On What Planet Does Our Equalities Chief Reside?

Civitas, 2 March 2010

‘For someone from my background, parliament is like a foreign institution and that needs to be changed…. We need to stop discriminating in favour of… white middle-class lawyers… Parliament is 20 per cent Oxbridge PPE graduates who come out of the City and law… [We] should require decision-makers to explain and publish information. We can crack this by talking about it and being transparent about the numbers…’

Thus reportedly said equalities tsar Trevor Phillips recently about what he claims to be the unduly narrow and unrepresentative character of the House of Commons in terms of race and class.

The Quango that Phillips heads costs the tax-payer a lot of money, which includes his annual pro-rata salary of £157,000.

One would, therefore, expect his public pronouncements about racial and class discrimination to bear some remote resemblance to reality.  But if we do as he says and look at the statistics, we find reality bears little resemblance to what he claims to be the case. This should be genuinely worrying for those concerned about these issues,  given what a prominent and powerful position he occupies.

Consider, first, the ethnic composition of Parliament. It’s true that only just over 2 per cent of MPs returned to Parliament in 2005 were non-white, as against non-whites forming just under 8 per cent of the overall UK population according to the 2001 census. But we need to take age composition into account.

For a variety of very good reasons inherent in the nature of representative government, MPs tend to be relatively older than the general population. (One simple reason why is that good MPs tend to like their job, be popular with their constituents, so keep being returned).

Because of their comparatively recent settlement and comparatively much higher rate of fertility, the non-white population of the UK is much younger on average than is its white population.

In the 2005 Parliament, the average age of the MPs was 51 years, whereas only 15 per cent of the UK’s non-white population was aged over 50. That means that, as a proportion of the overall UK population, non-whites aged 50 plus formed only 1 per cent of the population.

The ‘under-representation’ of non-whites in the UK Parliament, therefore, is not at all unsurprising, nor out of line with the profile of white representation in terms of age. Nor is it even any less than what it is reasonable to expect it to be, unless, that is, you think that the affairs of state of this country should be debated and decided exclusively by teenagers. That is not a thought one is inclined would be likely to spring to the mind of 56 year old Mr Phillips who many think is likely to want to stand against Boris Johnson in the next election for mayor of London.

Next consider the composition of Parliament in terms of social background and previous occupation. Again, it is, indeed, true that the 2005 Parliament contained a disproportionately large number of MPs from a legal background. They formed nearly 12 per cent of the House. But is that really so surprising or unacceptable?

After all, what do lawyers do but debate? In what do they supposedly have expertise but the law? And what, after all, is the House of Commons but a debating chamber for deciding what laws should be enacted?

In any case, lawyers do not form even the largest single group within the House of Commons in terms of the professional background of MPs. That dubious distinction goes to teachers who comprised no fewer than nearly 13 per cent of MPs in the 2005 Parliament. Those with a background in business formed an even higher proportion of MPs than that: no fewer than almost 20 per cent.

The long and the short of it is that our dear Trevor does not appear to know what he is talking about, when he pontificates about how much of a lawyers’ club is Parliament.

That comes out still further when he remarks:

‘We don’t want a veneer of diversity. We don’t just want black people who are exactly like what’s there already in every respect other than skin colour. We want real diversity. We want to open doors.’

Do we? Is that supposed to be what representative government is truly supposed to be about?

If what Trevor Phillips was saying were really true, then we should be determining the make up of the House of Commons in the same way as we do juries, effectively by lot. But is that really the best way in which affairs of state are to be decided?

Our Trevor complains about how so disproportionately many MPs have gradated with a PPE from Oxford. But that is not altogether necessarily such a bad thing. Back in the 1940s and 1950s at least, if not now, they would have been made to study politics and the merits of different forms of government. There they would have been likely to read the likes of the philosopher E.F.Carritt who remarked in a section of his 1947 book Ethical and Political Thinking entitled ‘The Ideal State’:

‘To many of the ancients it appeared a truism that the best form of government is government by the best man rather than by the majority… The ancient condemnations of democracy were  partly due to the fact that the word then had a different meaning; it meant not government by majority-elected representatives but a universal chance of office, so far as possible by rotation, or, if the jobs would not go round, by lot, a device that worked as badly as might be expected. Election of representatives is a kind of retrievable trial and error device for securing what the ancients meant by aristocracy [rule of the best]…’

The essence here is selection of the best by trial and error. Electorates can correct their past mistakes at the next election, after they have discovered them, something they were credited by Carritt with wisdom enough to be able to discern. As he put it:

‘In one point the many are always wiser than the few; they know what shoe pinches most feet, and will at least try at least to choose good cobblers. We do not let cooks choose our dinners, since the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’

Well, with an up-coming election in a matter of months if not weeks, we shall likely have an opportunity to see Carritt’s surmise being carried out in action.

I am not suggesting that any one party has a monopoly of wisdom. But elections do at least give electorates an opportunity to exact retribution for misgovernment, even when the alternative with which they have been presented offers little better than a fresh unsullied pair of hands at the tiller.