By Isle of Wight Observer
It matters not if you’re on the left or the right of politics, most of us agree that Britain doesn’t work anymore. I live in hope that someone can fix it, so, on May 10, I spent my Saturday morning at a public meeting at the Wellow Institute, with special guest speaker, Richard Quigley MP.
Being a shrinking violet, I sat at the back of the hall and found myself beside newlywed former MP, Bob Seely. I’m not sure I’d have cut short my honeymoon to hear the concerns of West Wight residents, but clearly he thought it would look good.
I haven’t set eyes on either man since election night, since when, I confess, I’ve found Labour pretty disappointing.
It doesn’t help that woodentop Keir isn’t a natural TV performer. Good communications and message discipline are essential in government.
Regrettably what we hear can seem more important than what’s delivered.
Meaningful change is always glacially slow; improvements hard to see. Before she got the top job, Liz Truss had been a minster for ten years. Former colleagues say that, before becoming PM, in her various departments she achieved very little. Rory Stewart says he can’t recall any policy achievements at all. He claims she was promoted only because she was considered an excellent TV and radio performer. Liz never apologised or explained, nor did she answer questions. She aggressively repeated the party line – without giving ground or varying her tone.
Politicians who are great on TV don’t always make a good fist of running the country. These days government seems more about what’s said than done – while the electorate wants it the other way around. Bob’s presence at a meeting of 40-odd people in a village hall a week after his wedding suggests that he’d like his old job back. The Tories’ problem is that we’ll judge him on his reputation and performance last time around.
Being a prospective MP is a tough gig. You need to have empathy and spend lots of time finding out what people want and promise to give it to them. That’s obviously much harder when we’ve heard it all before from somebody and lots of people think comeback candidates have already had their chance. And remember Bob lost when new Tory, Joe Robertson, won.
A parliamentary hopeful needs to point out what the sitting MP promised but failed to deliver – not a difficult task for any good candidate up against Bob. Labour won well last July, but I had a feeling that we’d be impatient with them, that they were for one term only. Obviously, Sir Kier would love to go on and on, perhaps that’s why he’s now channelling the ghost of Enoch Powell.
Thanks to our first past the post system, the majority rarely get what they vote for. It took less than a third of the vote to deliver Labour’s huge majority. Will Nigel Farage’s band of ‘fruitcakes, loons and closet racists’ – as David Cameron stupidly called them – triumph running local government, or will they crash and burn?
In the Wellow Hall, the assembled crowd mostly asked housing questions. Councillors Peter Spink and Chris Jarman insisted they wanted more affordable housing – but I wasn’t convinced.
Others complained about government-imposed building targets; some folk moaned about ferries. Sat at the back, it must’ve all sounded very familiar to Bob, who made lots of notes anyway. Quite what for is anyone’s guess, unless he was absent mindedly writing a shopping list –
or noting that you don’t try to use coal on BBQs (as he allegedly did at his wedding party).
If you’d attended the same meeting 10 or 20 years ago, I suspect it would have been pretty much the same things. Nothing much changes here. That’s part of the charm and surely worth fighting for.