😬 "I'm not going to care about 90% of your clients"

Good MPs are exclusive in their focus

I say this, as you know, in the kindest possible way… I’m not going to care about 90% of your clients. I’m just not. But there are hundreds of others who hopefully will care about each of them. The country is very complex, and it’s not possible for MPs to have a good understanding of everything that's going on. The best MPs are ones who pick specialisms, who don't try to be generalist.

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The goals of the UK’s largest parliamentary caucus

I'm the co-chair of the biggest group of backbenchers, the Labour Growth Group, and we are pushing to ensure that the government is as bold as possible, and takes on the trade-offs that are needed to get the British economy growing again. Per capita wages haven't really grown in two decades. We can't have another decade of that if we want to keep the far right out of running this country, keep our public services going, save the NHS, and ensure that there's more money going into people's pay packets.

Like any coalition, the devil is in the… principles

An effective parliamentary caucus has got to have founding principles and a narrative for what holds you all together. You'll disagree on certain issues and you don't have to take positions on every issue, but you've got to have a founding principle on which you will agree, that holds you all together. We're a backbench group of Labour MPs, we support the government and what they're doing, but also it's about pushing them to go further and I think the most successful caucuses hold themselves in that space. They work out how to be constructive, whilst also loyal, to the party that they are members of.

The tyranny of risk adversity

You've got to be willing to come up with new and innovative ideas in politics. Too often in politics, people end up moving back to speaking in platitudes, saying things that are self-evidently true that no one could really disagree with. But ultimately if you spend all of your time doing that, you don't get anywhere because if something was easy and didn't involve a difficult decision or a difficult trade-off, it would have been done a long time ago.

For their part, think tanks spend too much time saying things that are either obvious or have been said hundreds of times before. I'd much rather hear their most unpopular or controversial view rather than spending so much time on the things that ultimately everyone is going to agree with.

We need to be responsive to unintended consequences

We've had a 73% drop off in new starts for house building in London, mostly caused by the building safety regulator. It was an important thing to do post-Grenfell to make sure our high-rise buildings were safe, but we created a regulator that didn't work, that was taking too long, that was causing delays and has ultimately stopped us from building new homes in London, pretty dramatically decreasing the number. The government needs to be far more quick and agile and responsive to what's happening out there in the country. Things change so quickly now that policy can't take as long as it used to in order to catch up. 

Lessons from a career in political polling*

The first thing I learned in polling is that there is a silent majority out there who are often very different from the noisy people that you hear from. Newspaper headlines do not represent the public view. My email inbox does not represent the public’s views. Planning consultations, which mostly hear from people who are opposed to projects, do not represent the views of the public who often appreciate, for example, the importance of building new homes or energy infrastructure.

The second thing I learned is not to sweat the small stuff. Ultimately, there may be an issue here that seems like it's really big, it seems like it's the end of the world, it seems like it's the only thing everyone ever cares about. But most voters are getting on with their lives, trying to look after their families and do their day job. They're not getting obsessed with what we're getting obsessed with.

* Chris spent close to a decade in political polling before becoming an MP, for the firms YouGov and Opinium.

The thing that annoys me most…

What will annoy me is when people dismiss what is self-evidently an issue. Often it is best in public affairs not to dismiss every problem that your client or your sector has, but to acknowledge them and acknowledge the challenges with fixing them. For example, I often find talking to water companies is quite a good experience because the water industry doesn’t pretend that what's happened in recent decades is even close to acceptable. They'll start from that position and then you can have a constructive conversation about how we move forward.

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