The local paper for Ness on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, where I've spent the past week, is called Fios. It's produced from the sports centre, is published every other Thursday and usually reports on successful bids for funding to improve the play park or gives notice of stays in the Western Isles hospital. But looking through recent back copies, I came across a report of a speech given by David Cameron, late last year. He spoke about land rights and the imbalance of a small percentage of people owning the vast majority of the land. This wasn't, need I add, David Cameron of Downing Street, but David Cameron of the Isle of Harris, chairman of Community Land Scotland.

I thought of the Hebridean Cameron when a new clutch of appointments to the House of Lords was announced. I've been talking to people all over the country for a book I'm writing about work and listening to crofters in the Outer Hebrides and entrepreneurs in Silicon Roundabout tell me that they don't think Westminster speaks to them.

Perhaps these 30 new lords would help? Doreen Lawrence has spoken for the forgotten against the powerful for 20 years now, but who are the others when they're not being donors? (One, Dame Lucy Neville-Rolfe, has already dispiritingly written that she is looking forward to being a role model, as if she were Miss UK 1978.) So I wondered whether the other David Cameron would be a better lord: he knows his community inside and out; he understands how laws can be changed to noticeable effect; he's not scared to speak about what he sees. But most of all, he speaks the language of the crofters. When he says cheviot, they know he means a white-faced sheep originating from the Scottish Borders with a dense white fleece. (I Googled it.)

I don't suppose "my" David Cameron will ever make it to the red leather of the Lords: land rights are more of a 19th-century issue and besides Ness men and women acquired their land in a community buy-out in 2007. But this shadow Cameron reveals something that it seems politicians have forgotten how to do: speaking about ordinary, human-size problems, in a way that resonates.

There is a sense that the things that annoy, worry, upset and piss us off in our everyday lives, and measures that might be taken to change them, aren't being talked about in Westminster, or at least not by politicians. It seems from here that politics is done in a machine-like way: he said this, so I'll say that in order to box him into a corner. George Mudie, the Labour backbencher, criticised his leadership for not being clear about their policies on education, welfare, the NHS. Perhaps if you're feeling under fire from your own backbenchers, never mind the opposition, it's tricky to get beyond "he said, she said".

All politicians talk about "hard-working families": Cameron said, at last year's Tory conference, that his father's story was "a hard-work story"; Clegg last January declared he wanted to help the "hard-pressed and the hard-working"; Miliband said in 2011 that he wanted to show "hard-working families that Labour is back as the party of them". But it's only Labour that's got work and people's experience of it, in its warp and weft, which perhaps explains why it's more disappointing when that party fails to "connect". (I might add that I've never met anyone yet who described their family as "hard-working" or told me they were "squeezed middle" or part of "alarm clock Britain".)

It's not just the way things are said but also what is said. Justin Welby's stand on payday lenders resonated because it came from the bottom up, both from Stella Creasy's dogged pursuit of the issue and a months-long project between the Churches of England and Scotland. Even the Westminster David Cameron's recent speech about porn culture drew on a groundswell of common feeling that something had got out of control. And there is no reason the opposition shouldn't speak up too.

I had thought that talking to people about their working lives would mean talking about the Labour party and the unions; after all, it feels as if Westminster has been talking about Labour and the unions for months. When the American oral historian Studs Terkel collected more than 130 people's stories about work in the 1970s, he talked to welders about a "go slow" at the Ford plant in Chicago and to lettuce pickers in California about union organising. Even when he found people who couldn't see the point of their union, at least it came up one way or another in conversation.

I've found people talk more energetically about other things: the intern who gets her hopes up but is spat out after a few months because interns are plentiful and entry-level jobs don't exist any longer; the shop assistant on a zero-hours contract who is still unpacking imported cardigans at 11pm for a job he believed finished when the shop shut; the lecturer who is demoted after coming back to work after having a baby; the workfarer who is told that working for free will show commitment and drive; the manufacturer who is feted internationally but hasn't received any help from the council.

I've walked down high street after high street with shop windows that have been blanked out with newspaper, with a last lonely poster telling shoppers that their nearest shop is the internet. Keynes hoped that the modern world would bring a 15-hour week, but it has actually brought contracts that are contracts in name only, slave labour by another name, the monetisation of fellow feeling.

I recently interviewed a man during the last week of his working life. He had begun at 16 in the pits, moved on to the potteries, then to a white goods factory and then finally back to glazing mugs, bowls and plates at Emma Bridgewater, after the popularity of her designs in London's King's Road meant the company could support a factory in Stoke-on-Trent. Looking back on his life, what stood out for him were not the thousands of bowls delicately dipped in cornflower blue or lilac glaze with huge tweezers, before being baked to hard shininess. Yes, he was happy to see the dotty mugs and teapots in the shops, but he also remembered the struggle to get a wage when he had young children to feed, the pride in gaining a qualification when he'd left school so early. But what he most wanted to talk about was his cycling, his grandchildren, his colleagues.

For Alan Goldsmith in his retirement week, a life wasn't counted in bowls glazed – no one ever begins a eulogy with a statement of profit and loss: this many shirts ironed, that many wine glasses smashed – but in the successes of having a lively grandchild and a coast to coast bike ride.

I wonder if the answer to this gap between Westminster and the country "out there" is as simple as listening to some of these stories. Doreen Lawrence is in the House of Lords because her story meant and continues to mean something to all of us, both in its details and the grander significance. The Met's admission of institutional racism following the Lawrence case was the only thing that made it into my teenage diary that wasn't about my best friend or the centre forward I fancied. I am so glad Doreen Lawrence is there but it's nevertheless true that her story is exceptional.

We also need to hear the stories of people who didn't change the way Britain thinks and runs. If Alan's story was going to appear in a conference speech, it could be about the Thatcherite decline of the pits, or about Chinese manufacturing being cheaper than in the UK, or about the growing British love for cycling or the value of vocational qualifications. The memory I have of talking to Alan is of how much he wanted not to talk about his work, but about his life, his family, about fairness and justice; about live and let live.

We would promptly get sick of our politicians if they spoke of motherhood and apple pie as they do in America. But it's more important than ever to listen to what "ordinary" people have to say and the way they say it, as is suggested in a forthcoming IPPR report by David Robinson. Since the announcement of the new lords, we've been reminded that our second chamber is second only to China's Politburo in size. But I wonder whether we shouldn't also be talking about how to get a wider range of people in there too, to speak up against the donors, cronies and former MPs who have seen it all before. We increasingly rely on the Lords for popular opposition to major planks of the coalition's programme, from the backdoor privatisation to the NHS to the nearly wholesale removal of legal aid. So while I wait for Alan, the interns, the shop assistants and the Hebridean David Cameron to be elevated to the Lords, my advice to Ed Miliband is to follow their example: speak cheviot.