Wales’ new political elite at Westminster

Professor Russell Deacon, visiting professor and lecturer at the University of South Wales 

The question often asked about going to university these days is “What’s the point of getting a university degree in Wales?” or “What profession can it get you into that not having a degree can’t?”.

There are some obvious answers. Medicine? Of course you need one! Lawyers? Obviously! Accountants?

Maybe you could gain vocational qualifications! What about being a Member of Parliament? Surely not.

Isn’t that the one profession that requires no formal qualifications to enter? In fact, the profession you don’t need a degree or even one GCSE for is also one that pays a basic salary of £91,346 a year as a starting salary plus expenses.

You’ll find, however, in reality, that it’s almost impossible to become an MP without your BA, BSc etc.

This article explores the extent and nature of the educational divide between Welsh MPs and those they represent. It also examines the second big divide into who represents the 42% of the Welsh population that didn’t vote for a party that gained a Parliamentary seat in Wales in 2024.

Representative representatives

In some very visible ways Welsh MPs appear very representative of the wider Welsh population. In a number of key areas Welsh MPs are fairly, if not exactly, representative of the Welsh population.

On gender balance, 49% of the Welsh population are male, as opposed to 53% of Welsh MPs. For females the ratio is 51% and 47% of MPs.

This is the closest to equilibrium there has been at a Welsh general election. We should also not underestimate what a step forward this is: remember that until 1997 the ratio of male to female MPs in Wales was 97.5% male and 2.5% female.

The Welsh Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and Plaid Cymru had all never had a female MP at that point in time. This move to near gender balance has seen a seismic change in Wales.

The geographical origins of Welsh MPs are also almost proportional to those they represent.

Those Welsh MPs born outside of the UK are 6% and for the Welsh population it is 7%. Equally, the proportion of the Welsh population born in England is 21% as opposed to Welsh MPs at 25%.

Less proportional are those Welsh MPs going to private school: at 19%, it’s nearly 10 times that of the Welsh population as a whole, which is just 2%.

We should remember this figure does not include any Conservative MPs, who are the normal advocates of private education. Instead it includes mainly those parties that are advocates of state education.

It is the educational background of MPs, particularly their university education, that provides the most disparity in representation of MPs compared to the overall Welsh population, however.

The university challenge

Only two MPs are not listed as having undergraduate degrees: Gerald Jones in the Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare constituency and Llinos Medi in Ynys Môn. So that means that 92% of Wales’ new MPs have degrees and 95% of those MPs in Wales who were returned for a second or subsequent term also have degrees.

In 2022 some 31.5% of the Welsh population had undergraduate degrees as opposed to 96% of Welsh MPs. These MPs therefore are three times more likely to have a degree than the general population of Wales.

Now, a quarter of Welsh MPs have also been to Oxbridge (mainly Oxford rather than Cambridge).

This means that Welsh MPs are 3125 times more likely to go to Oxbridge than their comparable Welsh undergraduate cohort in 2022.

Welsh MPs are also half as likely to go to university in Wales (as opposed to elsewhere) as the general population – just 31% as opposed to 62% of the Welsh undergraduate population.

So even at an undergraduate level Welsh MPs are not representative of the Welsh population. Therefore, whereas seven MPs went to Oxford in England, less than half of this number went to the most common Welsh university for Welsh students – Cardiff University.

Some of Wales’ largest universities produced no MPs in the current cohort. No MP was an undergraduate at the University of South Wales or Bangor University.

Does it matter that nearly all MPs are also graduates? Now this article is not against having a degree or going to university. It is, however, here to raise the question whether not having a degree should also be valued for representation, just as equality of gender, sexuality and ethnic origin are.

Are we confusing education with intelligence and not facilitating intelligent and able non-graduates to become elected representatives as well?

Does having an academic degree unnecessarily exclude other types of education, such those who did vocational and professional qualifications or those that are not mainly desk based from becoming MPs?

Political elites

In May this year the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel gave a talk at the Hay Literature Festival on political elites. He questioned the “elitism of the university degree”, with its massive over-representation within the democratic system, which he indicated stalls “social mobility and increases inequality”.

In this respect in Wales we would seem to have a Parliamentary system for Westminster with the university degree acting as the gatekeeper for both selection and election to Westminster that Sandel highlighted as a problem for liberal democracies.

If you were studying politics at A level or degree level you would know that the political theory indicates that in “liberal democracies”, in which Wales is categorised, the widening of the electoral franchise over the centuries has led to general agreement that all adults over the age of 16/18 regardless of gender or race be allowed to take part in this democracy and should also be part of those representing us.

Historically, graduates have been advantaged politically but the dual system of graduates having a constituency vote and a Welsh university seat vote ended in 1950.

It was seen as being elitist and putting graduates electorally above everyone else by giving them greater value in the electoral system with plural voting. Every voter’s vote after 1950, therefore, should in theory mean that all voters are equal.

This general pluralist view of democracy believes that less advantaged groups in society should also be encouraged to take an active part in this society. A democracy for all! Yet with respect to higher level education, it is the wider non-university-educated group that is almost wholly excluded from being an elected representative in Wales.

Despite the bias towards graduates in Welsh politics being officially removed almost three quarters of a century ago, unofficial bias towards graduate representatives, however, now supports elitist theory that the most important decisions in society should be left to those with the relevant qualification ie. a degree.

According to this theory the elected representatives are “better” than most of the people they represent because they have the required qualification that enables them to make better decisions than those that don’t have it.

This would indicate that the possession of a degree is one of the defining factors behind who are in the political elite. This means that while the representatives of the parties may change at elections between Conservatives and Labour, for instance, the university educated “democratic elite” will remain constantly there.

Therefore, although at Westminster Wales sees itself as a nation that practises political pluralism as a “liberal democracy”, it actually supports a form of political elitism that is centrally underpinned by a university educational background.

Not all votes are equal in Wales!

One other large degree of unrepresentation, frequently mentioned, is that MPs are not representative of political viewpoints of more than one third of the Welsh electorate.

In fact 42% of those who voted in Wales in the July election voted for a political party that didn’t win a single seat in Wales.

Under the First Past The Post electoral system we use, there are massive distortions between the number of people voting for a party and the number of MPs it gets elected (proportionality).

Under our current electoral system most MPs are elected by gaining the majority of the minority votes, which means they get the highest number of votes from those contesting the seat, NOT necessarily the majority of votes in that seat. This can mean in practice that almost three quarters of the voters did not vote for them to be the MP.

The results of this in 2024 are that proportionally, the Welsh Conservatives have six missing MPs, according to their proportional share of the vote; Reform have five missing MPs; the Lib Dems one. Plaid are roughly equal in seats to their vote share yet Labour gained 84% of the seats on 37% of the vote.

That’s around 10-11 more seats than their share of the vote entitled them to. The unrepresentativeness of the First Past The Post system is well documented but in respect of this article it highlights another barrier to being a pluralist democracy.

Lessons to be learned?

Two things are certain therefore about Welsh representation at Westminster in 2024:

1 MPs are not elected proportionally to those they represent ideologically;

2 They are not proportionally representative of the educational background of their constituents.

Why does any of this matter? Well, as we stated at the start of the article, MPs are famous as a profession for needing “no qualifications or experience to enter”. This is political pluralism, with anyone being able to participate in the contest for an MP with an almost equal chance of being elected. This is the central pillar at the heart of our parliamentary representative process.

When this is put to the test, however, if you don’t have a university degree and can’t navigate the electoral system you almost certainly won’t be an MP. These types of entry barriers result in us having a system of government closer to “political elitism”.

Perhaps the days of Welsh MPs being “pale, male and stale” are vastly diminished, but the gap between “town and gown” and the gap between voting and being voted in are perhaps stronger now than ever before.

At the moment, to be a Welsh MP two factors are the most important: join Labour and go to a university in England to get your first degree (70% of Welsh Labour MPs did).

MPs may argue that they have working class roots or belong to other underrepresented groups. As MPs from working class backgrounds, for instance, Marxists may argue that they haven’t removed the class barrier: all they have done is follow and gain the entry criteria – via university – to become one of the ruling class elite themselves, benefitting from individual social mobility.

The Welsh MPs’ club is also skewed on entry, as we saw earlier, due to the electoral system, with a heavy bias to those that support Labour.

If you don’t do so naturally, you will need to attune yourself to that party in 2024 or you’ll have a far smaller chance of becoming an MP, eg Plaid Cymru or Lib Dems, or no chance at all if you’re from the Conservatives, Reform or the Green Party.

As for being an independent MP without a prior party political background, you have zero chance of getting elected. None have been elected in this century or the last in Wales. A party label is even more important than a degree. Therefore, it does not matter what university or how educated you are: in Wales, if you don’t have a background in party politics you’ll never be a Welsh MP.

For elections, as Michael Sandle has noted of other “liberal democracies”, wanting a diverse representation and not ending up with a political elite whose representatives come from the minority and not the majority leaves us with some questions worthy of debate:

* Why when we say it is not desirable that only people with a degree can vote do we then only give the power to cast our votes in parliament and govern us nearly solely to people with degrees?

* Should people without degrees be almost totally excluded from becoming MPs in Wales? If not, how can selection be altered to be more inclusive?

* If constituencies wish to enhance non graduate representatives, how can they do so when candidates are imposed from the central party – as was the case with a number of Welsh Labour MPs, in the 2024 general elections?

* What skill sets are missing in our national governance and political life by excluding those with non university backgrounds?

* Should those MPs that study at Welsh universities have a better chance of becoming an MP?

* Can we justify an electoral system that ignores the votes of 42% of the Welsh population who didn’t vote for the three political parties that gained the 32 MPs?

* How can politics find space for those candidates who are independent or non party mindset?

If we are to move away from having a political elite the debate surely needs to start now.

* The statistics quoted in the article are taken from the Wales Census, Government Wales, UCAS, MPs’ entries on the Westminster Parliament site, Wikipedia and Linked In, 2024 general election results. Calculations on these are the author’s, who apologises for any errors.

Professor Russell Deacon is a visiting professor and lecturer at the University of South Wales and also a lecturer at Coleg Gwent. The article represents the viewpoint of the author and not the institutions he is employed by.