Do MPs grasp everyday life in our ‘ordinary’ towns?

Tracking Back: In the latest of his series of reflections on place and pathway, Will Gore visits Watford and ponders the gap between the parliamentarian prism and reality

Watford is a diverse place with affluence and poverty (iStock)

It’s customary during election campaigns for politicians to hit the streets. They will meet “ordinary” people on the doorstep, feel their pain, or be heartened by their random stories of success. Prospective parliamentarians will put up with the occasional slammed door if the hard yards translate to votes on polling day.

Decent constituency MPs (there are some) will say that all this is nothing but an extension of their usual work, getting out and about to meet the people they represent. But it’s hard sometimes not to feel that in many cases, MPs don’t so much get out of the Westminster bubble as bring it with them wherever they go. And it means they are still viewing everything through the same filter.

Not long ago, I found myself in Watford for a meeting. I know the town a bit, having shopped occasionally for big ticket items in the Harlequin Shopping Centre (now rebranded as the Intu Watford), and been stranded frequently at Watford Junction station when electrical faults, leaves and the like have caused the main line from Euston to grind to a halt.

MPs don’t so much get out of the Westminster bubble as bring it with them wherever they go

My engagement on this occasion was with a potential project-partner at a business on the town’s south side. He had recommended getting a cab from the station but my natural aversion to taxis was not to be outdone. And in any case, much better to be on the move than killing half an hour in Starbucks.

The town centre was busy, even on a grey Monday in September. Young couples milled between shops, while office workers grabbed coffees and – in other places – larger groups of lads just hung around, mostly without menace. I took a shortcut through a car park and into the residential areas beyond.

Watford is a pretty diverse place: just over 60 per cent of the population is white; there is affluence and poverty; the MP is a Conservative, the mayor a Liberal Democrat. The streets I walked offered a glimpse of this complexity.

Much of the housing stock was Victorian, classic terraced homes – some neat and loved, others unkempt and probably tenanted. A large Edwardian factory building had already converted into smart flats; further on another large commercial premises looked to be going the same way. I wondered what existing residents made of it, and whether there would be additional infrastructure.

While these industrial buildings had had their day, there was plenty of commercial activity to be seen: halal groceries, computer and phone repair shops, hardware stores, kebab joints and plenty more besides – all competing with the Tesco Metro that hove into view at a crossroads. There weren’t many customers around.

A baptist church played host to a playgroup, pushchairs lined up by a side door. And, as drizzle set in, I warned a woman waiting for a bus that the stop she was standing at was closed. “No buses”, she repeated uncertainly, thinking perhaps that I wanted to catch one whereas she in fact was merely keeping out of the rain. We smiled at each other and I walked on

It was a normal, damp Monday in a very ordinary English town, where human life carried on as it always does – each person occupied with their own thoughts, maybe even in their own bubbles. It was a dull but oddly comforting reality; multi-layered to the point that its details were perhaps impenetrable, but without somehow being impossible to understand.

Can our politicians see these things when they are viewed through the prism of parliamentary ambition? Or do they see merely the reflection of their own success and failure, and hear only a voter won and lost?

I like to believe they can burst their own bubbles and take a big breath of real air – whether in Watford, Barnsley, Fife or anywhere else. In these troubled times we certainly need them to.