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Andrew Rawnsley

These scams are atrocious. Worse is the lack of remorse

Taxmen to probe MPs over profits from home sales

• • Crisis intensifies with investigation into whether MPs have evaded capital gains tax

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    The Damned Parliament has well earned its title

    Would-be MPs are looking with glee at revelations that could radically transform the Commons

    Comments (27)

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    • • Nick Cohen
      • The Observer, Sunday 10 May 2009
      • Article history

    Until the 17th century, the English gave parliaments nicknames. The Good Parliament of 1376 attacked corruption at court and was followed by the Bad Parliament of 1377, which, on the orders of the court, repealed all the Good Parliament's reforms and imposed the poll tax that provoked the Peasants' Revolt. The Rump Parliament of 1648-1653 declared England a republic after the execution of Charles I. The Cavalier Parliament of 1661-1679 fawned over the restored Stuart line.

    The parliament of 2005-2010 is begging for similar treatment. "Bad" is blunt, although I heard blunter last week, and "cavalier" accurately reflects MPs' attitudes towards public money. However, neither word captures the possibility that the peasants will massacre today's generation of politicians at the next election.

    Even decent MPs – and there are plenty of them – could not see how lethal the receipts will look when challengers use them in rough, populist campaigns against Westminster's Malteser-scroungers, needlepoint-rug queens, conservatory tycoons, second-home swappers and receivers of stolen soft furnishings.

    An impeccably honest opposition spokesman predicted that scores ofLabour MPs would lose their seats at the next election, not because of their conduct, but because a sea change was coming. However good they had been as constituency MPs, they would be out because they were Labour and Britain has had enough of Labour. The fiddling of second-homes allowances was disgraceful, he agreed, but he thought last week's fuss would go away and few of his colleagues would suffer next year solely because of popular revulsion.

    I thought he was going to quote Macaulay's line that no spectacle is "so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality". For there is an element of absurdity in the scandal – where else on the planet, after all, could you find an immigration minister threatening to sue the press for alleging he claimed a £1.19 packet of tampons for his wife on expenses?

    Yet British politicians have no choice but to live with periodic fits, including periodic fits about periods. If they find themselves on the wrong end of one, their careers will be finished. And once you move away from the self-pity and self-justification of the Commons, many in politics know it.

    A grizzled byelection campaigner, who has never knowingly hit above the belt, thought the receipts were a gift to challengers. Would he use them? Of course, he would – big, early and often, until he had banged the fixtures and fittings of the incumbent's public-funded property portfolio into the voters' minds. Meanwhile, MPs' poorly paid and often shabbily treated researchers were eying their employers like undertakers measuring corpses. Many hope to become MPs themselves and told me they expected a sudden and delightful increase in the number of vacancies when the electorate slaughtered the old guard of back-slapping, back-scratching "good House of Commons men", who more than any other group had grown reckless as they realised the fees office would approve outrageous claims without complaint.

    I would not dismiss their predictions as fantasies. We have precedent for a populist backlash. In the 1997 general election, Martin Bell, the former BBC correspondent, sensationally defeated Neil Hamilton, the MP for Tatton, one of the safest Tory seats in the land. I wrote a rather snotty piece about Bell at the time, because aside from raising the controversy about Hamilton taking cash for questions, he had next to nothing to say on the great issues of the day. Surely, I thought, the voters wanted to hear about Europe, taxes public spending and constitutional reform.

    They did not, because they grasped what I could not: corruption taints every thing. An MP who receives wodges of tenners in brown envelopes is unlikely to care if officials who are incompetent or worse waste public money on badly run hospitals and schools.

    Tatton lies in the Cheshire gin and Jag belt. It is footballers wives' country where the only class tension is between the comfortably off and the stinking rich. Moreover, Bell challenged Hamilton in 1997 when Britain was booming and unemployment falling. Even at that time and in that place, the suspicion that an MP was on the take was enough to destroy him.

    Now that the long boom has smashed into a thousand pieces, I suspect voters will be less tolerant than ever. Despite Hamilton's protests, the parliamentary commissioner for standards concluded the evidence that he received between £18,000 and £25,000 was "compelling". Compare that with the figures the Telegraph was knocking around last week.

    Shaun Woodward, the richest man in the cabinet, still demanded that the public give him £100,000 in mortgage interest payments. Andy Burnham wanted £16,500 to buy and renovate a London flat. Keith Vaz claimed £75,000 for his flat despite having an expensive home a mere 12 miles away, while Greg Barker, from the Tories, went one better and made £320,000 after buying a flat with the help of taxpayers' money, then selling it on.

    They are not corrupt. Shadowy figures have not bought them. But money has insulated them from the catastrophic decline in Britain's fortunes, which is diminishing our ability to fund everything from meals on wheels to the troops in Helmand. Vast numbers of people are waking up in the middle of the night terrified about their families' future and furious at the behaviour of the bankers, but our elected representative are not among them.

    Too few MPs have raised their voices in genuine anger about what the City has done to Britain. Many, including the chancellor and prime minister, are so complacent they seem content to let the banks return to their old ways once recovery comes. The electorate may not understand the economic arguments, but it has good reason to suspect instinctively that the profits of playing the system have cocooned the political class and suffocated the desire for sensible reform.

    If the voters throw out not just the Labour MPs, who are going anyway, but the Tories and Liberal Democrats caught up in the scandal, then the 2005 parliament will not be the Bad Parliament or the Cavalier Parliament, but the Damned Parliament which cursed those who entered it.