She appears on television programmes such as Question Time, This Week, The Andrew Marr Show and Have I Got News for You, and is a presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme Week in Westminster. Not as critical as I originally wanted it to be as I have gotten quite cynical about politics in recent years. However, this book has shown the realities of parliament the good, the bad, and the ugly. At times it inspired me to run as an MP before it equally crushed that small idea with the reality of life as an MP. Hardman then goes on to hand-wring for politicians driven to drink, without giving any consideration to the fact that many of these selfsame MPs have drafted, or helped vote into law, legislation that has driven many vulnerable people to suicide. In one of the latter chapters, Hardman even has the temerity to state that suicides triggered by government policies shouldn’t be indicative of the failure of said policies because “it is irresponsible to suggest that suicide has one clear cause”. A statement as ill-informed as it is heartless.. Elected politicians on the national level are called Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK and they represent a local area known as a constituency. All political party selects one MP candidate for each constituency and local residents vote for the candidate they like to represent them in the lower house of Parliament called the House of Commons. The party with the most MPs in the House of Commons becomes the ruling party. We hear about the main barriers to entry in becoming an MP. Time and money, but mostly the latter. The problem is that politics is more about money than the ballot box. As the author reflects, “But today, would-be politicians are still having to buy their way to a seat. No wonder Parliament doesn’t look very much like the rest of the UK” Elsewhere Hardman insists that, “What is striking about politicians is how many of them have had dysfunctional upbringings.” of the 2015 intake of MPs who spoke about their upbringing a staggering 39 grew up without their fathers. Michael Gove was adopted at 4 months old and 8 MPs were raised by a single parent dad.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians is a vital and compelling read Why We Get the Wrong Politicians is a vital and compelling read

A woman named Ma Anand Sheela stands out as a prime example. She began her adult life as an idealistic art student, searching for spiritual enlightenment in India. A few years later she began to drink at the trough of power, serving as the spokeswoman of the Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who was then living in America. Soon she began hatching plots to assassinate politicians who crossed her, and in 1984 she masterminded the poisoning of 750 people while trying to rig a local election, becoming the worst bioterrorist in American history. But when I met her more recently in Switzerland, she had lost power and was running a care home. There has been no further hint of abuse. With a wealth of research, interviews, and experience as a seasoned political journalist, Hardman’s book is divided into three sections: Why we get the wrong politicians, why we get the wrong policies, and can we get the right politicians? It is a relief to get to that last bit, because after the first two sections, benevolent dictatorship begins to sound quite appealing. We get the wrong politicians because, many of the right people, cannot financially afford to run, and are deterred from running for parliament by aspects of the job and the prejudices of what Hardman refers to as the ‘Westminster bubble.’ Hardman focuses on people in the first section, giving an account of political life that runs from getting in to parliament to leaving. For example, she says the 2 main parties should pay bursaries to low-income candidates, as it would be "much more effective than setting up a new party that doesn't get anyone elected, as the well-funded Women's Equality Party has done". She also says we should raise the prestige of Committee Chairs in parliament, and pay them a higher salary to compete with Ministerial pay, hence reducing the incentive to climb up the Executive Branch and instead create a career path for legislation-oriented MPs outside of government. Neither of these suggestions are especially eye-catching or politically motivating (paying MPs more, anyone?), but there's a hard-headed pragmatism about them that I like. Realistically, the political system we have now is likely to more-or-less be the one we have in 50 years: things tend to stay roughly the same. So we might as well spend our time making the most of the one we've got, because these things only change in crises anyway (although on the other hand, a crisis might be on the horizon). Here's a confession. I've led you on rather in this book, suggesting with its title about the 'wrong politicians' that we do indeed have a bunch of self-serving toffs in the House of Commons. Of course, you will have realised by now that I think of them rather more charitably, and perhaps you are sorely disappointed, because this isn't what you expected." Hardman rightly devotes space to the unsung work that MPs and their staff do in their constituency surgeries, taking examples from across the political spectrum, because this is a very fair-minded book. For people in desperate straits, who have exhausted any other avenue of remedy, an MP is often the last hope of dealing with a housing emergency, a benefits dispute or some other acute personal crisis. Many MPs take this part of the job very seriously and that is a change from the past. Time was when an MP could get away with being highly neglectful of his constituents, paying them attention only every four to five years when he needed their votes. The horrible irony is a lot of constituency work involves sorting out personal crises caused by rubbish legislation

Footnotes

Hardman also does not shy away from the toxic aspects of politics with chapters on ‘Getting caught’ – money and sex feature prominently, including sexual assault by MPs- and a section on illness with emphasis on mental health and substance misuse. Good systems attract good people, and rotten systems attract rotten people. Humans may have some destructive tendencies when it comes to wielding power, but we can counteract them with the right reforms.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians : Isabel Hardman Why We Get the Wrong Politicians : Isabel Hardman

For instance, if Tory a politician wants to become the Party’s MP candidate for Hemel Hempstead, she has to sway the selection panel which consists of the area’s local Conservative Party councilors. However, these panels are sadly small which are barely over 250 people. And while there are indeed some politicians who could go toe-to-toe with Frank Underwood from House of Cards, there are far more who are upright, hardworking and keen to serve their country. True, their age, race, gender and wealth might be unrepresentative of the country at large, but it isn’t inherently their fault. The problem lies far deeper: in the structure and culture of Parliament itself. This book was also so well researched and written by someone who definitely has an authority to speak on this subject: a parliamentary correspondent who has witnessed it all first hand. You will be surprised to find a person that really likes politicians. The majority of us either dislike them with passion or see them with cold indifference. However, we should be more sympathetic as the majority of them are well-meaning people taking an exceptionally hard job. I think she is right. A politician from a pit community or raised by a single parent is, pleasingly, no longer that uncommon. However, those who make it to Westminster are likely to be somewhat distanced, in both their friendship groups and lived experience, from most of their constituents.

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This problem is symptomatic of a commonly held feeling that, increasingly, MPs don’t see serving the state as a job for life. A lot of politicians, from the ex-Prime Minister David Cameron to the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, have found life outside of politics to be more sufficient and worthwhile after stepping down from high-status posts. Politicians are consistently voted the least trusted professional group by the UK public. They've recently become embroiled in scandals relating to everything from expenses to sexual harassment to illicit parties. Every year, they introduce new legislation that doesn't do what it sets out to achieve - often with terrible financial and human costs. But, with some notable exceptions, they are decent, hard-working people, doing a hugely difficult and demanding job. Politics is a collective endeavour for confronting a shared horizon of unknown possibilities. Pivotal to this endeavour is those charged with making choices, the “political class” of this title. The question of this inquiry is whether it really matters who is in this “class”. Not for the first time, either. In fact, an alien observing modern Britain might wonder whether our system of government rewarded those who lied and cheated and engaged in sleaze, so long as they used clever turns of phrase and delivered them with a roguish smirk.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians Summary of Key Ideas and Why We Get the Wrong Politicians Summary of Key Ideas and

Perhaps that power-hungry personality is inherited. “My father put a mark on me, like I was part of the Bokassa brand,” Marie-France told me. “Bokassa — it’s a name that is powerful,” she said with a grin. “I wouldn’t want to change it.” A randomly selected shadow parliament of 650 people wouldn’t have real power but would debate and decide on the same issues as parliament. Often divergences between the real parliament and the shadow one would be caused by the trappings of power: lobbyists, chumocracies, partisanship and electoral calculations. The shadow parliament would highlight when politicians were making decisions for all the wrong reasons.This is not really a book about excoriating out of touch Westminster Bubble elites, posh toffs or any of the other stereotypes we have of MPs, although it does have a fair bit to say about such things. This is a book about how the whole culture of Parliament makes it inefficient, ineffective and basically impossible for a well-meaning MP to make a difference, starting from the astronomical costs of running in a constituency (something I hadn't known about), to the useless rubber stamping bodies that most committees are (something I had some idea of before), to the fact that so many votes are held that MPs often have no idea what they are actually voting on. The only way to make a difference is to become a minister, and the only way to become a minister is to shut up and follow the government's lead. Even when you become a minister, the Yes-man culture of parliament prevents your bill from getting the scrutiny it would need to become an effective piece of legislation. A whole raft of perverse incentives act to inhibit MPs from actually making that difference that most of them entered the Commons with dreams of making. Meanwhile the metrics by which we measure a politician's effectiveness (number of questions in the commons, speaking time in debates) are measuring the least effective ways that MPs can actually influence legislation. Both authors are to be commended for moving beyond diagnosis and into the realm of solution. Their solutions are mostly conventional. That is not to be critical. Representative democracy originated over two millennia ago, in the city state of Athens. Opportunities for “out of the box” solutions are rare with so ancient a concept.