Member News
By Tony Grew - 27th June 2011
Milton Keynes does not have an exciting reputation.
Londoners in particular tend to scoff at its concrete cows, reticular road network and duff-sounding ‘Bowl’ venue.
The very name conjures up images of anodyne Barratt homes, bored kids on bikes and dreary middle-class pursuits.
So it is genuinely refreshing to meet a sincere enthusiast for the town.
Iain Stewart, a softly-spoken Scot with a perennial grin, is Tiggerish in his enthusiasm for MK.
"I like it," he tells me when we meet, “I genuinely like it.”
"I was no stranger to Milton Keynes when I first got selected as a candidate.
"I went to university in Exeter and when I graduated I joined an accounting firm. The process at the time was they recruited you to 'the firm', and then you had to go through an internal recruitment process to decide which office you went to.
"That’s why I ended up in Milton Keynes. It’s one of these places whose reputation does not do it justice.
"Everything is supposedly roundabouts, concrete cows, soulless concrete housing estates, but actually there is a very rich history in the place."
His enthusiasm comes as no surprise, of course, for Stewart is no carpetbagger inserted into a South East seat by Cameron's A-list shenanigans.
He fought Milton Keynes South West in 2001 and 2005, and lost both times.
Many wannabe MPs in his position would have spent the last Parliament jockeying for a safe seat, especially as the expenses unpleasantness meant a surge in newly vacant true-blue constituencies.
But Stewart stuck where he was, and on May 5, 2010 the good people of one of England's most maligned towns rewarded his hard work with a majority of 5,201 in the new seat of Milton Keynes South.
"In the two elections that I lost in ’01 and ’05, there is nothing else I could have done as a local candidate to swing the result," he explains.
"It was the national mood - people in the country didn’t want a Tory government in those elections.
"Standing my ground, it helped me build up a local profile, which I think does make a difference.
"In a time when there was a lot of cynicism about politics, I was able to show a loyalty to the place, campaign on local issues, and build up a profile that I was genuinely interested in what was going on, which you can’t fake over a decade. I think that does make a difference."
Stewart was also no stranger to Westminster - he headed the Parliamentary Resources Unit, which supports Tory MPs from 2001 to 2006.
That experience gives him a perspective lacking in some of the 2010 intake. He is "absolutely loving" serving on the transport committee, he says, and not at all worried about not being a PPS.
"Yes I’ve got ambitions, of course I do. I’d like to be able to be a minister one day, but I’m not in any great rush for it.
"I’d rather get a good grounding.
"Certainly, I want to stay in the select committee for the time being, when we are doing interesting inquiries with high-speed rail, in particular, coming up, which I really want to get my teeth into."
He takes his committee duties seriously. He recently drove out to some villages in Kent to gauge how loud High Speed 1 trains are when they pass through.
The verdict?
"Quieter than I thought."
Stewart has a useful facility for towing the party line while making his own point.
This is a good skill for an MP who wants to work their way up the greasy pole.
Take reform of the House of Lords.
"I’m a traditionalist, I don’t like revolutionary change," he begins.
"Britain has been a product of evolution, not revolution. House of Lords reform is not something that I would die a death for.
"If push comes to shove, I’d probably select a majority elected upper House, but not fully elected.
"For me the critical issue is what the House of Lords does; in my view it is very much a revising chamber for letting off steam, for extra scrutiny.
"I would hate to get to a position where the Lords suddenly rivalled the Commons."
It is often said by Westminster wags that if you ask 25 Tory MPs what the Big Society is, you will get 25 different answers.
The policy has proved difficult to sell, and Stewart puts it mildly when he admits it is "an evolving concept".
He tacks back to praise for MK.
"Milton Keynes is leading the way in the Big Society," he asserts, with disturbing credibility.
"Because it is a new town and the vast majority of people have come from somewhere else, there is very much a pioneer spirit that this is our place, and we shape it how we want to do it.
"We have got quite a mixed ethnic and religious community, all of whom rub along very well together.
"We have never had any of the religious or ethnic tensions that other urban areas have had because right from the word ‘go’ all the communities have worked together in being involved in civic life.
"There are a lot of charities, Milton Keynes is a very well networked place.
"If a new charity wants to get going it can tap into the business network, charity network and crystallise what it wants to do."
If the Milton Keynes Lightning, the town's ice hockey team, are ever short of a cheerleader, they should give Stewart a call.
"It sounds idyllic," I venture.
"It is, you should come and visit," he replies without missing a beat.
We move on to another area of interest, namely gay rights.
At last week's prime minister's questions, Stewart asked a question about homophobia in sport.
He insists it was not a planted question, but it did allow David Cameron to mention that he was hosting a party in Downing St for LGBT sportspeople that evening.
A few hours after PMQs, Cameron told his 200 guest how proud he was that an openly gay MP asked that question; proof that if the Tory party can change its stance on LGBT rights, then so can other organisations.
Stewart was clearly chuffed by the PM's words, but rejects my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that he is "a poster boy for gay rights".
"I don’t want to only be regarded as interested in gay rights, but I’ve got a responsibility too, to make sure those issues are not forgotten and are raised in Parliament with the ministers.
"I think that government has got a good programme looking at some of the issues, and I hope that we are getting to the point in British politics where it is not seen as a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, where we get away from that nonsense name-calling.
"I know Conservative history is far from perfect on this issue.
"I am hoping that we can get into mature debate now about specific issues."
A sign of that maturing politics is the fact that "never once" has his sexuality been raised on the doorstep.
"That is a reflection on changing attitudes in society.
"I'm sure there are some people that hold that view but they have never expressed it to me. But, neither do I walk around carrying a big rainbow flag."
He is still willing to give it a bit of a wave for Alan Turing.
Turing was a computing genius and unsung wartime hero who was harried and abused for being gay, until he took his own life by eating a poisoned apple.
Stewart speaks with real passion as he recalls the tale of a man he describes as "one of the top code-breakers and the father of the modern computing era".
There is a constituency connection, of course. He worked at Bletchley Park, the wartime code-breaking centre in Stewart's patch.
"Turing was gay, but he was heavily persecuted for it.
"He was arrested and forced to undergo electro-chemical treatment which shortened his life.
"Belatedly the country has acknowledged that a wrong was done to him.
"Gordon Brown, to his credit, made the official apology and there have been a number of developments since, which I think are helpful.
"We are obviously coming up to the centenary of his birth next year, which is a fitting time to acknowledge him.
"There was thankfully a successful campaign to save Bletchley Park, to buy his original papers, in which he sets out things like artificial intelligence for the first time in a scientific document.
"This is the starting point for a lot of the development of modern computers.
"The campaign to get those papers – you asked earlier about the Big Society, this was a perfect example – because the money to get that, they needed the time to get it. That’s where I came in; I raised it to Parliament and helped them buy the time to put it together.
"The money was a mix of a donation from the National Lottery, a very generous donation from Google, a big corporate donation.
"But, critically, hundreds and thousands of individual donations – someone had the idea to set up a viral campaign using Paypal or one of those things – and that raised the money collectively and got those papers secured for the nation. And I am hoping that they will help boost Bletchley's status as a national museum."
We turn finally to Scotland, and the spectre of independence.
Stewart is not just a proud unionist, but a thoughtful one. He has written papers on the economic impact of a separate Scotland, and his overarching message to those seeking independence is it is not as simple as it looks.
"We are now in uncharted waters and everyone has got to think very carefully about this," he says of the SNP's recent victory.
"I am a unionist, and I will do everything I can to stop the country I love from being broken up.
"I’m a Scot 100 per cent by birth; my dad is on one of these ancestor websites, and as far as he has gone back I am pure-blood Scot.
"But I define my nationality as British: through marriage in the family now my family is both Scottish and English, and I define my nationality as British.
"After 300 years of union it has been a big success, socially, historically, economically; it has been to our huge benefit. So, to try and split that up, to me, seems unnecessary.
"For me it would be a big emotional wrench. Scotland has a thriving culture, I don’t think being free necessitates being a separate country.
"There is a very strong expression of Scottish identity. I’ll cheer as loudly as anyone else for Scotland on the rugby field, but that is not incompatible with being a part of the United Kingdom."
Stewart points out that if the SNP gets the independence it wants from England, the nation "could survive but it would be unstable, at least to begin with".
"I don’t mean unstable in a negative way; it’s because to begin with it would effectively be a petro-currency, and subject to the huge fluctuations, and also a petro-currency that would be declining as North Sea reserves diminish.
"So that creates an uncertainty.
"Obviously the problems with the banking system; I don’t know how a separate Scotland would cope with that, with problems such as Iceland and Ireland have had.
"Would a separate Scotland have been able to cope with that? Well, I’m not one of these people of doom and gloom that there won’t be any money to do anything.
"Of course, I just think we are better off together.
"On where we go from here, we do it in a pragmatic way. We look at issues on tax and spending on a sensible basis. We don’t know the true fiscal relationship because we have always had a unitary tax and fiscal system. To start unpicking that; well, people can make estimates and forecasts, but no-one actually knows.
"The SNP argues for a devolution of corporate tax. I’m not necessarily against that but I just don’t think that we have enough information at the minute to make that decision.
"On all these issues, monetary or elsewhere, I want to look at it at a more practical level, not through a constitutional prism of: ‘is this going to further us towards independence’ or ‘is this going to safeguard the union’?”
He also suggests the nationalists’ "real endpoint is not independence in totality, but to achieve a much greater degree of fiscal autonomy".
But as we have learnt, Stewart's heart is not in Holyrood but in Milton Keynes, and he is already pondering the next general election with characteristic optimism.
"By the time we get to 2015 the plans that we have put forward as a government will hopefully come to fruition; the economy’s back on track and the finances are getting sorted out, and we’ve made some of the social policy reforms.
"Both coalition parties can turn around at elections and say, together we did this.
"We have moved the country on successfully in the last five years, now here are our competing visions of where we go from here, and as in all elections, there will be some policies that we agree on and others that we disagree on.
"And then it is up to the electorate to decide.
"What I am totally against is presenting to the country some sort of pre-conceived coalition.
"I’m sorry, that is treating the electorate as fools.
"Each party puts a manifesto forward, receives what the result is and then you go forward from there."
Until then, Stewart will continue to cheerlead for Milton Keynes from the Tory backbenches.
Tony Grew is parliamentary editor of ePolitix.com
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