In particular, the puerility of Gwynne’s imaginary letter to a constituent raised a chuckle: “Dear resident, fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.” And I also enjoyed the Alan Partridge-like specificity of his death wish towards Nick the irritating cyclist: “I had positive visions of him getting mown down by an Elsa Waste HGV while he’s cycling to the Fallowfield Loop. We couldn’t be that lucky!” Most of the other stuff wasn’t up to much, though there was a passable riff on Black History Month involving Justin Trudeau.

As others in the press queue up to pass pained judgment on all the racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, I find myself at a loss. It seems a kind of amnesia has collectively infected nearly everybody, and I am one of the few remaining people with immunity. For I still remember the existence of a human activity called “joking”, and a particularly mordant variety of it called dark comedy. As I recall, it used to be quite popular in the olden days, but has since gone the way of VHS and spangles. Quite possibly, everybody now thinks the name is racist.

Even weirder, the same affliction also seems to have obliterated a meaningful difference between “public” and “private”. Reading the press coverage with half an eye, you’d be forgiven for thinking Gwynne had hired Stockport Town Hall to try out a bold new stand-up routine. “Public” has now become synonymous with “potentially leakable” — which in practice means anything written down at all. You can question participants’ wisdom in committing their gags to a group chat — and, even more so, placing trust in whichever snake in their midst eventually grassed them up —but clearly they never intended the bantz to go mainstream.

An essential element of black or dark humor is the breaking of taboos. There are flagrant transgressions of morality codes; incongruent switches between earnest and bawdy registers; knowing double meanings, referring to things that can’t otherwise easily be said. Jonathan Swift did a lot of the latter — see a poem of his called “Oyster” (“No Colchester oyster/ Is sweeter and moister/ Your stomach they settle/ And rouse up your mettle.”) In the 20th century, this style of humor became especially literary: think of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert calling the teenage Lolita, perfectly accurately, his “aging mistress”; or Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal inadvertently eating his lover Prudence in a cannibal feast in the appropriately named Black Mischief.

But dark comedy was in the street, playground, and pub first. In the 17th century, there were hundreds of iterations of a song called “The Black Joke”, where “joke” also stood for what one contemporary explainer called “the monosyllable” or “a woman’s commodity”. Under communism, Poles would tell gags about starvation and Jews would jokingly remember Auschwitz with fondness. Eighties America had Challenger disaster jokes, while Eastern Europeans found comedy in the aftermath of Chernobyl.

In the Nineties, the UK had the Diana version (sample: “Why is Di like a mobile phone? They both die in tunnels.”) These lines were barely about Diana the woman at all — or, indeed, about poor mobile phone reception — and much more to do with the public mood at the time. They were the privately anarchic counterpoint to the oppressively monolithic tide of grief washing over the nation, the equivalent to getting a fit of the giggles at a funeral. The more unseemly it was, the funnier it became.

Since social media is the new street corner, it’s only fitting that the fun would have migrated there. Giving a group chat a silly title is the new version of naming your pub quiz team “Gossip Girls” or “Breaking Bald”. And since moral codes are everywhere these days, the world should — in theory, anyway — be our oyster, as it were. Surrounded as we so often are by the earnest, the pinch-lipped, the fanatical and the hypocritical, verbal transgressions beckon temptingly from every angle. Yet most feel constrained from taking them up.

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How Weebs lost their way

By Poppy Sowerby

Part of the problem is that our age is simultaneously blighted with tedious people who want to make the whole practice of joking a taboo as well. Academics — not a demographic well-known for their airy badinage — have been doing their best on this front for ages. A joke, we are told with a stern face, creates an ingroup and an outgroup. Now, you might have thought this was superfluous information, since quite obviously it does. The outgroup is the person looking puzzled and saying “I don’t get it”, while the ingroup laughs uproariously at your lines. On the other hand, if the joke is poor, the outgroup is the odd person smirking, and the ingroup are the silent and bemused ones. That is part of the glorious jeopardy of joke-telling — will you bring these people into your world for a shared moment of laughter, or place yourself on the other side of theirs?

But it’s commonly supposed to be much worse than this. Many jokes don’t so much create outgroups as bully existing ones; they “dehumanize” and are part of “delegitimization strategies“. They trade in racist, sexist and homophobic stereotypes; they mask aggression and contempt; they “punch down”. In vain might you point to distinguished satirical forebears. For now Swift is a misogynist, Waugh is a racist, and Nabokov is either a pedophile apologist or a kink-shamer, depending on who you are talking to.

In fact, two different things are going on here. Forty years ago, as I remember things anyway, there was no particular taboo about making jokes based on racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes. In my Scottish school playground, your currency as a funnyman was cemented by the number of terrible anti-Irish or anti-English jokes you could tell. Saturday-night TV lived for jokes about the ditziness of blondes, the bossiness of mothers-in-law, and the campness of gay men. Equally, though, as no taboos were being broken, these jokes didn’t count as especially “black”. Some of them were blue, but that’s different.

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The sisterhood is a feminist lie

By Kathleen Stock

Yet now in the overreaching present, whole swathes of discourse have become effectively off-limits. These include not just unambiguously bigoted jokes, but any joke at all that vaguely references an ethnic minority or a woman or a gay person. If you want to be funny, you are best sticking to anodyne puns or Christmas cracker fodder, and even then the whole process can feel dangerously freighted with risk. To some, it is a time for repressing any intrusive comic thought at all for fear of what comes next. But for other more anarchic souls, it’s exactly the right time to start a WhatsApp group called “Trigger Me Timbers”.

That’s because making jokes the target of modern morality codes has enabled a whole new variety of black humor, where it didn’t previously exist. Now you can deliberately transgress those codes for shock value and the amusement of your mates. The more ponderously sanctimonious, humorless, and offense-seeking your conspecifics become, the greater the urge to puncture the mood by making a joke about some sacred totem of theirs: pensioners, say, or gay men, or Diane Abbott. And that was what Gwynne and co. were clearly doing in their group chat, at least partly. They were in the Labour Party, for God’s sake.

When the context is Stalinist Russia, black jokes against the regime, muttered on street corners to trusted confidantes, are viewed as a noble assertion of the indomitability of the human spirit. When you are in a Labour group chat slagging off Angela Rayner, it seems they most definitely are not. Gwynne’s edgelord schtick may not be to your personal taste, and you may be enjoying his demise for political reasons. Still, I suggest you don’t get too relaxed with the heavy-handed presence of the public censor. For all you know, it could be Breaking Bald next.

David’s death is indescribably tragic. As a new MP I didn’t have the chance to get to know him well. But all the tributes from those who did describe a wonderful man and a brilliant parliamentarian. Gentle, kind, faithful, generous, committed to his constituents and constituency. His loss will be felt so keenly by his family and friends, as well as his staff, constituents and colleagues.

We are deeply saddened but also deeply shocked that such a brutal murder could take place in a routine constituency surgery, at the heart of the community that David served so well. Despite what is often written about Members of Parliament being in a Westminster Bubble, MPs dedicate an enormous amount of time on the ground in their constituencies, both on official business such as conducting surgeries and visiting schools, but also in an informal capacity, popping into the local pub, shopping at the local supermarket, chatting to residents in the park. Most MPs — and their partners and children — are very much a part of the communities we represent. It is horrible to be reminded that we are in danger in the place we call home.

Much is still unknown about the circumstances surrounding David’s death and the motives of his murderer. But, while physical attacks on politicians are mercifully rare, it is also rare that we feel truly safe. Whilst the vast majority of constituents are polite and friendly when we meet them face to face, the toxic atmosphere generated by social media – where comments about us often contain threats, personal information and abuse – ensures that MPs are constantly aware that there are many who wish us harm. Like all MPs, I could fill many pages with the online abuse that I’ve had to report or delete — on one occasion a Twitter user incited others to share my home address. I had to temporarily move my family out of our home while the police got involved.

This is not just a problem faced by MPs; a brief glance at the Twitter account of any journalist or academic will reveal the appalling state of the health of our public discourse. Vile language, threats, personal abuse, sexualised comments, demonisation and hate that would no doubt result in perpetrators’ arrest if the attacks were made in the “physical world”.

We’re in danger of losing our humanity, forgetting that behind every public profile lies a human being, who laughs, cries, loves and tries to make the best of life like the rest of us. In a free society with healthy democratic debate, we should be brutal in critiquing ideas and beliefs but protective of the people who espouse them. I fear we have turned this principle on its head, with more and more sensitivity about challenging ideas and a readiness to demonise or hate the people who take a different view.

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How to humanise Westminster

By Various contributors

I am new to politics, and before I entered Parliament I’m afraid I had probably accepted a number of the common stereotypes about MPs. But I can honestly say have never ever met a group of people who work harder and who take their responsibilities more seriously than Members of Parliament, of all parties. It is the sad truth that abuse on social media already discourages many good people — especially women — from standing for election, and the awful events of yesterday will only make matters worse.

Our security services work tirelessly to protect those in public office, and I had been contacted by four separate local police officers by the early evening yesterday, to reassure me and my staff. No doubt improvements can be made to keep us safer, though inevitably this will result in less free and open access to our constituents.

We will never eliminate all risk, and of course moments like this make all of us think twice about the potential dangers of this particular job. Yet MPs like me will continue to do what it takes to represent our constituents, not because we deny or accept the threats to our safety, but because we are resolved to serve. It might sound old fashioned, but I still believe that politics is a vocation, and many of my colleagues describe a sense of a calling to the role.

David Amess epitomised this resolve to serve and he will be remembered as someone who demonstrated all that’s good about politics. Rest in Peace.

I was bored a decade ago when Julia Goldsworthy got told off for wearing formal shorts in Parliament. I was bored when Tom Brake upset Peter Bone by asking a question without wearing a tie. I was bored when Jeremy Corbyn was accused of disrespect for wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph. I was bored when Theresa May was pilloried for wearing expensive trousers. And this week I am so much more bored by it all that I fear my head may explode simply because Tracy Brabin decided to reveal the scandalous truth that she has a shoulder underneath her clothes.

These are the people who run our country. They make decisions that matter. Their clothes do not matter. H&M or Hermès. Trousers or skirt. Shoulders bare or swathed in cashmere: clothes signify nothing about the content of your character. I would say I wouldn’t care if they turned up in a clown suit, except that I would care because the godforsaken newspapers would run pages and pages about who had the longest shoe or the best-applied lipstick, and I’d have to hide under a bush for a week just to escape it all.

And I’m sorry, I can’t even summon the energy to be feminist-ly outraged by the attempt to police Tracy Brabin’s fashion choices because, well, you know: the internet melted when Obama wore a beige suit, and you could probably cover Norfolk with newspaper photos of Dominic Cummings looking shabby, as if that affected the workings of his brain.

There’s only one solution to make all this stop. Uniforms.

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Why you can't dress up a state school

By Polly Mackenzie

What I have in mind are jumpsuits, issued in party colours, made of the same thick polyester they make children’s school trousers out of, so they don’t need ironing or carry stains. They should be just ill-fitting enough to ensure no-one can look attractive in them, because there are several Parliamentarians who could probably rock the jumpsuit look. And we don’t want anyone looking attractive, lest it distract the public from hating their MPs, as they are supposed to do.

On the front would be a little name badge, like the ones janitors wear in American high school movies. This would be a huge benefit to news broadcasters and picture editors at newspapers: no more pesky mix ups between black women MPs who dare to have similar skin colour and hair styles to one another. (White male MPs have, of course, have had similar skin colour and hair styles to one another for hundreds of years, but inexplicably never got mixed up. Nevertheless, the name badges would help avoid future confusion even for them. Some are getting a little old, after all).

And we’d stick the constituency names on the back, like on a football shirt, to make it easier to remember who represents are — essential, given MPs are (bizarrely) still not allowed to refer to one another by name.

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Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

Wearing party colours would also be a boon to MPs. No more would fellow MPs assume Kemi Badenoch or Bim Afolami are part of the Labour party, simply because of the colour of their skin. The radiant blue would announce their affiliation to the world. And no female or ethnic minority MP would ever again be mistaken for a secretary, because the jumpsuits would only be issued to the elected representatives, as a symbol of their high office.

Just imagine how gloriously colourful Parliamentary events would become. No more boring sea of charcoal and navy suits, enlivened only by the occasional bright dress. Instead, a surging sea of red and blue, with hints of yellow, orange, and green. A live action recreation of a Jeremy Vine election-night animation, played out daily for all to see. A source of bright light and optimism for the whole nation.

You may think this absurd. But judges wear uniforms. Police officers wear uniforms. Fire fighters, nurses, checkout assistants at B&Q. Black Rod wears a uniform, and hers includes knee breeches, which are several measures more absurd than a jumpsuit. So many of our fellow citizens consider a uniform routine that there’s even a dating site for uniformed professionals — surely many of our single MPs would be delighted to join their serried ranks, in search of love.

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The problem with political journalism

By Peter Franklin

It shouldn’t have come to this. Human beings are smart, and capable. Why are we so easily distracted by the design of a collar? The cut of a coat? The colour of a pointless piece of fabric encircling someone’s neck? We’re rather like the dog in the movie Up: capable of thought and speech, but instantly bedazzled by a squirrel passing into view. We know we should care about the words, the meaning and the impact on lives, but if there’s a sequin in view, our frontal lobes shut off and the lizard brain responds: “Scandal!”

After all: can anyone tell me what question Tracy Brabin asked while wearing the offending item? It’s hard to pay attention when all you hear is outrage, pomposity and misogyny. Only uniforms can save us from our weak little distractible minds. In the Jumpsuit Parliament, we would be obliged to focus on what our representatives said. Instead of filling pages and pixels with fashion analysis and faux outrage we’d have to focus on the facts.

MPs might even have an incentive to spend their time on policy, not polish. Or is that the biggest fantasy of them all?

After 30 years in Parliament it is a wrench to be standing down. Sadly, I leave with the House of Commons devalued as an elected chamber and with the image of politicians in general never lower.

I have served under four Speakers, of whom Bercow was most definitely the worst. His love of his own voice, his deliberate attempts to humiliate individual MPs and his bias on EU issues — his foibles are all significantly to blame for the shambles of this Parliament.

I very much hope that our new speaker will be genuinely fair-minded — someone with no favourites, no personal vanity and no wish to be the story. This will help the House of Commons revert to a place where politeness, even in the midst of huge differences, rules.

I believe that ‘modernisation’ moves — such as allowing children in the chamber and voting lobbies, lowering of dress standards, and clapping — have all contributed to the feeling that the Commons is not a workplace but a showground. New MPs need to remember that the traditions in the Commons had a reason for lasting so long. While I don’t expect all the changes to be reversed, it will be up to Speaker Hoyle to look again and exert his own influence. I hope he does.

Move Parliament to Milton Keynes
Philippa Perry, psychotherapist

I think our present system needs to change to something more like jury service, because egos have no place in Parliament. At the very least Parliament could move to Milton Keynes as a deterrent to narcissists.

Our trouble is that the more we appear to be hurtling into crisis, the more the electorate craves certainty. We may mistakenly think we need a bish-bash-bosh approach, and someone to blame. Needing a scapegoat is our most brutal trait, as blame turns to hate and the urge to purge and annihilate.

Let’s have neither rich against poor, nor poor against rich, nor tribe against tribe. We need, more than anything, kindness. To bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number is a tall order, but we could try to bring the greatest kindness to everyone. We could thank the rich for their tax contributions rather than grab it, and use the money to house, tend and feed us all. Let us extend that kindness to the planet.

We can start by being as understanding and kind to our children as possible. Kindness is what they will learn and pass on in their turn.

End anonymous communication
James Kirkup, Director of the Social Market Foundation

If you want to make the experience of being a politician more bearable, ensure that people can only communicate with politicians when they use their own name. Put an end to anonymous communication to MPs.

I don’t mean ban anonymous accounts: far too draconian. I just mean that if you aren’t prepared to put your name and address on a message, that message won’t be seen by an MP or their staff. Electronic communications to parliamentarians and their offices should be automatically filtered: no name means no-one’s going to read it.

I’m fairly militant about free speech but I don’t think free speech includes the right to send anonymous abuse; too many people currently misuse that freedom to send threats and abuse that make many MPs’ lives miserable and are corroding our public life. If people had to use their full name to engage in public conversation with politicians,  the volume and intensity of abuse would drop sharply.

We expect politicians to do everything on the record and in the open, and quite right too: transparency is essential because it ensures they can be held to account for their actions. But if we expect openness of politicians, because it ensures their good conduct, we should accept that a similar standard should apply to members of the public and their behaviour too.

Unshackle MPs from Westminster
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos

One of the worst features of being an MP is trekking between home and constituency. Much has changed since the days when Ross Poldark was elected a (fictional) MP, and disappeared to London for months at a time: even the most far flung parts of Cornwall and Shetland can be reached in a day’s travel from London. But we now expect MPs to make that journey at least twice a week. No wonder so many feel so exhausted.

We should bring Parliament into the 21st century by enabling some of its sittings — especially committee sessions — to be held entirely by video conference. MPs from far flung areas should able to conference in to the main chamber for ordinary sittings. And electronic voting should be possible, whether from in the chamber, or from a secure line in the constituency.

Traditionalists will say that you need everyone to be physically present, so that MPs can chat to Ministers in the lobby. But what kind of a system is it that relies on an MP to be charming while walking through a corridor? MPs should be able to make a choice about what best serves their constituents, not be forced to rattle around the Palace of Westminster regardless of whether they’re doing any good.

Look after parliamentary aides
Marie le Conte, author of ‘Haven’t you Heard: Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works’
Our politics is broken in a thousand and one ways; it’s hard to know how we can go about fixing it, if we ever find ourselves out of the Brexit vortex. But one vital change that’s long overdue would be an absolute overhaul of the way MPs’ staff are employed.

At the moment, each individual MP is in sole charge of hiring, paying and managing his or her aides. This causes all sorts of problems. The hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on salaries makes it look, to the untrained eye, like MPs are racking up huge expenses, for instance. Meanwhile, on top of everything else, MPs are forced to occupy a management position that most were never trained for.

It’s time the House of Commons set up a body dedicated to the hiring and management of parliamentary aides. On a day-to-day basis, the MPs would remain the bosses of their aides — whom they would still pick. But they should not have to deal with anything related to their salary, or what normal workplaces call “human resources”.

This would be a huge weight off the shoulders of MPs but it would also change the life of their staff. The new system would put an end to questionable hiring habits from MPs, a number of whom currently have staff on precarious time-limited contracts that they may or may not renew at any given point.

And, as we have seen time and time again, parliamentary aides bullied or sexually harassed by their MP have no-one to formally turn to, because their MP is their lone boss.

Happy and safe researchers are effective researchers, and effective researchers means effective MPs. The system needs to change to facilitate that safety. That this has not happened yet is a scandal.

Give Parliament a better building
Tanya Gold, freelance journalist

Charles Barry’s neo-gothic Palace of Westminster is a masterpiece, but it is not a fit place for a modern legislature, either practically or philosophically. It was built in the mid-Victorian period after the old palace burnt down and the principles it expresses are those of that time: deference to aristocracy, exclusion of women, and pomposity, all harking back to an idealised past.

The interiors, by Augustus Pugin, are magnificent, but they might encourage parliamentarians to go mad, as he did; how can you govern a real nation from a palace that is a painted construct — essentially a stage set for a play about British domination, on a marsh? The parliamentary chambers themselves encourage masculine grand-standing, which is alienating; shouldn’t we have a circular chamber to encourage consensus?

In any case, it is falling apart, filled with faulty wiring, asbestos, and Victorian pipes that have yet to be replaced. The building caught fire 40 times between 2008 and 2018; fire safety teams patrol it 24 hours a day. The basement was flooded with sewage on the day of the Brexit referendum; the stone is rotting; the toilets stink; it is infested with vermin; the parliamentary archive in the Victoria Tower — the most important archive in Britain — could not be saved in the event of fire. There would be no time.

In 2016 a joint committee compared maintaining the building to “trying to fill a bathtub with a thimble while the water is draining out of the plughole at the other end”. How can a healthy legislature work here, when they do not even feel safe?

Parliament should move to a more suitable building, but it won’t. Instead they squabble about how to tell the electorate what it will cost to repair. Much like the country, it cannot let go of its dreams.

Let MPs have lives
Elizabeth Oldfield, director of Theos think tank

You can’t be responsible for the lives of millions if you don’t have a life yourself. The civil service — committed to flexible working and offering plenty of part-time roles — is great at making sure its employees have a decent work-life balance. It’s time Westminster followed suit.

Improvements have been made, but the house still sits until 7.30 two nights a week — and 10.30pm on Mondays. As well as making any kind of healthy social life impossible, there is good evidence that long hours like these are counterproductive. One review of the consequences of such habits “showed that long hours working, especially when coupled with sleep disruption, caused deterioration of task performance, because it had detrimental effects on such things as rates of error, pace of work and social behaviour”.
The shameful toddler-like outbursts in the chamber could be reduced if MPs simply got more sleep. And their judgement would be better — so these changes are in all our best interests.

Another relatively simple change would be to allow MPs to job share. This would not be without its complications in terms of campaigning and voting, but with a little careful thought and planning, it shouldn’t be impossible.

As well as benefitting those with children or other caring responsibilities, many people have argued that this is the only way to enable people with disabilities to become MPs. In other words, it’s the only way to make sure our house of representatives is actually representative.

Fix Westminster’s drinking problem
Julie Bindel, feminist activist and journalist

In 2017, the so-called Pestminster scandal led to the resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon. He had been accused of “lunging” at a female journalist and propositioning her following a boozy lunch. The case represents an uncomfortable truth: Westminster has a drinking problem.

That was the conclusion of Laura Cox, who, in a 2018 report on the culture of bullying and harassment of House of Commons staff, wrote that, “a ready access to alcohol in the various bars on the premises was referred to (as an aggravating factor) by several contributors”. There are eight bars for MPs alone, with more for the lords. One was actually shut down after a glassing in 2017.

The report had been commissioned following a number of serious allegations — made against some male MPs by members of House staff, almost all of them women. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the high-profile women stepping down as MPs at the next general election have cited abuse as a factor in their decision.

It’s time we followed Cox’s recommendation and limited access to booze in parliament during the working day. Doing so would make Westminster a safer and more respectful environment for every MP — but for female MPs in particular.

It would also, of course, make Parliament more effective. The Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Wollaston once spoke up about colleagues voting while drunk. Ensuring MPs are sober while they are running the country is a good idea — not just for the sake of their more sensible colleagues, but for all of us.

Liberate MPs from the letter-writers
Peter Franklin, associate editor at UnHerd

The moment a new MP is elected, the letters and emails start pouring in. Hundreds of them. He or she will be expected to reply to every rant, every round robin, every request for help.

Still, that’s their job, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t. They are elected as legislators: their job is not to be their constituents’ agony aunt. Their job is to propose, scrutinise, amend, debate and vote upon the laws by which we are governed. It is a vital task — the lifeblood of a representative democracy — and yet the time available for it is under constant pressure from the post bag and the inbox.

MPs are there to serve their constituents, but the letter-writers represent a small fraction of each community. It is true that some correspondents are in real need and that MPs are often able to provide real help. But most of the requests concern matters over which the MP has no direct say.

There’s got to be a better way. If we properly devolved power to directly elected mayors, most issues could be dealt with locally. This would free-up MPs to dedicate their time to those matters that are actually decided in Westminster. Oh, and they might just have a little bit more time for their own families too.

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The abusive inhumanity of our politics

By Polly Mackenzie

At the next election, our Parliament is facing an exodus of capable, competent women who are giving up on a career in politics long before their time. Yes, it’s normal for a cadre of MPs to step down at any election. And the number of women doing so is in proportion to the (paltry) number of women in Parliament overall. But the average number of years these women have served is about half the number of years served by the men choosing to retire from Parliamentary life. They’re bowing out early, driven out by abuse, exhaustion and the hope of a simpler life.

A political career is decades in the making, especially if your party is in opposition. So be under no illusions: if talented women are giving up after five or 10 years, they are giving up the chance to secure lasting power or impact. If you can’t hear the alarm bells ringing for the quality of our politics, you need to take a syringe to your ears.

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How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

Being an MP has always been a pretty awful job. You have to have the skills of a social worker to deal with the problems your constituents bring you. You need a capable legal mind to navigate through your responsibilities as a legislator. If you take your constituency seriously, you have to split your life in two: live in the constituency and spend most weeks away from your family, or live in London, and shuttle the family up and down the motorway every weekend — until the children are teenagers and refuse to leave their friends, at which point you barely see them.

Most MPs want to make a difference. They want to improve the lives of their constituents, and the citizens of our country. They will put up with all of the crap if they know it serves a higher purpose. Half the problem is that our politics is so obsessed with Brexit at the moment that it’s hard to know what difference any MP is making, even if they do slog away for 80 hours a week.

On top of that, the party system is eating itself, putting more and more power into the hands of the most extreme. Imagine going home to your beloved constituency every week and being answerable not to your voters, but to the hundred or so most unrepresentative, most rabidly engaged activists who happen to be your local party.

Yes, MPs are well paid for the work they do, earning twice the average full-time salary of someone in their forties. But their decent pay packet, and their privileged role in our democracy, have started to be seen as a reason to dehumanise them completely.

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Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

It’s your fault: you voted the wrong way, the haters say. You took this job: you deserve everything that’s coming to you. Abuse against our MPs has reached epidemic proportions. On all sides — Leave, Remain, Left and Right — abusers on social media and in the streets have found a louder and louder voice. Death threats. Rape threats. Threats against family members. Dog shit through the letterbox.

It shouldn’t surprise us that women are more likely to buckle under this horror. Women are more vulnerable to physical threats, most of which come from men. Much of the abuse is gendered, with pregnant MPs singled out for attacks. And, because of the imbalanced way in which most parenting still happens in our society, women are also more likely to carry the burden of balancing family life with the challenges of their career.

If we lose the women from our Parliament, we have no hope of governing our country better. In the last months, Parliament has heard powerful testimonials from women speaking about miscarriage; sexual violence; abortion; living in an abusive relationship, and more. A Parliament without these voices would be impoverished, and that’s the Parliament we’re in danger of reverting to.

But it isn’t just talented women we’re in danger of losing. You don’t have to be a woman MP to think: why am I doing this to myself? More and more brilliant people seem to be leaving politics simply because they have better options: more money, more fun, less hatred, less work. And brilliant people who ought to go into politics look at the morass and say: never in a million years.

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Is Boris Johnson trying to rig the election?

By Tom Chivers

This is a crisis for our politics. If the best people run for the hills at the thought of a life in politics we will end up with the worst people in charge: and we the citizens will suffer.

There’s a Netflix series, Mindhunter, which tells the story of the first psychologists to study serial killers. The lead woman is an academic who’s spent her career studying psychopathic business leaders. Someone asks her: “How do you get to be a CEO if you’re a psychopath?”. She replies: “How do you get to be a CEO if you’re not?” These are the rules now governing our politics, too: ladders of opportunity for those who least deserve them. A pathway to a country led by shits and weirdos.

If we want great people to run our country, we need to make being an MP a fantastic job again — and stamping out political abuse is only the start. Change the rules so we genuinely attract and reward the best talent. Open primaries to create real opportunity for democratic engagement, and break the stranglehold of obsessive activists. Better paid and more qualified staff, so you know you’re doing a decent job. Proper parental leave, with Parliament by video conference for half the week so you can actually see your children from time to time, and stay in touch with your constituents.

We’re not good at democratic reform, I know, here in Britain. But the case is now urgent. Unless you really do want a country led by shits and weirdos, in which case: good luck to you. view comments]]> https://stage.unherd.com/2019/11/the-abusive-inhumanity-of-our-politics/?edition=us?appcommentsnew https://stage.unherd.com/2019/11/the-abusive-inhumanity-of-our-politics/?edition=us/feed/ 23764 https://stage.unherd.com/2019/07/do-politicians-have-poor-mental-health/?edition=us https://stage.unherd.com/2019/07/do-politicians-have-poor-mental-health/?edition=us#respond https://stage.unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1133675719.jpg?w=524 https://stage.unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/chivers.jpg?w=96 Tom Chivers is a science writer. His second book, How to Read Numbers, is out now.

Who’d be an MP? It sounds a horrible job: you’re surrounded by awful people, working long hours for no thanks, mainly detested by the ingrates you represent. Working much of the week miles from your family, in a tattered old mouse-riddled building that probably needs burning to the ground. Close proximity to Mark Francois.

It is in this context that the Guardian reports “Three in four MPs ‘probably have poor mental health’”. They’re basing it on a study in the BMJ, “Mental health of UK Members of Parliament in the House of Commons: a cross-sectional survey”. It’s carried out by Dan Poulter, a psychiatrist and Conservative MP. (As a side note: there aren’t enough MPs with scientific backgrounds and it is great to see one doing actual research, even if I think the contents of the research are being overstated. Which I do, so please read on.)

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In the Guardian’s telling, members of the House of Commons are “much more likely than either the general population or people in other high-level jobs to be troubled by distress, depression and similar conditions”. For instance, the study found that MPs were twice as likely as the population at large to have “common mental disorders” such as depression – 34% to the British public’s 17%. Poulter suggests that this could be due to the nature of the job: “Being an MP can be quite a lonely occupation. The work itself is inherently stressful.” He mentions the long hours and the separation from one’s family, as well.

I am 100% ready to believe that MPs are stressed as heck. All jokes aside, a large percentage of them are decent people trying to do good by their constituents, and in return they get death threats. One of them was murdered a few years ago. They are ranked second-last in the “most trusted professions” index, above only advertising executives. And being involved in trying to get Brexit through – with its utterly irreconcilable, contradictory demands – must be an unbearable nightmare.

But this study tells us nothing.

For one thing – even if it did indicate precisely what percentage of MPs suffered from various mental health conditions, it can’t  say anything about what causes them. It’s a snapshot, a so-called “cross-sectional” study, which looks at a population at a given time. It doesn’t tell you how they change over time, or what causes the things you see.

And while stress could be causing the mental health problems, there’s an obvious alternative hypothesis. We’re dealing with a bunch of people who are similar in one important way: they all chose to go into politics and become MPs. That makes them, immediately, an unusual group.

Not to put too fine a point on it, you have to be pretty weird to want to go into politics. The sort of person who becomes treasurer of the union at university, or joins the Durham Young Conservatives, is not representative of the average student; most of us were too busy drinking, sleeping late and trying to convince our friends that we were having sex. So might it be that the sort of person who wants to become a politician is at greater risk of mental illness?

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I can’t find any studies to confirm that theory. Interestingly, there are three – looking at Italian politicians (2010), German politicans (2011), and American politicians (2016)– that find that politicians do have detectably different personality types from the population at large. But the findings are weirdly contradictory: two of them find that politicians are more “open”, one finds they’re less; some find they’re more “agreeable”, some find less.

They do, as you’d expect, tend to be more extraverted, and two studies find they’re less neurotic, i.e. more emotionally stable, which I think would suggest they’re less prone to mental illness. But since they’re an unusual group, it’s not inherently surprising to find that they’re different from the population at large.

But, more importantly, this study is just badly designed. Here’s the problem. There are 650 MPs in total, if you include Sinn Fein and the speakers. The researchers sent the study questionnaire to all 650 of them. Of those, 146 responded.

Now, imagine that there are two MPs, both of whom receive a questionnaire in their pigeonhole with a title like “survey into MPs’ mental health”. One of them is entirely happy and well-adjusted and hasn’t spared a thought for her mental health in years because she is lucky enough not to struggle with it. The other is struggling with depression and anxiety. Which of the two is more likely to fill out the form?

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So the group of respondents are even more unusual: they’re not just MPs, they’re MPs who chose to fill out an entirely optional questionnaire about their mental health. That may mean that they’re people for whom mental health issues are particularly salient. It’s also worth noting that the ones who replied are disproportionately young, and younger people are more aware of – and therefore more willing to discuss – mental health issues.

As I said: I’m happy to believe that MPs’ jobs are stressful and even that those jobs cause them to have worse mental health. But this study does very little to confirm that. (I asked a psychologist friend about it and he replied “God, this study looks awful.”)

I think it’s important to push back against it because it’s part of a wider conversation in society, about how we are apparently in the grip of a mental illness epidemic. But I am far from convinced that’s true.

As the UCL neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell pointed out recently, the World Health Organisation and national governments track the impact of mental health disorders on populations. The WHO has found that in western Europe in general and Britain in particular, harms caused by mental health have not risen noticeably in the last 30 years. Another study shows significantly decreasing harms in western Europe since 2000. An NHS/NatCen report found a slight increase in the UK since 1993, but attributed it at least partly to people being more likely to acknowledge it. Those claims are based on large-scale survey data, so they’re as solid as you’re likely to get in this area.

And yet, we are constantly worrying about it, in much the way that we are constantly worrying about air pollution, loneliness and suicide. They’re real problems, absolutely, but they don’t seem to be getting worse. And while on the one hand calling attention to mental health issues might reduce stigma – the NatCen report said that greater awareness might be behind the increase in reporting – it is not an unalloyed good: if we overestimate the prevalence and importance of these conditions, we will dedicate too many resources to combating them. Each pound spent on NHS psychotherapists is a pound not spent on dialysis machines, which is a point I make fairly regularly.

None of this is to say that mental health problems aren’t very real, or – to return to my original point – that MPs’ lives and jobs aren’t stressful, of course. I wouldn’t do it for twice the money they get: it sounds horrible. You’d have to be weird to choose that life. But, then again, that’s the point.

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In practice, of course, most MPs are likely to seek re-election and so would be foolish to deviate too far from the way their constituents see things. But the settled way we have come to understand the role of an MP is that s/he is an independent agent, and not merely an extension of the collective will of their constituents.

Before Brexit, it was mostly only constitutional anoraks that concerned themselves with such matters. But the results of the 2016 referendum, when broken down into votes by constituency, has exposed where a gap has opened up between the view of the MP and the view of his or her constituents.

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Yvette Cooper, for example, was a prominent Remainer, yet 70% of the people of her constituency – Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford – voted to leave the European Union. Under the Burkean understanding of being an MP, she is quite free to try and derail Brexit against the wishes of her constituents. And here, she has much support: “The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain,” claimed Winston Churchill. “His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this is well known.”

The Burkean philosophy on MPs not being delegates but representatives has now become the standard line for expressing the relationship between MPs and the people who voted for them. But we shouldn’t be too comfortable with it. Burke was a terrible constituency MP. He visited his Bristol seat infrequently, and he disagreed with the city’s merchants over opening up trade to the Irish. So when Burke told the voters of his Bristol seat on the day of his election in 1774 that “your representative owes you … his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving, you if he sacrifices it to your opinion” he was, in a fancy way, telling them to get stuffed – that he would vote however he likes.

It may not be a great surprise that as re-election approached he came to realise he had no hope of winning again. Voters don’t like being told their views don’t count for much. And it says something about Burke’s attitude towards voters that, after losing his Bristol seat, he went off to secure a rotten borough under the patronage of Marquis of Rockingham; one that did not require the need to have – or to listen to – pesky voters. “Bidders in an auction of popularity” was how Burke dismissed politicians and the vulgarity of elections.

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Burke was no great fan of democracy. He was terrified at the prospect of a French revolution coming to Britain to destroy the established social order of church and nobility. Burke believed that government should be the preserve of the “natural aristocracy”. And he had little time for the views of uneducated, common people whom he thought could be easily swayed by the those who would appeal to their emotions and their prejudices.

This Burkean line, of course, is remarkably similar to a view that has often been repeated by Remainers – that poor, simple, ordinary people didn’t really know what they were doing when they voted to leave because they were being manipulated by demagogues and liars.

It is extraordinary that a man who finds democracy so distasteful has become the go-to person for an understanding of the relationship between an MP and their constituents. English democracy didn’t begin this way. The first proper conversations about democracy in this country are often thought to have taken place during the Putney Debates of 1647.

The revolutionaries who met in Putney’s Church of St Mary the Virgin to discuss what the country might look like after the tyrant King had been ousted envisaged a much more direct form of democracy, including annual elections for MPs. Legitimate power comes up from the people; morally, it is a bottom up thing. And chopping the head off a king – 370 years ago this week – is as arresting an image of the rejection of top down governance as it is possible to imagine. From here on, only the people are sovereign. That was the idea.

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But the sort of direct democracy imagined by the Levellers at the Putney debates was never going to be acceptable to those with an established interest in running the country. Those arguing against the Leveller position claimed that it was irresponsible to give the vote to people without property, and thus without a proper stake in the country. And a version of this argument has echoed down the centuries, with the established order continually looking for ways to mute the full consequences of the democratic instinct.

Burke’s idea of representative democracy is another, albeit subtle, version of that counter revolutionary move against the idea that the people are sovereign.

Fast forward to our current political quagmire. On the 9th June 2015, the House of Commons voted by 544 votes to 53 to have a referendum on our membership of the EU. In other words, the Commons itself agreed by a huge majority to have an exercise in direct democracy to break the Parliamentary log-jam over Europe. And what many MPs initially accepted at least was that such an exercise, albeit it advisory and no legally binding, nonetheless morally trumped the representative ‘think for yourself’ functions of an MP. Going into the lobby in early 2017 to vote for the triggering of Article 50, many MPs felt obliged to act more like delegates, ventriloquising the people’s will. And many deeply resented it.

What Brexit has exposed is how much our supposedly democratic system is weighted against democracy itself. When an exercise of direct democracy is conducted within a representative system, the representatives generally don’t like it. For the very idea of representative government still contains a sort of Burkean snobbishness about the general will.

The battle over whether Brexit will be implemented is not just a battle about Brexit per se, it is also a battle about who is boss: the people or MPs. Brexit may be an exercise in repatriating power from Europe to Westminster. But it is also a reminder that the moral source of political authority lies ultimately with the people and not with politicians.