MPs were returned to Parliament in the general election of 1966, three fewer than in the previous outing and comprising just four per cent of the total Commons membership. Of the 26, 19 were Labour and just seven Conservative. Compare that with today, when there are 208 women MPs, including 119 on the Labour side, making up one-third of the total. The gender breakout sparked by “Blair’s Babes” – part of the class of 1997 – was far and away the most radical reform of Parliament since women gained the vote in 1918. Ironically, given this context, both of Britain’s female prime ministers thus far have been Conservatives, with no woman on the Labour benches yet challenging for the top slot.
Class remains the great divide, and yet not, for the greater part, between the parties, but rather within the parties. There are definitely more working-class and lower-middle-class Tories than there used to be, among whom can be numbered the Home Secretary Sajid Javid, of Pakistani heritage, born in Rochdale, the son of a bus driver. There are also many more entrepreneurial strivers, such as James Cleverly, a former businessman and still a colonel in the Army Reserve, born to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone. A proto-typical Tory MP these days would be less a knight of the shires than a property developer, investment analyst or estate agent.
Most millennial MPs are neither “salt of the Earth” nor “posh”. Overwhelmingly, they are university graduates who have gone on to work in business or the City, or else in the research departments of the major parties or the think-tanks that come up with the latest ideas. But some are still Old School. Of the 650 representatives elected in 2017, 29 per cent (188) went to private schools, against just 7 per cent of the general population, including 45 per cent of Conservatives (down from 48 per cent in 2015) and 15 per cent of the People’s Party. Just over half of all MPs (52 per cent) went to comprehensive schools – often the better ones that have since achieved academy status – while the rest (17 per cent) are the products of the surviving grammar schools. Sink schools are not well represented at Westminster anymore than miners, steelworkers or the aristocracy. But Eton still manages an impressive 19-strong turnout, led by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg , who if they end up as PM and Chancellor would be following in the footsteps of their fellow OE’s, David Cameron and George Osborne.
Beyond schooldays, what matters most is which university you attended. Nearly nine out of ten MPs are graduates, and of the total just under a quarter went to Oxford or Cambridge, most of them Tories. The majority of these read either PPE or Greats, considered the ideal training for a political career. Almost none bothered with either science or technology. Another 30 per cent of the present intake were awarded their degrees by élite Russell Group universities, such as UCL, Imperial College, the LSE, Durham, Exeter, Bristol, Manchester and York. The rest tended to favour Scotland (always a place apart in the academic sphere) or the US, usually Harvard.
It used to be said that the Tories represented landed interests, business, the Bar (not the pub) and inherited privilege, while Labour stood up for the common man (to which was then added the common woman). The Tories were the officers and Labour the squaddies. And there is still some truth in this. But reform over time becomes a revolution, and the truth is that today’s MPs, of all parties, are mostly technocrats and meritocrats, of little or no distinction, who think they have mastered economics but really only understand money.
The House of Commons of 1969, led on the one side by Harold Wilson and on the other by Edward Heath, was already an anachronism. It reflected a Britain that was slowly dying, built around the conceit that the future would be much like the past, only with improved technology and, on the Labour side, justice for all. For all that, it was more colourful and less sterile than the present House, and more capable of getting things done. The Brexit fiasco would have shocked the class of ’66. What Britain was in the mid-twentieth century was understood in a way that has long-since been forgotten.
Today, all the talk is of the rich and the super-rich and workers’ rights, with race and gender the prisms through which all progress is to be viewed. Tribes of every kind, and their consultants, have been released and are in more or less permanent conflict with one another. If peace is to be achieved and the country brought together, it will need a very different House of Commons than the one we have today.
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