Part of Parliament: Researcher Sam Mason
4 min read
Sam Mason is a parliamentary researcher for crossbench peer Baroness Caroline Cox. From a close shave in rural Nigeria to pencil pushing in Westminster, no two days are the same
I’ve never been that interested in party politics; it’s the issues that motivate me. And someone like Caroline – who’s got a big heart and a passion for justice – what she does is the sort of thing I’m drawn to and want to be involved with.
Caroline’s sphere is humanitarian aid. She’s devoted her life to it – going to war zones and places off the radar of the world’s media. And it’s my role to support her in doing that from her parliamentary office. My job is sorting the procedural aspects behind the bigger objective of making a difference.
I’ve got long to-do lists. It can range from the mundane things like stuffing envelopes and answering phone calls to more exciting things like drafting speeches and meeting ministers.
We get on really well. One of the things about Caroline is she is so amiable. She will hug the caterers and speak to the guards and things like that – and I think before anything else she’s just a nice person and so that makes it very easy. I see her three or four times a week – usually for meetings where she’d like me to take notes or to chip in, or if she just wants to catch up on things informally.
Ordinarily I’m here in the office on my swivel chair. But last year Caroline invited me on a trip to Nigeria to visit people who had suffered attacks from Boko Haram and from semi-nomadic Fulani herdsmen who in recent times have become increasingly militant. On one day we were visiting some very remote rural villages and heard incredibly sad stories of how men dressed in black had emerged from the hills and had massacred tens of people. Those who couldn’t run, women, children, the blind, the elderly. We were there to hear their stories and speak to the families who had chosen to return either to bury their dead or try to rebuild their homes. It was just rubble at every village.
But our guide sensed danger and began looking increasingly agitated and hurried us along to get back in our minibus and head out of the villages. We found out later that we had just missed an ambush from militants who knew we were there and had started firing at vehicles hoping we would be inside. We had just managed to escape. It’s hard to process an event like that. We were obviously shaken but I remember Caroline’s immediate concern was whether the villagers were safe. Our guide assured us that no one was killed, as far as he knew.
Obviously that’s an exceptional day. And the frustrating thing is you come away from an experience like that – the reality of ordinary people living there and facing real life horror stories – and it just doesn’t get the headlines. That’s one of the biggest frustrations of this job. You hear stories and you’re moved by them and motivated to do something about it, so you do everything in your power to bring about positive change for that person or that community, and then you just hit the procedural machine.
I’ll give you an example: Caroline has a Private Member’s Bill going through parliament to address the problem of gender discrimination in religious tribunals – like in sharia councils. She’s introduced it six years in a row and I get to sit and listen to the debates with contributions from experts across the House. And then the minister stands up and says ‘nope – not for us, we’re not taking it forward’.
It’s fantastic to hear the peers contribute to the debate positively, knowing they have taken note of briefing material I’ve put together. You feel like you are making progress – and you are successful in getting some momentum behind an issue – but at the end of the day the government can stand up and say no. But in terms of the democratic process as a whole we have a good system in place.
Even in this office we’ve had victims of abuse sitting in that chair in tears and telling us their stories and it’s incredibly sad. But it’s satisfying knowing that they have come to a place where their story can be heard and that the person I work for is in a position to do something about it. I know that in the mundane tasks of booking meeting rooms and things like that I have helped facilitate making a difference to those people.
PoliticsHome Newsletters
Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.
