The Conservative party will lose almost 1,000 years of Commons experience just from MPs who have already announced they are standing down, a Guardian analysis has shown, amid an exodus likely to be even greater than in 1997.
So far, 66 MPs elected as Conservatives in 2019 have announced they will not stand again – this includes four who have since lost the whip and sit as independents – which is close to one in five of the total.
Suppressing my initial urge towards sarcasm, the calculation seems to be based on a simplistic calculation of number of total years served. If we look at one example, Bill Cash, mentioned in the article he has forty years of experience. Unfortunately, that forty years was spent as a backbencher, which if you don’t have a handle on it after three years probably indicates that you have been promoted by the voters beyond your level of incompetence.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who despite having a moral deficit, is a much more effective tool for the Conservative Party having a clear grasp of Parliamentary procedure and has only 14 years as an MP.
So in terms of experience longevity is not indicative of the loss of expertise to the Conservative Party.
So in a sense the calculation is too simplistic but in another perhaps it’s unnecessarily complex. British Parliamentary democracy is a pure numbers game where quantity of MPs, rather than quality, is the be all and end all. It is my hope that it’s this simple total will be reduced by at least a couple of hundred.