Straight to the point

You may not have heard of Ed McGuinness. The Conservative candidate for Surrey Heath this weekend posted a picture on social media of him holding a set of keys outside a front door. “Surrey Heath residents,” he said, “expect their MP to be a part of their community.” “Well as of today I am now a resident of St Paul’s ward!” It did not take long for someone to point out that the property in question was an Airbnb and so did not necessarily demonstrate the deep commitment to the constituency that McGuinness was anxious to prove.

On one level, this was just a low-rent campaigning story. Were it not for social media, it may not have been much noted outside of Surrey and perhaps not even noticed that much within Surrey. Yet it illustrates a broader point about British elections in recent years: the desperate desire of politicians to prove to their constituency how “local” they are.

Aside from the mockery of Mr McGuiness’s keys, over the past week I’ve seen a candidate attacked for not holding his birthday party within the boundaries of the constituency and another who tried to demonstrate his local roots by noting that it was where he had lost his virginity. Ok, I made the last one up, but the first is genuine and I do know of one Labour MP who talks about how he was conceived in his constituency, so it can only be a matter of time. Perhaps we shouldn’t give them ideas.

It’s been very clear from the selection contests this election that having some form of link to the constituency has been a key factor in determining who gets chosen to be a candidate, especially in many of the more winnable seats. The excellent Tomorrow’s MPs account on X, run by Michael Crick, found that around two-thirds of Conservative candidates are, or have been, local councillors. It’s all getting a bit too League of Gentlemen: local MPs for local people.

Just because you’ve lived in a constituency for a long time or have served as a local councillor doesn’t mean you have the required skills to be a decent parliamentarian. William Hague, for example, has complained that instead of would-be statesmen we will get glorified local councillors. “The House of Commons is being turned into Birmingham City Council on a bigger scale, and we all know what just happened to that.” 

But there is a reason candidates bang on about it so much. Because when you ask voters, being local comes very high up their list of what they want from an MP. It’s a collective action problem: we might well want a parliament bursting with talent and a decent number of statesmen, but that is not what voters want in their local MP. 

It is all very well pointing out that Churchill, for example, did not have exactly deep roots in the constituencies he represented in Oldham, Manchester, Dundee or Epping. Something similar, mutatis mutandis, could be said of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. But people don’t especially want to be represented by a Churchill, Thatcher or Blair. They want to be represented by someone they see as, well, representative.

For example, just before the 2010 election, I ran a survey in which I asked people about the characteristics they wanted from their own MPs. Being local was one of the most popular responses, coming only very narrowly behind having MPs who shared the same political viewpoint. Indeed, more than a third of respondents prioritised having a local candidate over one who represented their views, and another 21% ranked them as of equal importance. 

It’s worth pausing and thinking about that last sentence for a minute. We often think about elections in terms of ideas and policies. And yet fewer than half the respondents to the survey said that sharing these with their MP was more important than having someone who came from the same area. Lest you think that this survey is now old hat, pretty much the same thing comes through in other studies. 

Of course, there are lots of different definitions of being “local”. Is it birthplace? Residence? (And if so, for how long?) And one interesting feature of “localism” is that you can become local — or, as with Mr McGuinness’s keys, at least appear to be. He is certainly not the first candidate to rent a flat in the constituency. It almost certainly means different things to different people. And it probably also varies between types of voter. While we don’t know a lot about how voters conceive of localism, we do know enough to know that overall they do care about it in their MPs.

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For all that we can be sniffy about this, you can see why it might matter to them. The local candidate might be thought to be more invested in the area; an out-of-towner can just “up and off” if it all goes south. They might think that a local MP will work harder or understand them more. Perhaps a local politician will share their own values, in a way the carpetbagger does not. I am dubious that any of this is true, but it is surely not too difficult to understand the perception. 

For all that each election creates arguments about parachuted candidates — just as this one did — the trend is actually in the opposite direction. Between 2010 and 2019, there was an increase in every election in the number of MPs who sat for constituencies in the region in which they were born. That applied to more than half of the House of Commons that just ended. Labour MPs have been more local than Conservatives, but the increase is true across the board. At every election since 2010, those entering the Commons have been more local than those exiting — and those coming in as a result of taking a seat have been more local than those who inherited a seat from the same party. And while it is always unwise, before a single vote has been counted, to make too many predictions about the composition of the next House of Commons, there seems little doubt that, after 4 July, the 650 MPs sitting on the green benches will have deeper local roots than the parliament they replaced.

What’s driving this? In part it is the same pressures that have led MPs to spend more and more of their time working the parish pump much harder than they did 40 years ago. MPs are not only more likely to come from the constituency, they are more likely to spend time working for it. In part, it’s because the electorate is becoming more volatile. If voters behaved with bovine obedience, then it wouldn’t matter too much who the candidate is. To a certain extent this is still true, in that candidate effects are still pretty secondary in British elections compared with the effect of the party, but marginal effects can matter in marginal seats. It’s also obvious that the tendency to play the local card heavily is strongest at by-elections when there’s so much more focus on individual candidates and the area. 

I think it is also in part a response to the rise of identity politics, the idea that who you are is as important — sometimes more — than what you believe in. Some readers will deprecate this trend but it is a difficult one to ignore in contemporary politics. All candidates seeking election or selection will deploy whatever resources they have and if you can claim, however tenuously, to be local it would be difficult to understand why you wouldn’t stress it. When the Conservatives tried to diversify candidate selection under David Cameron, they allowed parties to consider local candidates “in exceptional circumstances” alongside the sex-balanced priority list. There were rather more “exceptional” local men than had been expected. Nearly half of the initial selections turned out to be local — and they were nearly all (86%) men. But that should not have been surprising. Male candidates are more likely to play the local card, simply because in a competition about presence it may be the only card some of them can play. 

And being local isn’t just one card to play among others. With the benefit that almost all of the target audience will relate to it, in a way that most other characteristics will not, it really can be an ace.

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