The Huffington Post meets one of Labour’s great parliamentary survivors and its youngest new hopeful.
The Labour stalwart Margaret Beckett is an institution in her own right, after an impressive four decades in the Commons. From battling through 18 years of opposing Conservative government to cabinet positions under Tony Blair - she has been there through it all.
By contrast Pamela Nash became an MP only last year, making her ‘the baby of the house’ at the tender age of 25. She had worked as John Reid’s researcher, before taking his safe seat in her home constituency of Airdie and Shotts. So how are these Labour figures, at contrasting ends of the experience spectrum, finding life in the present parliamentary climate?
Last year heralded the arrival of an unusually high proportion of fresh-faced novice MPs, the diversity of which Beckett welcomes, as she has seen the atmosphere of the Commons ‘transformed’ for the better over her long career. Despite Beckett and Nash’s obvious enthusiasm for parliament, it is clear that the 2009 expenses scandal has done lasting damage. As part of the ‘Class of 2010’, Nash has the supreme advantage of arriving untainted, ‘it’s definitely an advantage in the constituency because people don’t associate us with the scandal’, but Beckett adds solemnly, ‘expenses did enormous harm; it’s still a very difficult issue to talk about’.
The expenses outrages created lasting bad feeling not only amongst the public, but among the MPs themselves, creating low morale. As a parliamentary researcher at the time, Nash could see that ‘over the last couple of years MPs were worn down. Many just wanted to go, they’d had enough’. One of the ‘Yes To AV’ adverts characterised MPs as duck house-owning, self-indulgent leeches on the taxpayer. Beckett is still infuriated by such an insinuation that current MPs are not working hard enough:
‘On a Sunday afternoon, one colleague rang me and said ‘I’m here in my dining room with a table covered with papers and I just saw somebody from the Yes to AV campaign on the TV saying ‘we need to make MPs work harder’. I nearly threw my Blackberry through the screen.’
Recent online petitioning has proved another strain on MPs, with their precariously balanced resources and overworked staff. In recent weeks there has been an unprecedented amount of correspondence, largely courtesy of 38 Degrees. Beckett plainly states that MPs ‘are not staffed to be able to cope with that kind of campaign’ and is adamant that it should not be allowed to encroach on casework. Nash though seems more at ease with it. ‘You hear a lot of MPs moaning about that, but it really does inspire me when I get loads of emails about something. I think that’s great, even if it is a standard email’.
Both women are strikingly zealous in their beliefs, and in their conviction of how very misguided their Conservative counterparts are. The eighties were a seminal moment in this. For Pamela, it was growing up with a single mother in Ravenscraig, where the community was ‘absolutely ravaged at that time’ by the steelworks closing down.
She remains indignant at the manner in which she believes the Tories demonised single mothers – ‘the rhetoric was so against single mothers of the time. It’s probably the biggest effect that Conservative government had on me. My mother wasn’t political but I would hear her say ‘you’ll prove them wrong’. That resounds in my head”.
For Beckett, the eighties meant a frustrating 18 years in opposition, at the Labour party’s lowest ebb in recent history:
‘The most difficult part was when we’d had the split off of the SDP and the Conservatives were in such an overpoweringly strong position. It was hard, but they were doing things that were, from our point of view, so outrageous – that kept you going. There was always a fight worth having. I shadowed social security for 5 years, during which time the Conservatives savaged the entire welfare system’.
Beckett’s recollections of frontline politics in the eighties echo the indignation that Nash felt growing up in Scotland. To both Beckett and Nash, the difference between the parties seems remarkably clear-cut and class-based. Nash describes the mentality of young Conservative MPs: ‘they’re thinking about themselves, they’re the lucky ones, their parents did extremely well’. She is ‘not that sociable with the Tories’ but when she is, it is with those to the left.
Despite this apparent antipathy, I wondered whether Beckett feels the fight is less energised than in the eighties, whether there is less to play for. She does not agree. ‘What people don’t realise outside politics is that this isn’t a job, it isn’t even a profession. It’s a way of life’. This attitude goes some way to explaining her admirable longevity. However, I point out that many of the electorate complain that since New Labour there is not enough difference between parties these days:
‘On the whole, there is a gulf of experience and understanding across the House. There’s a kind of gut association of values. When I see people who are having problems I think how lucky I am. ‘There but for the grace of God’, I think. Whereas I get the impression sometimes that people among our political opponents, just think ‘these are not people like us.’
Nash is quick to agree. ‘The constituencies that they tend to represent, mostly don’t have the social problems that Labour MPs experience. I had a conversation with one of the Tories at an all-party group recently. I was telling them how many cases I had with DLA [Disability Living Allowance] problems at the moment and how we’ve had another avalanche of letters and calls, because people are frightened. He hadn’t had a single one; that level of deprivation just isn’t there.'
Clearly upset by the experience, Nash even had to deal with a constituent who tried to commit suicide, having spent weeks in contact with her office, worried about being taken off his benefits. ‘He had other problems as well, but the fact that his benefits might be taken away was the final straw – that he was driven to it by worries about policies terrified me’.
As the Division bell rings for the BSkyB debate, Beckett has some parting advice for her young protégé: ‘I always say to any new MP, one of the most important lessons to learn is to say no. You can never satisfy everybody, and you’d just kill yourself if you tried’. As a seasoned parliamentarian since the 1970s, Beckett reflects that it still is a truly gruelling job. Her must-have qualities for survival are ‘luck, stamina, and resilience’.
It seems it has not taken Nash long to discover that herself. She smiles, ‘yes, there’s a lot of Red Bull consumed in my office’.