Claim: "You look at the front bench on both sides of the House, hardly any of them have ever even had a paper round" – Nigel Farage, Leader of UKIP.

“We've got too many stockbrokers and architects and professional people, as Nigel quite rightly said, representing people: we want some more butchers and bakers and candlestick makers” - Bob Crow, General Secretary of the Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers.

Background

Speaking on Radio 4's Any Questions, both were echoing a common perception that the House of Commons is dominated by career politicians and representatives from a narrow range of professions.

We cannot, of course, fact-check how many frontbench MPs have ever delivered newspapers. Instead, we have given a brief summary of the pre-Parliamentary careers of Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet Members, together with some general observations about the make up of the front benches and the Commons more broadly.

How diverse these careers are, and whether it matters, is for you to judge.

The Cabinet

David Cameron: briefly worked in corporate communications before going into politics.

Nick Clegg: lecturer, journalist, author and director of legal aid program in Central Asia before becoming MEP.

George Osborne: entered politics very early after working for a short time in NHS administration and freelance journalism.

Theresa May: financial consultant.

William Hague: involved in student politics, then briefly became a management consultant before his election to Parliament.

Vince Cable: economist in various political and corporate roles, including with the Kenyan government and with Shell oil company.

Eric Pickles: broadly political career.

Jeremy Hunt: management consultant, English teacher in Japan and director of IT company.

Liam Fox: trained as a Doctor and worked as a GP and a medic in the Armed Forces.

Michael Gove: journalist for the TLS, Prospect and the Spectator, andalso had a short-lived, low-profile career as a film actor as 'Chaplain' in A Feast at Midnight.

Chris Huhne: set up a business in the City, then became a journalist, writing principally for the Guardian, the Independent and the Economist.

Caroline Spelman: lobbyist for farming and food industries.

Andrew Lansley: Civil Servant.

Andrew Mitchell: UN peacekeeper in Cyprus, then investment banker and other financial jobs.

Ken Clarke: barrister.

Owen Paterson: director of leather businesses.

Michael Moore: accountant.

Danny Alexander: Communications roles, mostly in campaigning organisations.

Philip Hammond: Director and consultant for various businesses.

Cheryl Gillan: worked in marketing.

Iain Duncan Smith: worked in the armed forces and with the General Electric Company.

The Shadow Cabinet

Ed Miliband: fleetingly a journalist before going into Westminster politics.

Harriet Harman: solicitor.

Alan Johnson: postman and trade union official.

Ed Balls: academic economist and leader-writer for the Financial Times

Yvette Cooper: Briefly a journalist for the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, but this was between the political roles she had since university

Sadiq Khan: human rights solicitor.

Douglas Alexander: solicitor.

John Denham: campaigner for various charities including Oxfam and

Friends of the Earth.

Jim Murphy: has had a political career beginning in the National Union of Students

Angela Eagle: worked largely with trade unions before her election.

Maria Eagle: solicitor.

Andy Burnham: political career.

John Healey: tutor at Open University, union official and campaigner for disability rights.

Meg Hillier: Journalist, but had a political career from an early age.

Mary Creagh: taught Entrepreneurship in between political roles.

Ivan Lewis: voluntary sector worker.

Caroline Flint: political career.

Liam Byrne: claims on his personal website that he worked in McDonalds before trying his hand as a writer, a banker and a consultant prior to entering Parliament.

Hilary Benn: political career.

Ann McKechin: solicitor.

Shaun Woodward: journalist.

Peter Hain: political career.

Rosie Winterton: Mostly a political career but was briefly a Managing Director of Connect Communications.

Butchers and Bakers?

On the whole, this list certainly seems to support the popular perception that high-ranking politicians are a largely homogeneous group whose vocational experiences span from business, to finance, to political research, to law, to journalism, to officialdom, and not much further.

But is it reasonable to generalise this to the whole front benches?

A whirlwind background check of the nearly two hundred frontbenchers on either side of the House does indeed suggest that neither butcher nor baker nor candlestick maker is numbered among them.

Judging by the biographies-in-brief on MPs' personal websites and on services such as the Guardian's Ask Aristotle, the vast majority have been primarily involved in one or more of the areas listed above.

On the Government side, finance and business are particularly prominent. Labour MPs are of course more likely to come from a Union background, and the Opposition benches also seem to have a slightly higher proportion of MPs without a previous non-political career.

The eleven school teachers Full Fact has found among the Opposition elite may or may not represent diversity, but here are a few of whom Messrs Farage and Crow would surely approve:

Anne Milton, elected as a Tory after a career as a nurse and medical adviser, now serves as an under-secretary in the Department of Health.

Jim Fitzpatrick spent 23 years as a firefighter before becoming a Union executive and then a Labour MP.

Jon Tricket, also of Labour, worked as a builder and plumber between1974 and 1986.

The long-serving MP for Derbyshire Patrick McLoughlin, now the Conservative's Chief Whip, had previously worked as both a farm labourer and a mine worker – a  vocation shared by at least two on the Opposition front bench.

However, these are the exceptions to the overall picture that the path to Westminster is broadly executive, financial or professional.

It is possible that in some cases the careers from which MPs made the immediate transition to politics were preceded by other work not recorded in their summary profiles.

Nevertheless while Nigel Farage was clearly exaggerating, his point about a lack of diversity in working backgrounds of the front benches may well be a fair one.

Has it always been this way?

According to a House of Commons research paper, the number of manual workers entering the Commons decreased from 15.8 per cent of the total in 1979 to 6.2 per cent in 2005. The number of farmers has also declined after each election during this period, although our cursory look at the front benches suggests Conservative gains in 2010 may have resulted in an up-tick.

However (and once again with the caveat that this Parliament may present a different picture), the proportion involved in both business and the professions has also declined. Medicine, law, teaching and the civil service still provided us with almost 40 per cent of our representatives, but this was down from 44.9 per cent in 1979. The most striking fall was a halving of the number of barristers between 1983 and 2005.

Who is replacing the miners and barristers?

The answer to this question is twofold. The 12.7 per cent of MPs from a white collar background in 2005 continued a rise from 1.5 per cent in 1979 and probably reflects growth in the service sector nationally.

The other spurt has come in the number of Members who worked as politicians before ever entering Parliament. This rose from 3.2 per cent to 14.1 per cent in 22 years.

David Cameron, with his CV of political research and public relations, could be included in either one of these categories.

Politics as a profession.

In April last year, The Economist discussed the comparative constituency of governments throughout the world, and found that the predominance of law and business was widespread among democracies.

The article also noted the trend in “mature democracies” such as Britain of “the rise of politics itself as a profession”.

The survey evidence supports this idea, and closer analysis suggests that the data may actually underestimate the number of MPs for whom “the road to a political career leads through politics itself”. This is because some of the consultancy, communications, public relations, or directorial roles cited as previous jobs are in fact with political organisations such as think tanks.

Peter Oborne argues that politics is in danger of coalescing into a detached, enclosed and nepotistic world.

On the other hand Luciana Berger, the new Shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change, argues on her website that a background working in Westminster will be vital to her effectiveness as an MP.

“The common theme” in all her jobs, she argues, “is understanding and influencing the Westminster and Whitehall machines. Knowing which doors to bang on.”

Either of these perspectives seems reasonable, and the two are not mutually exclusive. Which is more prescient is not for Full Fact to judge, but evidence for the growth of politics as a vocation is persuasive.

Conclusion

There is no question that the occupational make up of the Commons does not map to that of the country as a whole. There are proportionally around five times as many manual workers in the country, for instance, as there are in Parliament.

And while we have failed to identify more than a couple of Bob Crow's apparently multitudinous architects, the professions do continue to constitute a disproportionate percentage of the House.

The growth in the number of politicians without a non-political background is, on the other hand, a relatively recent development.

So although we cannot endorse the clearly rhetorical statements of Mr Farage and Mr Crow, the broader point about a lingering lack of diversity in the Commons seems justified.

Whether this is necessarily a problem, however, is a matter for debate.

Edgar Gerrard Hughes