Today I am going to talk about politics and how we tend to approach it.

When I was working as an actuarial consultant we had a client who wanted to write to the local MP about how the Pension Protection Fund levy his company were paying on behalf of their admittedly poorly funded pension scheme was endangering the viability of the business itself. Our view was that it would do no harm and the letter was sent. Nothing came of the complaint, not that we had expected anything would, but the letter was responded to. And so have my letters both times I have written to my MP in a personal capacity, one of them even came back with a Minister’s letter enclosed with it.

One way of looking at this is that it is fantastic. It shows democracy working for individuals and businesses at a local level about the issues they care about. A kind of democracy service. This is certainly how we are encouraged to think of it.

However another way of thinking about it is that this is just bonkers. To understand this, consider some numbers.

There are not nearly enough GPs, according to the latest of many similar reports of a “looming health crisis”. How many full-time equivalent GPs are there per 1,000 patients per practice in England? 0.58, meaning that on average there is 1 GP for every 1,724 patients. GPs frequently complain that the standard 10 minute consultation this necessitates is not enough time to fully explore their health.

Compare this with the position of MPs, another profession which runs “surgeries”. There are 650 MPs to cover the whole of the UK. That’s one for every 92,000 people, or 68,000 voters. It is therefore faintly ludicrous to expect MPs to be able to:

• write to a relevant department or official;
• send a letter to an appropriate Minister;
• make a personal appointment to discuss an issue;
• make an issue public; or
• speak at an event concerning an issue.

for each and every one of his or her constituents and their businesses, as the blurb suggests. “These steps can often go a long way to providing a solution” it adds helpfully.

If we were all to take up this suggestion of course, the system could not cope. And it cannot, by definition, be fair: a 92,000th of the power of an MP, even if it’s the PM, is probably not worth having in your corner, so the process MP’s use to decide who to help becomes a postcode (or, in reality, power) lottery on a much grander scale than anything we might be concerned about in the NHS. So beware of MPs who say that their minds have been made up on an issue by what can only ever be anecdotal contact with their constituents at best.

Even when most of us don’t bother our MPs, they are still inundated with a level of enquiries, most misdirected, that makes it very hard for them to keep up with their parliamentary work.

So it is perhaps not unreasonable to suggest that an entirely parliamentary approach to doing politics might not be the only option. And now the Labour Party are exploring this idea in the current leadership election. To the side now coalescing around Owen Smith, Corbyn’s policy-making on the hoof and lack of organisation and discipline at times makes him unfit to lead a party set up in 1906 to promote “socialism via parliamentary means”. To Corbyn’s supporters, the party needs to become a movement not confined to Parliament, and the sudden surge in party membership to 450,000 and £4.6 million collected in 48 hours from the £25 fee paid by registered supporters are signs that he is the person who can deliver this.

People cannot agree whether Jeremy Corbyn represents the past or the future, which certainly makes the present very exciting. But if MPs are too busy to represent us the way we want to be represented, we may all need to get more involved in politics from now on.