Last week, while the media were preoccupied with Downing Street parties, an election took place in parliament in which every sitting MP had a vote. The purpose was to fill the post vacated by Yvette Cooper’s elevation to the shadow cabinet: chair of the home affairs select committee.
It’s a powerful position: the winner can subpoena witnesses, make statements to the house and issue reports and recommendations on some of the biggest issues of the day. All the chairs of parliament’s 30 key committees serve as members of the liaison committee and get to grill the prime minister regularly at close quarters. Follow-up questions are allowed, unlike at prime minister’s questions, where slots are drawn out of a hat with very poor odds. Chairships are divvied up between the big two parties in proportion to how many MPs each has, so this was a guaranteed Labour post.
Despite the universal acknowledgment that we need a parliament that reflects wider society, backed up with strategies and policies to achieve it, there is a glaring omission in this vital element of our democracy: not a single one of the current 30 committee chairs is black or from a minority ethnic background. I tried to change that. I failed.
Before becoming an MP in 2015 I was an academic and sociologist, writing books on drugs and riots. In my first parliament I was Labour’s home affairs spokesperson and a shadow minister, so I reckoned I was suitably qualified. Others who’d trodden the same path before, unsuccessfully, warned me of the awkward conversations these elections entail: the sucking up to Tories for votes, the fierce competition with others in your own party. Nonetheless I went for it – how bad could it be?
In the end Dame Diana Johnson, the continuity candidate from the committee, won. My 132 votes garnered to her 154 placed me second of three candidates. I’m delighted for her and know she’ll be great. But the experience confirmed many things I’d been warned of.
In 2020, my friend and fellow London BAME MP Kate Osamor, who ran for the international development committee, crunched the figures. LGBT and disability are represented among committee chairs, she found, with women catching up, but black and minority ethnic representation lagged seriously behind.
As she points out, BAME candidates all too often don’t get taken seriously. As it is the media tend to mix us up: I’ve been captioned as Tulip Siddiq by the BBC.
The same has happened to Dawn Butler and Marsha de Cordova, and others. In this case, media coverage described me as “considering a tilt” rather than being a serious contender. That has its effect; possible candidates don’t stand because they fear how they will be perceived. And thus we see an eerie repeat of the underestimation/underachievement loop that means BAME footballers struggle to become managers, black lawyers struggle to make partner, and black police officers rarely rise to the rank of chief constable.
This matters because, unlike the weekly pantomime of the chamber and PMQs, select committees do have the ability to hold the powerful to account on the nation’s behalf, and have a record of actually doing so. Remember beleaguered Rupert Murdoch’s appearance amid the hacking scandal, the discomforting of Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley over his company’s working practices, and the spectacle of Dominic Cummings likening Boris Johnson to a shopping trolley careering around with no direction – an epithet that stuck.
But there is weakness in homogeneity. During the digital, culture, media and sport select committee’s inquiry into the racism in cricket scandal, it was remarked that none of the admirable MPs involved in cross-examination had any first-hand experience of the racism being discussed. To have a committee chair who could identify with how it feels to be racially abused, to be called a “Paki”, might have sent out a powerful signal.
I hope things will change, but I can’t help but notice that of the three committees I’ve served on, justice, public administration and Brexit, the chairs have been either knighted or the offspring of MPs – or, in the case of Sir Bernard Jenkin, both. This feels like a replicating pattern.
And while there has undoubtedly been progress in diversity – on both sides of the house – since 1987, when my ex-boss Diane Abbott first took up her seat alongside Keith Vaz, Bernie Grant and Paul Boateng, progression in key aspects of parliamentary life – the roles that shape how the executive does its job – seems to have stalled. At this rate, for example, will we ever see a person of colour in the Speaker’s chair, refereeing proceedings?
I may not have got the chairship but the experience was salutary, and this is not about me as an individual. Surely the concern for every MP must be how it appears that no one who looks anything like me tends to get there. The one exception was Keith Vaz who was forced, amid scandal, to resign in 2016.
We need more MPs to vote in these elections – less than half of those eligible did this time – and for them to see a broader picture when they do.
In parliament’s shop window, we have the most diverse house ever with Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, Kwasi Kwarteng and Sajid Javid in powerful public roles, but in committee-land, where important stuff happens without the Punch and Judy style spectacle, it’s still “hideously white” (as Greg Dyke once described the BBC). As we head into 2022, is that acceptable?
Rupa Huq is the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton
