The book Small Town Politics, about Glossop in the 1950s has provided food for thought, not just for reasons of personal nostalgia but as background to current concerns about the health of our national political system.
One point came as a bit of a surprise, though I suppose it should not have done:
Except in London & the biggest provincial cities, the majority of managers, scientists, lawyers, clergymen, surgeons & senior public officials in a town are likely to be immigrants rather than natives. In Glossop this is certainly the case.
(It should be stressed that immigrant here means mostly from elsewhere in Britain or Ireland).
In fact 60% of professionals & managers were immigrants to Glossop, compared with 35% of the adult population as a whole – and for those in the highest positions the proportion was more like 4 out of 5.
How had this come about?
At the beginning of the C20th the social, political & economic structures of the town pretty much coincided.
The manufacturing industries (overwhelmingly cotton) provided the towns wealthy families who dominated the leadership of civic affairs.
The only way to rise from the ranks of the working class was by making money in business. Those who succeeded generally stayed in the town, & full participation in civic life was a way of further enhancing their status.
But:
In recent years this avenue of advancement has been largely replaced by the examination system.
The way to grammar school & university is now open to all children who can pass the required examinations & the importance of this is not lessened by the fact that, because of class differences in intelligence & home environment, the proportion of middle class children who pass is higher than the proportion of working class children who do so … formal education has become the requisite for advancement in more & more fields
To an increasing extent, it is the education system itself which selects the people who will fill positions of responsibility in industry & commerce
So the towns managerial & professional classes were not rooted in the community as they had been. They might belong to the golf club, but not the council
At the same time, one unlooked-for consequence of the new opportunity for social mobility offered by a grammar school education was that the towns own brightest & best children moved away. The change to industries run by large companies with employed managers (rather than capitalist owners) & the burgeoning public sector all relied (outside London) on geographic mobility for promotion through the hierarchy
One startling finding of the Birch study was that only ⅓ of the boys who left the grammar school in the early 1950s found employment in the town (only ⅓ of the girls moved away). By contrast, about ¾ of the secondary modern school boys found local employment
An even more surprising finding was that, of those who went into further education, less than 10% returned to the town – and all of them were school teachers. The book does not say, but it would be no surprise to find that most, or even all, of them were female
This loosening of local ties could have had an important effect on the chances of the next generation of children. At the beginning of the process the whole community would have known, & had an interest in, those children identified as bright. Although parental support would have been important then, as now, the parents themselves would have received a much wider range of encouragement. Not just the school teachers but the towns doctors, clergy & other worthies - & the local paper - would have invested something in their prospects, if for no other reason than to bask in a little of the respect they would earn for the town & its institutions. What we now call mentors. But this would have fallen away with the reduction in the internal connectedness of the town
In the last half century geographic mobility has increased still more, & not just for reasons of social mobility or advancement. The relative ease of daily travel, with the coming of the car & the reduction in cost relative to income, have broken the close link between the place where you live & the place where you work, helped, hindered or enforced by the way the housing market operates. The increased participation by mothers in the labour market, plus the fact that even children may commute quite long distances to school, means that the daytime population of an area has little in common with the one that is there in the evenings, weekends or holidays.
And so social circles are no longer limited by geography or bounded by locality. We are, in a sense, all Man U supporters – famous for having no other personal connection to the city that gives the team its name.
One plot beloved of authors of classic crime novels made use of the fact that nobody ever remarked on the presence of the postman at every scene of crime – his familiar presence was simply unremarkable. At the same time everybody would notice the stranger on the street, watch, make sure that his purpose was an honest one. Now the home town is full of a constantly changing cast of strangers, & we may not know even our neighbours by sight. Even the childrens friends are not the neighbours, & the postman is a stranger
The idea that politicians & their parties represent ‘interests’ is viewed with suspicion these days, we are no longer (even if we ever were) defined by our interest in land, capital or labour.
We find our friends & social groups through other interests, be they work, cultural, sporting or ‘other’. We talk of metaphorical communities. We may even define ourselves that way
So really it should not be a surprise that we have now developed a political class or community, whose members have more in common with one another than with the rest of us
Our system of political representation however remains firmly based on the idea that our community of interest resides in the area where we live. We generally do not have a vote in the area where we work, or for the body which governs the provision of the public services which we use, wherever that may be.
Because our closest personal or family links may be with people who vote in other areas, we naturally take note of what is provided there & demand the same, complaining about the postcode effect
Curiously, representation in the House of Lords – whose historical justification lay in locality par excellence (their Lordships owned the land) is increasingly being based on special interest, expertise or experience (including experience as a member of the politician community). And although Members of the House of Commons, constitutionally speaking, represent nothing but a locality, there are moves now to drop the habit of referring formally to each other as The Member for …
Is there any way we could take away the geographical basis of parliamentary constituencies, move towards
The Member for the Royal Statistical Society
The Member for the Football League
The Member for the Star Trek Fan Club
Those specific suggestions were just plucked from the air, partly in jest, & it is unlikely that any such system could be introduced for elections to the House of Commons any time soon
But we are still stuck on whether, or how, to elect members of the House of Lords. Many dread the idea of straightforward extension to the kind of party battles we see for the Other Place, & there would certainly be problems persuading candidates who were not seasoned veterans of that electoral process to put themselves forward
Unless we follow the existing geographic divisions, & have one Lord, one Commoner for each (a mind boggling idea) there will have to be yet another layer to add to town/parish, local authority, constituency, county & European region (with even more in Wales & Scotland), & maybe more voting systems which do not rely on single votes & simple majorities
So it would be worth considering whether to think in terms of other kinds of constituencies of interest – tapping in to organisations which already exist. There would certainly be problems of definition (& duration), of how to determine who is entitled to vote in each constituency, how to guard against multiple voting (maybe we could have fractional, rather than proportional, votes!)
Thinking about the use of modern IT based methods for registration rather than just voting could present a really useful way to go (it might even provide a more obviously useful justification for ID)
There would be questions to address on how these fitted in with political parties, whose skills we do need. The constituent organisations need not necessarily be linked uniquely to one party , though they could say which policies they would support (much as even a candidate standing “in the Liberal interest” could promise to support Lord Derby on a particular issue in the 1860s)
Parties would have to engage with a wider range of interests – this could have a galvanising effect. It could even loosen the grip of the mass media on the coverage of elections, as each constituency would look for supplementary coverage of its special interests
"Let's have quality of votes not quantity of votes. If you don't know - don't vote"
Frank Skinner
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