A newly elected Labour MP has urged colleagues not to overlook the 2024 intake, as she defended her decision to run for the chair of an influential select committee only weeks after being elected.
Marie Tidball said the historically large 2024 cohort of MPs would offer “fresh eyes and fresh experience” to parliament and government, as she bid to be head of the education select committee.
Tidball is one of a handful of new MPs looking to be elected as heads of select committees when MPs vote on Wednesday, while others have already been made ministers. The rapid promotion of new MPs has caused disquiet among some colleagues, who complain the new set of Labour members are pushing out those with more experience.
In an interview with the Guardian, Tidball said the country needed the skills offered by those who were swept to office for the first time in Labour’s landslide election win.
“I think it’s incumbent on us, given the grave and difficult problems this country is facing, where we have the skills and experiences to do the very best for this country … we ought to use those skills and experiences,” she said.
“We need a range of variety of voices and experiences from professional backgrounds within select committees and coming at problems that have faced us for a very long time with fresh eyes and fresh experience.
“You’ve got a whole load of new MPs that haven’t just spent their life in politics, that have loads of skills, worked in a variety of areas. Let’s draw on them, and let’s offer the very best to this country so that we can come up with the solutions that it needs to move issues forward.”
Tidball is one of three candidates applying to be chair of the committee, and is not widely expected to win. However even her candidacy has upset some of her more experienced colleagues.
More than half of British constituencies are represented by a newly elected MP, after a record-breaking 335 were voted in at this year’s general election in July. The vast majority of them sit on the Labour benches.
Tidball is one of several new Labour MPs aiming to chair one of the influential cross-party select committees, which have the power to launch inquiries and call in ministers for questioning.
Mike Tapp is running for the justice select committee, David Pinto-Duschinsky is going for the work and pensions committee, Alice MacDonald is seeking to be head of the international development committee, and Shaun Davies is running for the housing and local government committee.
Others in the 2024 intake, meanwhile, have already been given jobs in the government, in many cases even before they were allocated an office on the parliamentary estate. These include Georgia Gould, who is a Cabinet Office minister, Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister, and Miatta Fahnbulleh, an energy minister.
Their appointments have caused friction within parliament, with some MPs complaining that their less experienced colleagues were pushing for high office too early into their careers. One MP recently told Politico the select committee candidacies of 2024-intake MPs had gone down “like a bucket of cold sick”.
Tidball, however, who has a disability and has been a disability rights campaigner for much of her career, insisted parliament would benefit from more MPs with backgrounds like hers.
“I missed three years of school because of the surgeries that I needed,” she said. “I believe that experience means I get that not everyone has a linear education pathway. And we need to think about how we get children that, for all sorts of reasons, have missed periods of school, back into school and staying in school.”
