The Daily Echo 17 January 2008

Written by Sandra Gidley MP on Thu 17th Jan 2008

I sometimes despair. This is the stage in the parliamentary cycle when new legislation is being introduced and many MPs are spending hours in committee rooms looking in considerable detail at proposed legislation.

I picked up a tabloid newspaper in the tearoom and scanned it for parliamentary coverage. The most prominent article went into some detail about whether a Minister had used a rude word and whether this had later been deleted from Hansard, which is the official parliamentary record. This was closely followed by a damning piece on Peter Hain. The only other substantial article dealt with the subject of MPs pay.

I couldn't find any mention of Home Office Questions, the second reading of the Education and Skills Bill or the committee stages of numerous bills including Health and Social Care, Planning or any number of bills which affect my constituents' lives. Yet the newspaper I was reading is very widely read by my constituents.

It is no wonder that most people I meet have a very jaded idea of politicians as they receive a very uni dimensional picture of what is going on and seem to regard us all as a load of wastrels, living it up in Stangers bar whilst awaiting for the pension to accrue. We're not perfect but most of us work hard for our money.

Faced with this jaded attitude it has been a delight recently to spend some time with the next generation of voters. I have been visiting a number of schools talking to children about Parliament and what my job involves. The children and young people are engaging and challenging. The relative lack of cynicism may be purely down to the fact that few of them seem to read newspapers - a worrying trend in itself. But, the fact remains, that the young people are learning about democracy, parliament, local government and about how decisions made by others affect their lives. I wish I had received such a grounding when I was their age.

So I have left to be wondering where it all goes wrong. Why do the media prefer to run a negative story rather than a positive one? It is not just politics that suffers but I would suggest that it suffers more than most. I can't decide whether the cynicism of the press is a direct cause of public attitude or whether there is an all pervading cynicism in 2008 life that pervades the press. So for 2008 let's try and look at the bright side of life - for some of the time at least.

Published with kind permission of the Daily Echo