Or if they did, they would find themselves with little influence with the already established metropolitan elites. It's a rather self-serving coterie of professional apparatchiks. keep to the Fen Causeway
Those who do their jobs well within the constituency can gain very valuable experience about the issues that effect people locally, the realities of day to day life. Being out campaigning on the doorstep is a real eyeopener if your constituency has poor areas and blocks of council estates. If you then go one step further and actually talk to these people, engage them, get them along to surgeries and genuinely listen (some do!) then that approach is hugely valuable.
Trouble is (whatever party) many MPs are not really the link between their constituency and the Parliamentary process that they should be. So decisions get made without having a ground level view of what the impact can be for people, or at least a very selective or distorted view. Ad astra per aspera
but those who entered the union heirarchy directly from university and made the right alliances there and then. They still have little experience of real work.
This is the kind of view one usually gets from the right - a a bit like ValentinD :-) - never mind all this academic theory, WE understand the real world from our experience of "real work".
In fact "real work" - cf TBG: "a white collar working class who do crappy menial office jobs - working in call centres, accounts, basic IT maintenance, salesandmarketing, training." - is likely to give you a competence in a few routine skills and very little general understanding of the world, while a GOOD academic education can quickly expand horizons and understanding enormously. Unfortunately too much higher education is very narrow in focus - just like much work. We fund education so that people don't have to try to learn everything over again from experience.
It's no surprise to me at all that, as Drew said:
The college kids running the Obama campaign did better than I've ever seen the unions do.
2.I was referring to Helen's comment about "real work", not to experience in general and certainly not to trade union experience, which can often be an education in itself and the unions have encouraged members and especially union representatives to continue their education.
3. Let's look at the guy mainly responsible for the NHS, Bevan - it supports my argument :
[He] became a trade union activist: he was head of his local Miners' Lodge at only 19. Bevan became a well-known local orator ... In 1919, he won a scholarship to the Central Labour College in London, sponsored by the South Wales Miners' Federation. At the college he gained his life-long respect for Karl Marx. ... Upon returning home in 1921 - [he was mainly out of work until] In 1926, he found work again, this time as a paid union official... ... In 1928, Bevan won a seat on Monmouthshire County Council. With that success he was picked as the Labour Party candidate for Ebbw Vale ... The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, appointed Aneurin Bevan as Minister of Health, with a remit that also covered Housing. Thus, the responsibility for instituting a new and comprehensive National Health Service, as well as tackling the country's severe post-war housing shortage, fell to the youngest member of Attlee's Cabinet in his first ministerial position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
How about the PM - Atlee - "In 2004, he was voted as the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of professors organised by MORI."
He was educated at Northaw School, Haileybury and University College, Oxford, where he graduated with a Second Class Honours BA in Modern History in 1904. Attlee then trained as a lawyer, and was called to the Bar in 1906. [A bit like Tony's background. Of course general experience can be very important too:] From 1906 to 1909, Attlee worked as manager of Haileybury House, a club for working class boys in Limehouse in the East End of London run by his old school. Prior to this, Attlee's political views had been conservative. However, he was shocked by the poverty and deprivation he saw while working with slum children, and this caused him to convert to socialism. ... Attlee became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1912, but promptly applied for a Commission in August 1914 for World War I. [And the latter would have been quite an education - nothing like ordinary "real work".] After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics until 1923. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee
[A bit like Tony's background.
Of course general experience can be very important too:]
From 1906 to 1909, Attlee worked as manager of Haileybury House, a club for working class boys in Limehouse in the East End of London run by his old school. Prior to this, Attlee's political views had been conservative. However, he was shocked by the poverty and deprivation he saw while working with slum children, and this caused him to convert to socialism. ... Attlee became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1912, but promptly applied for a Commission in August 1914 for World War I.
[And the latter would have been quite an education - nothing like ordinary "real work".]
After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics until 1923.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee
Bevan was famously driven by his ferocious sympathy for people who did 'real work.'
Do you think that sympathy originated at the Central Labour College, or during his time as a trade unionist?
Likewise with Attlee, whose views were conservative in spite of his impressively broad academic education, and were only changed when he worked with and for people who did 'real work.'
In fact "real work" - cf TBG: "a white collar working class who do crappy menial office jobs - working in call centres, accounts, basic IT maintenance, salesandmarketing, training." - is likely to give you a competence in a few routine skills and very little general understanding of the world, while a GOOD academic education can quickly expand horizons and understanding enormously.
Clearly I was talking about much of "real work" today and its routine narrowness. Nor was I saying that education is the only thing that counts. In my reply to you I said that general experience is important and I noted that the experience Atlee had in the East End was very important.
Having "sympathy" is one thing, understanding what to do about it and how to operate in complex political situations at a national and international level is another. Clearly Bevan went beyond being sympathetic to workers, as no doubt most workers were, to get a broader education which included the study of Marx, which he thought very important. Obviously unions thought it was not enough for their representatives to have their hearts in the right place, which is why they sponsored the education of people like Bevan. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Not sure what you mean, but it shouldn't be surprising for one simple reason: A bunch of old UAW guys in Ohio aren't going to be able to make sense of new technology. A bunch of college kids in North Carolina will, because they use it every day.
I don't think it has anything to do with an academic education. There are plenty of older, college-educated people who don't get it. (And obviously it's not universal. There are many older people, college-educated and not college-educated, who are more up-to-date on this stuff than most younger people, and there are many younger people who don't have a clue.) Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
