Call for poverty activist to be MP is well wide of the Marcus

THIS week, following a successful intervention in the outrageous food parcel scandal, footballer and child poverty activist Marcus Rashford was asked by fans if he would consider running for Parliament.

I found this utterly baffling – it’s precisely because he is not a politician that he has been so politically effective.

The conception most people have of politics is that to get something done you have to become a “proper” politician. This is, of course, nonsense.

You can be involved in politics without setting so much as a foot in parliament. You can think and behave politically without seeking election. To be actively interested and involved in a communitarian pursuit, no matter how small or obscure, is to be immersed in a politics of sorts.

Politics is not just about power. It’s about listening to people, understanding your turf and developing keen, reliable intuitions about how to get things done.

Many of us are involved in politics, whether we notice or not. If you are a member of a trade union then you are in politics. When you sign a petition or donate money to a campaign, you are in politics.

This column is political. Even something that does not appear overtly political (like running a local sports team to keep potentially wayward young people off the street) can be, in some sense, a political act.

We do ourselves and democracy a disservice by entertaining the notion that politics is a specialist profession. The exclusive preserve of the so-called political class.

This desire for Rashford to formally enter politics demonstrates widespread confusion about the nature of professional politics.

There is a misconception that, if only the right people got into politics then things would be better, which is to misunderstand completely the point.

The process of becoming and remaining a professional politician is what knocks the moral stuffing out of so many of them.

No matter how competent they are, or how passionate, political institutions such as Holyrood and Westminster exist, not simply as forums for decision-making and debate, but also, more subtly, to ensure that nothing too radical happens.

Institutions are like factories. They are designed to create a specific range of products. These products may at times appear diverse but their combined output always looks, sounds and feels the same.

This rule can be applied in a very general way to most institutions you can think of. An idealistic politician may genuinely wish to represent the will of the people, but political institutions have a will of their own.

In Britain, our institutions are the problem. They do not possess the political piping to pump out anything but more of the same crud. Walk through that door, you’ll get sucked into the whirlpool.

History shows that real change begins on our doorsteps and that professional politics exists in large part to either resist, pacify, dilute or, in most cases now, appropriate and then take credit for that change.

A parliamentarian’s most important role is to represent their constituents.

This work is long and really unglamorous but essential.

But, when it comes to big picture social change, from abolishing slavery, women’s and worker’s rights, the right to vote and so on, political institutions, packed with politicians, were often the biggest obstacles to progress.

In all cases, the change started with people “outside” of politics.

The last thing Marcus Rashford should do is become a politician.

That would be like tying his hands behind his back because he wanted to win a boxing match.