Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS Doesn’t Everyone? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Michael Blastland Producer: Richard Knight Editor: Innes Bowen BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 22.06.09 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 05.07.09 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Sir Bob Worcester, Chairman, Ipsos Mori Professor Andrew Oswald, Department of Economics, University of Warwick Ann Cryer MP, Labour member for Keighley Dr Sandra Jovchelovitch, Reader in Social Psychology, London School of Economics Lord Lawson of Blaby, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ramsey Raafat, University College London Dr Ruth Fox, The Hansard Society Ali Muriel, Institute for Fiscal Studies Professor Daniel Dorling, Department of Geography University of Sheffield BLASTLAND: (Bar Fx) A friend walked into a bar - not this one - and found herself next to Martin Johnson, former captain of the England rugby team. “Couldn’t believe it”, she said. “He’s … enormous” - arms stretching improbably. Six foot six and nearly 19 stone, I believe. “Really? Never looked that big playing rugby.” They don’t, do they, one giant next to another? This programme is about MPs. What does that have to do with Martin Johnson seeming bigger in the pub? Perspective, that’s what. Our question - prompted by the expenses saga, but reaching further, thank goodness - is whether those at Westminster, struck by group-think, have forgotten how things look from elsewhere. Yes, say critics, they have - badly. WORCESTER: I don’t think I’ve ever met a Member of Parliament who doesn’t tell me how well in touch they are with the local constituents. They’re living in a cloud cuckoo land. BLASTLAND: That’s the venerable pollster, Bob Worcester, of Ipsos Mori. OSWALD: Once you’ve met your first trillionaire, it may be very hard for you to renormalise what you actually think is a sensible salary for yourself. BLASTLAND: That’s Andrew Oswald, an economist. CRYER: To suggest that Labour MPs are oblivious to the problems of their poorer constituent is just absolute pie in the sky. BLASTLAND: And that’s Ann Cryer, MP, robust in their defence. We’ll hear from all three. It’s worth saying up front that there’s no way of settling this - no annual exam of MPs’ understanding of the state of Britain (now there’s an idea). But we can gather evidence that makes you wonder. We begin with the ugly phrase, group-think. Dr Sandra Jovchelovitch is from the London School of Economics. JOVCHELOVITCH: Group-think is a concept developed precisely to justify how bad behaviour takes place. It refers to the fact that sometimes when individuals are insulated in a group, are very much part of a group with a common background, a common set of ideas and practices, they will tend to behave in a way that forgets larger moral values, that forgets acceptable social norms, that forgets how one is expected to behave in relation to the wider society. In a way, that can explain why it was so difficult for MPs at first to realise that they had done anything wrong. BLASTLAND: Sandra Jovchelovitch. Mind you, a great many politicians insist that they really didn’t do anything wrong. Nigel now Lord Lawson, former MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer, defends the majority while noting the bad-apple effect. LAWSON: People lower their own standards very often, regrettably, when they find that others in the same position have lower standards. If others are making claims, then eventually they think well why shouldn’t I? If everybody’s doing it, you know everybody else is doing it, why shouldn’t I? So there is a kind of Gresham’s Law in which the bad drives out the good, I’m afraid. And this is not just Members of Parliament. It happens in all walks of life. BLASTLAND: Lord Lawson. By way of bizarre illustration of how we are influenced by the values around us, imagine an alley-way where you’ve left your bike. On your return, you find a leaflet stuck to the handlebars. What do you with it? That depends, says Ramsay Raafat, from University College London, who describes just such an experiment and sees a parallel with MPs. RAAFAT: Well in a series of elegant experiments by Kees Keizer there were two conditions of order and disorder. In the first study, an area where bikes were parked, the order condition had a prominent ‘no graffiti’ sign and a flyer was attached to their bikes. When the riders or owners returned to their bike and they had a decision as to what to do with the flyer essentially, only 33 per cent of the people chucked the flyer and got rid of it. Littered; broke a norm. Now when there was a slight manipulation. Everything’s the same - we have our bike shed, bikes, prominent ‘no graffiti’ sign - but now there’s graffiti in the area, so a norm has been violated. Now, interestingly, in this situation a whopping 69 per cent of the riders when they returned chucked the flyer. And so in this instance when one norm’s violated - the graffiti violation - there’s a massive effect on another norm of littering. But the most interesting, perhaps most dramatic effect of norm violation was their final experiment and that was looking at how graffiti and littering can affect something like stealing. Now stealing is a powerful norm violation. We learn at a very early age not to steal. So how did they do this? This was very elegant. They had a post-box. Sticking out of it was an envelope with a five euro note attached. Now in the ordered condition - no litter and no graffiti - only 13 per cent of people stole, took the envelope. However, when there was graffiti or litter, a whopping 25 per cent or 27 per cent of people stole. That’s more than a doubling of norm violation. BLASTLAND: Ramsay Raafat. Today expenses; tomorrow your hubcaps. I think not - but it’s interesting that academics spy a resemblance. Behaviour is often shared, and often institutionalised. It would be odd if MPs didn’t go native in some way. Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society has studied the way they acclimatise. FOX: Unlike most professional careers, MPs get very limited induction and professional training, and what they do get is very often around sort of the administrative practices rather than a lot about parliamentary procedure, which is where a lot of them want to make their mark. And a lot of what they do get also comes from the Whips’ Office and it’s not in the Whips’ Office interest to assist them in any way that’s going to help them to be rebellious or to raise questions or to challenge or to try and make change. Once they get into Parliament, there is a hierarchy. For example, in the chamber speakers are called according to their seniority. There’s an interest built into the system for new MPs not to rock the boat, not to challenge, but to accept - in the expectation that after a few years they too will then start sort of climbing the ladder of seniority, possibly get onto the ministerial ladder. But by that time, after having been there for a few years, sometimes it’s too late and they too have been drawn into the ways and means of how Westminster operates and they accept things that three years ago when they started, they perhaps wouldn’t have done. JOVCHELOVITCH: When we come into a new place, we don’t know how things work. We depend on others to let us know how things work. So this kind of process is very vital and it’s very necessary for us individually and socially. However, at the same time that we get adjusted to what goes on, we are embraced by this environment and we may lose our sense of critical judgement about what’s happening. BLASTLAND: Sandra Jovchelovitch from the Institute of Social Psychology at the LSE. Enter the Palace of Westminster and the security, the portals and portraits, the bow tie on the receptionist - though he’s probably not called that. Every fact of the institution tells you that this is a place apart, and probably always was. I’m here in the lower waiting hall just off the central lobby in the Palace of Westminster talking to Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley. And it’s a fantastically grand, impressive place, and it’s a very exclusive place as well. CRYER: Yes. BLASTLAND: And do those things, necessary as they are perhaps, cause a bit of a problem in your relationship with your constituents back in Keighley? CRYER: Well yes, I mean it clearly could do, but I’m not making any excuses or apologising for the grand nature of this building. I love working here. I think it’s only right and proper that when the Houses of Parliament were being rebuilt in 1834 that the Prince Consort, Prince Albert, chose a design such as this, and I think it was to reflect the importance of the body that meets and debates here. BLASTLAND: We want Parliament to represent us. We also expect it to glitter. Wanting it both ways creates a strange hybrid culture: of lordly paranoia, privilege and vulnerability. MPs both masters and servants. Is there anything like it? No wonder they turn to each other for understanding. MPs in this gothic hen house, of whatever party, are bound to flock together. Having heard a little about how such groups can behave badly, let’s look at whether this group has particular characteristics that distance it from the electorate. A lack of women and ethnic minorities is often noted, something the parties say they are addressing. But since pay and reward have taken centre stage, it’s on this that we’ll concentrate. How do MPs compare with those outside? Their salary is about £65,000. Where would you guess that puts them? In the top 30 per cent? The top 20? Top 10? Ali Muriel is a researcher with the IFS, the Institute for Fiscal Studies. MURIEL: So on the IFS website, we have a calculator called ‘Where Do You Fit In?’, which lets you work out whereabouts you fit in in the income distribution. So we’re going to try plugging in an MP’s salary. We have to make some assumptions about the MP’s family, so if we assume that our MP is married with a non-working spouse. And if we just plug in the MP’s salary - so that’s around about £65,000 a year before taxes, so that works out to about £849.61 per week after tax - and we click through to see their position on the income distribution, they’ve got income higher than around 92 per cent of the population. So the calculator tells them they’re above about 55 million individuals in the UK. BLASTLAND: And what if we just do that on the value of MPs’ expenses? Can we key in the same, find the same result with that data alone? MURIEL: We certainly can. So if we take just the expenses, which are worth about £464.53 per week - then based on that income of £465 a week, so this is purely based on the expenses, they have a higher income than about 62 per cent of the population, so above about 37 million individuals in the UK. BLASTLAND: Alright. And what about if we add them both together, so expenses plus salary? MURIEL: Let’s see. The salary is taxed whereas the expenses aren’t, so when you add them both together you get around about £1,314 per week. If we plug that into the calculator, as you’d expect it’s very high - so this MP household would have a higher income than about 98 per cent of the population, above nearly 59 million people in the United Kingdom. BLASTLAND: Ali Muriel of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. MPs’ accommodation allowances alone - put aside salary for a moment - are worth more than the disposable income of getting on for two thirds of the whole population. Does that put distance between them and the majority? If so, would it matter? Or is saying so no more than the politics of envy? Envious or not, the thought might help explain why what seems trivial to some can loom large to others. Do they know how they compare? Do you? A former director of the IFS has asked dozens of audiences how much gets you into the top 10 per cent of incomes. Typically, the answers are absurdly high. People near the top tend to be clueless about how well they compare with the majority. A group of senior civil servants asked the same question were hopeless. About half seemed to think that the top 10 per cent started at an income about double - or more - the real figure. This bias, one we mostly seem to share, might be of looking only one way: up but not down. Andrew Oswald from Warwick University studies the economics of happiness, and says comparison is the key. OSWALD: Human beings are creatures of comparison, so usually, without being aware of it, they look over their shoulders at what other people earn before they can decide how happy they feel with their own pay. And I think what MPs do - consciously or subconsciously - is to look at others that they meet with good university degrees, who are relatively old, and they see these people earning well sometimes £600,000 a year rather than £60,000 or a little over, as MPs currently earn. And it’s that terribly invidious comparison that I imagine eats away at MPs themselves. For some deep psychological reason that we don’t really understand, I don’t draw a lot of comfort from the fact that there might be 42 million British people who earn less than I do. Rather I tend to look upwards, and this is generally a hurtful thing to do. Implicitly I’m looking at the people who earn more than me. So there’s a sort of asymmetry here and if you meet extremely rich people some of the time, that asymmetry’s going to be very harsh on you. You’re going to be looking upwards to your own detriment psychologically. The difficulty for a human being is if they start to mix - and clearly Members of Parliament do this - with a whole range of income level individuals, once you’ve met your first trillionaire it may be very hard for you to renormalise what you actually think is a sensible salary for yourself. FOX: So there’s a perception among many MPs that they ought to be paid more because of the nature of the work that they do, their skills and so on, but actually once they get out into the employment marketplace after they’ve lost their seats, many of them struggle to maintain a salary compatibility with what they’ve been earning in Parliament. About three fifths of them were earning, once they’d got an employment, either the same or less than they were as an MP. BLASTLAND: Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society on some interesting research by Leeds University. Our expectations are easily recalibrated by those around us. That’s partly the rugby-player effect: in the right company, big just doesn’t seem big anymore. Easy then to put out of mind that in most company we’d stand out, and that only in this - highly select company - are we normal. But it must take something powerful indeed to silence the political canary, the voice in the back of the head familiar enough with everyday experience to sing out a warning of what others might think. What kind of perspective was it that blocked out the plain fact that two people claiming on the same house just looks very bad indeed? Where was the voice from the pub? Who do they talk to? WORCESTER: They certainly talk to themselves a lot, and between themselves. They talk to the local worthies - the people in the local community, the constituency who are influential - and beyond that, they seem to talk to the same little group of people. BLASTLAND: Sir Bob Worcester of the market and opinion researchers Ipsos Mori. WORCESTER: I don’t think I’ve ever met a Member of Parliament who doesn’t tell me how well in touch they are with the local constituents. And yet when I ask the British people the question - which I’ve been doing since 1969, and I’ve asked people if they’re in touch with their local councillor or Member of Parliament in the last two or three years - and we have over the last forty years found every month that only about one person in ten say that they have spoken to or presented their views (so they could have written to their local Member of Parliament) over all of those years. BLASTLAND: So amongst those people, this quite select minority - do we know what kind of people, either by age or social class, are actually having this contact with people in positions of political power or representatives? WORCESTER: What you find is an even balance, more or less, between men and women. It’s when you start looking at age that the bias really comes into it because if you look at the third of the country roughly who are between 18 and 34, you only get about 4 per cent who have been in touch, 4 people in 100 in that age group. Whereas if you get to the middle-aged group - the 45 to 64’s - you’re up to 15 per cent, so nearly four times as many. And where the crunch really comes is the professional and managerial classes of their constituencies. 1 in 5 see an MP or write to an MP, convey their views about anything to an MP. It’s 1 in 10 of the administrative people, the white collar workers. And it’s 1 in … fewer really than 1 in 20, we’re talking about 1 in 25 of working class people who say they see their local MP. They’re living in a cloud cuckoo land when it comes to really being in touch. BLASTLAND: Bob Worcester. Who may profit from conducting opinion polls that help MPs stay in touch, but that doesn’t make him wrong. Anyway, he’s not alone in his views. Danny Dorling is a demographer at Sheffield University. DORLING: I think MPs’ connection with the normal has reduced and it can be hard for MPs to understand their constituents. They increasingly have an attitude towards their constituents as, say, a GP might have towards his or her patients. They feel they’re providing a service for them, but the MPs are more likely to have gone through a form of education, like a GP spending many years at medical school, which might make them find it harder to see other people quite as like them. I think it’s entirely understandable how MPs could have begun to think like this. I think many other groups paid similarly to MPs think like this. I don’t think it is helpful to think like this, but I think you have to work very hard not to do it. Once your lifestyle becomes aided by that much money, it is hard to get it out of your head that this is normal. FOX: There are fewer farmers, many fewer MPs from a mining background, and so you see that kind of narrowing. And what you then see is an increase in the number of people who have got a teaching background in higher and further education, and a particular increase over the last twenty, thirty years in the number of people coming from a background in politics - people who’ve been working for MPs as researchers at Westminster for some time, people who’ve been political lobbyists in sort of the Westminster village. BLASTLAND: Ruth Fox from the Hansard Society. Meanwhile, back in the village itself. CRYER: I enjoy being here. I enjoy my job, I love it, but I do not feel that I’m detached from my constituents in any way whatsoever. BLASTLAND: Where would you say you are now on your parliamentary salary within the income distribution of the country? How rich, roughly, do you think you are? CRYER: I know that within my own constituency, I am extremely well off, very well off. My wage is enormously more than the majority. I think the only people who will be on a similar pay to myself will be people who are perhaps bank managers, head teachers, doctors, possibly some very high-flying nurses but not many, and I think entrepreneurs of various kinds who have put their own money at risk in order to get a lot of money. But I recognise that the vast, vast majority of my constituency get a great deal less than I do, and I appreciate that. BLASTLAND: Ann Cryer, MP. Their pay makes MPs unusual, but that doesn’t mean it could or should be cut. The problem with expecting pay to be representative is that some already want it to do rather a lot besides: to measure worth, responsibility, effort and intelligence; to provide basic living standards and afford dignity; to compete, to allocate resources efficiently - and all somehow with objectivity. Slow down, says Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer. LAWSON: The only thing that’s objective is you need to have a level of pay for any job, any profession, any trade, which is going to be able to recruit and retain the sort of people you would like to have in that job. So you have to pay Ronaldo, for example, an enormous sum of money because he won’t play for your team unless you do. If you’re looking for a lavatory cleaner, you have to pay what is needed - which is rather less - in order to get a good lavatory cleaner. That’s the only objective thing. It’s nothing to do with the intrinsic worth either of the individual or of the job. BLASTLAND: So there’s nothing moral about pay? LAWSON: Nothing moral whatever, no. BLASTLAND: What if we look at some tricky labour markets. Let’s take perhaps the trickiest one of all - MPs’ pay - because there doesn’t seem to be a supply problem there. You could fill the job pretty easily if you wanted to. Is there anything we can say about how pay for MPs ought to be determined? LAWSON: That is extremely complicated, extremely difficult. It’s always difficult in any walk of life where there isn’t a market. And it’s the same in the civil service, it’s the same everywhere where it’s not a market test. Of course you could fill the House of Commons if you had no pay at all, but you would be filling it either with people who are sufficiently wealthy not to need money, which used to happen in the old days, but it was felt - quite rightly - you would not get a representative cross-section because only the wealthy could afford to do it. Or you’d get complete riff-raff, jokers who were doing it just for publicity purposes and not be prepared not to take any money. You wouldn’t want that. So you do have to make a judgement of what it is necessary to pay in order to get a reasonably good membership of the House of Commons because it’s very important you should. It’s also particularly important I think in a country like ours where on the whole members of the Government are going to be recruited from the House of Commons. So you want a sufficient pool of talent. BLASTLAND: Lord Lawson, who would keep the total package as it is, but move some money out of expenses and into salary. MPs in his day were well into the top 10 per cent of incomes, as they are now. But that 10 per cent, including MPs, has moved away from the rest as inequality has increased. While the typical income has risen about 60 per cent in that time in real terms, MP pay has risen nearly 80, and total allowances far more than that. This is characteristic of a society that has moved apart at almost all levels. Again, some see this as entirely proper, as merit takes its due. Danny Dorling is less sanguine. DORLING: We do have separation, almost caste-like separation where like marries like and social norms in different social classes in Britain are quite different as compared to most of mainland Europe, say. This is very much by social class. Less by ethnicity and by race - there’s certainly more mixing going on there - but when it comes to money and comes to wealth and comes to educational background, we are looking at an increase in how separated we are. BLASTLAND: I was going to ask you. So does it come down pretty much to money? DORLING: Yes, I think it comes down to money and wealth and protection. BLASTLAND: What about in the way that people tend to concentrate geographically, physically, you know where they move to. Is there anything we can say about whether we’re becoming more stratified like that? DORLING: Yes, we know a great deal about people becoming more stratified geographically because we’ve measured things in a similar way from the 1971 census, the 81, 91, 2001. We know by social class people are becoming more concentrated geographically. It’s most true of the very richest. They are the most clustered. They have the least choice over where to live, if you like. The very richest have decreased in number in relatively poor towns and increased in the south of England, particularly around places like Surrey and particular parts of London. It’s a very different kind of life that people in Britain are living from each other. One person’s success would be seen as an affluent person’s failure, and that kind of gap is wider than it was in the 60s or 70s. There are more people who can’t understand each other’s lives because the financial gap is much bigger. BLASTLAND: Brace yourself. Professor Dorling is pointing his finger at all of us - including, dear listener, you and me. DORLING: If by accident you tune into Radio 4 and you’re normal, it just sounds like complete gobbledegook to you. The fact that a Radio 4 audience may not recognise that that’s a normal reaction to hearing Radio 4 to most people in Britain is I think a bit unfortunate because a Radio 4 audience is supposed to be imaginative and interested in this kind of thing. BLASTLAND: Ouch! Is he right that we Radio 4 folk are as segmented, distant, and unusual as any? Half of us with mortgages paid off, quite likely to say that we’d never think of taking a package holiday. Would we guess - here’s a tease - that nearly 80 per cent of the loaves sold in the UK are white bread? Enough self-flagellation. In the context of politics and government, the question is whether this sort of unfamiliarity - if that’s what it is - has any serious or practical effect. What, if any, are the policy consequences? Some trade unions accuse Labour of a policy preoccupation with the interests of ‘Middle England’, arguing that this is in fact a ridiculously skewed notion of the middle that bypasses about 80 per cent of the population. Some pension policies have failed - I’m thinking of stakeholder pensions - because it seemed to be assumed by government that people were either feckless or ignorant of the need to save. In fact, there’s good evidence that they knew all right, and were often saving already, but were destined to a mean retirement not through irresponsibility but because they lived a modest life. Ann Cryer, MP, is having none of it. CRYER: To suggest that Labour MPs are oblivious to the problems of their poorer constituent is just absolute pie in the sky. I think you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t know where you’ve got it from, in fact. You should come to my constituency office and meet the people and meet my caseworker and my PA and my diary secretary. And it’s in the middle of a fairly poor area. It’s on the edge of a fairly big Pakistani area, Bangladeshi area. They’re not wealthy people who live there and my office is there to help them. BLASTLAND: Ann Cryer. Do you sense resentment? When people fall out, as MPs and the public seem to have done, the sense of distance affects both sides. Nigel Lawson is frank in saying that feelings are, in some respects, mutual. LAWSON: There has been, regrettably, a cynical attitude on behalf of a large number of members of the public, long before this, that oh these Members of Parliament, they’re only in it for themselves. I think that members of the public who’ve had occasion to go to their Member of Parliament, to go to their constituency member, have a very different and much better view. But most people have never come across one in their life and they just think, because we live in a cynical age, that they’re only in it for themselves. And that has I think hardened them a bit because they feel that you know the public don’t trust us and so we’ll ignore the public to that extent. BLASTLAND: When the people are giving MPs a kicking for MPs’ lapses, which is the herd with the group-think mentality? Them, or us, or both? I feel ambivalent about MPs’ expenses - trivial compared with war, health, crime, or jobs in a recession. But if politicians, of all people, were losing sight of how things seemed from where others sit - and we leave it to you to judge - it would be a problem. Though I also suspect there’s merit in Ann Cryer’s claim that she’s seen something of life. So the more sobering conclusion might be that if they are losing touch, so are we all.