Lathikka

We initially began reading the news to create a briefing upon the daily events, to ensure that the office was up to date on local news. This led to me writing a letter on Michael’s behalf to Colehill First school. We did some secretarial tasks, throughout the day, learnt about the difference between parliamentary and political work and the important work constituency staff do for their constituents.

Had a guided tour of Parliament and learnt about the extensive history of democracy and how we arrived at our current political system today. Travelling around the Palaces of Westminster, with specific highlights of the tour being the ancient and famous St Stephen’s chapel, the House of Lords’ chamber and the centre Lobby where we spotted some notable MPs, Gavin Williamson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Caroline Lucas. We were lucky enough to then watch an Urgent Question - regarding mortgages and the implied effect on cost-of-living crisis, it was an interesting debate with opposition MPs grilling Andrew Griffith (Economic Secretary to Treasury) about how the Conservative government intend to deal with the mortgage market crisis. We were able to watch Richard Graham introduce his ten-minute bill on Spiking, which was agreed to. We met up with two civil servants, Lydia and Abby, who helped us understand what and how the Civil Service works, and learnt how we can become Civil service members. We also managed to see the cupboard-esque! constituency office in London and the incredibly intricate architecture of Parliament.

We began planning for a debate that would happen at the end of the week, on compulsory national service. We chose teams and began planning for our motion side. I began preparing my side of voting against compulsory national service. I also finished drafting an article, Facebook post and a tweet for Michael’s social media platforms, deepening my insight and understanding of what actually parliamentary staff do.
Post Parliament, we wrote up a briefing of the 10-minute rule bill on Spiking, to update Michael on the content and outcome

We continued planning for a debate and learnt about the importance of casework, and what indeed casework was! We looked at tasks which used partially true cases to show what a casework in a parliamentary office must do and the difficulties of navigating such a varied and complex job! We began stuffing letters with cost-of-living crisis surveys for the constituents to fill out which would be posted in due course.
We then discussed our fantasy cabinets made up of people, living or dead, that we would like to see in government.

Initially, began with us continuing to stuff letters! We then started to distribute these letters - through the Corfe Mullen area, knocking on the door of constituents and learning about what is often a very major but time-consuming part of the role. It was incredibly useful to see how an MP would directly contact their constituents and in what ways a constituent can interact with an MP.
The final port of call for the week was the debate, which took a parliamentary-style structure and opened up another learning opportunity for both how a debate would work, but what type of public speaker I could be - headed by Michael as speaker with the rest of the staff, Frances, Laura and Simon taking key roles and interjecting!

This week of work experience has shown me the importance of parliamentary work both within the constituency and London, demonstrating the intricacies of how government and Parliament works and what it takes to deal with the day-to-day running of the country. The constituency staff (Frances, Simon, Hailey and Laura) along with Michael were incredibly helpful and informative and provided me with a clearer path of what I could do should I choose to study politics and immerse myself in the political world. It has genuinely shown me that working in politics needn’t be so adversarial! Despite myself not being a Conservative, I was shown the side of government and politics that never is shown by the media, the side which is collaborative, genuine and demonstrates that there are people, working on all sides that do want to make this country a safer, better and more loving place to live in.