Flickr/ UK Parliament. Some rights reserved.
Last week as part of his vision for a Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn announced plans to establish a fund to aid party members from working-class backgrounds to become MPs. In doing so he has reignited the debate about the need to prevent our Parliament from continued domination by a wealthy and privileged elite, whilst highlighting the urgency with which our elected representatives must reconnect with their constituents if the legitimacy of our democratic institutions is to be preserved.
The selection procedure that Members of Parliament undergo when seeking employment is unique among UK employers. While candidates are usually recruited and later nominated to stand by local or national political parties, they are elected by the public. Yet despite improvements in recent years, the House of Commons remains acutely unrepresentative of the British population it serves. Following the 2015 general election, according to the Parliamentary Candidates UK project, only 191 of the 650 MPs elected were women (29% of the total), meaning that the UK languishes 43rd internationally (below Rwanda, Nicaragua, Algeria and Zimbabwe) for gender diversity. Worse still, just 42 (7%) were from ethnic minorities – half of their proportion of the national population. Only a handful had a registered disability.
