No work outside politics for one in five new MPs
AROUND one in five of Scotland’s new MPs have little or no work experience outside politics.
Analysis of the 59 men and women elected to Westminster last month has found 11 of them are essentially lifelong ‘political professionals’.
Together with Mhairi Black, the now 23-year-old who entered Parliament straight from university in 2015, they make up a substantial 20 per cent block on Scottish benches.
There are more lifelong politicians than there are Scottish Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs put together.
Figures show two or three years of electoral instability – swings from first Labour to the SNP and then from the SNP to the Tories – have brought a resurgence in representatives of the old liberal professions in to politics.
There were six lawyers, including the prominent SNP QC Joanna Cherry; six journalists, broadcasters or other media workers, two accountants, three teachers, a lecturer, and two healthcare professionals elected in Scotland last month.
And seven MPs have a background in business.
One of Scotland’s new MPs, the SNP’s David Linden of Glasgow East, left school – Bannerman High – to be a council trainee.
So he has had ‘real’ job, just not for very long. He then worked for politicians as an assistant, often dealing with the real world problems of constituents. Mr Linden sees himself a political professional.
Two MPs are former civil servants. One of those is Chris Ste- phens, the SNP’s representative in Glasgow South West.
He is a former trade union organiser for council workers, a job academics studying the backgrounds of MP usually describe as a ‘politics-facilitating’.
The seven MPs listed as business people also represent a huge range of different experiences. Compare privately-educated millionaire Alister Jack of the Conservatives to Ged Killen, the lo- cally-schooled Labour MP and councillor for Rutherglen who runs a family roofing firm, a job he is currently giving up. Both are businessmen on our list.
Very few of MPs have classic working-class professions, though the SNP’s John McNally is a barber and Labour’s Hugh Gaffney is a postman. They and a handful of others, make up the tiny minority of MPs who did not go to university.