May 11, 2009 The spivs’ chorus on Planet Arrogance Daily Mail, 11 May 2009 The details and scale of what they were up to are beyond belief. ‘Flipping’ the designation of their main and second homes to manipulate the expenses system to their advantage and to avoid paying various taxes. Claiming help with mortgage payments for houses that were already paid for. Getting the taxpayer to reimburse them for eyeliner, plastic bags, nappies, mock Tudor beams, Maltesers, nail polish, plasma TVs, Christmas tree decorations, horse manure, bath plugs; and on and surreally on. Yet in the face of such baroque dishonesty, MPs claim that the real villain is the media for publishing the leaked details. So they’ve set the police on to probing the disclosures. But if the police should be investigating anyone, it’s surely the MPs themselves. Not, it seems, in the parallel universe of Westminster. According to MPs, none of them has behaved immorally. Not one. None of them should be censured or lose the party whip, let alone be prosecuted. Instead, utterly deaf to the mounting public fury this is causing, they are coming up with one excuse after another. Apparently, something called ‘the system’ — which, it seems, has nothing to do with them — is to blame. But the ’system’ is simply what the MPs themselves devised. Like sheep, they all went along with these scams, so that’s supposed to make them all right. ‘It wasn’t my fault, m’lud, that I claimed for a barbecue — it was the system.’ Sounds awfully like ‘I was only obeying orders’ in another era. In a kind of spivs’ chorus, they whine in unison that it was all ‘within the rules’. But rules can be manipulated for corrupt or otherwise indefensible ends. Luton South MP Margaret Moran claimed £22,500 of taxpayers’ money for treating dry rot in a house in Southampton, many miles from her constituency or Westminster. She justifies this on the outrageous grounds that her partner works in Southampton and it is ‘her right’ to have a family life with him. Her right? Other people cope with this kind of messy situation every day, paying for it out of their own pocket. Why should Ms Moran imagine it is her right to be paid for doing the same thing? The spivs’ chorus chants that the expenses fiddle was recompense for MPs’ low pay. Well, on that basis, low-paid workers everywhere could claim justification for fiddling the tax and benefits system. What is remarkable is that these MPs have absolutely no idea how awful all this sounds to ordinary people. Politicians really do seem to live in a hermetically sealed bubble on Planet Arrogance. Yet for all their protestations that they did nothing wrong, it is obvious from the lengths to which they went to try to prevent this information from becoming public that they knew perfectly well that they were doing something very wrong indeed. They say their dodgy claims were within the rules because the Commons authorities had endorsed them. But it’s not just that certain MPs bent the rules; the rules themselves were as bent as a corkscrew. For the Commons authorities not only went along with this abuse, but by all accounts actually encouraged MPs to make such questionable claims — because if they didn’t do so it would show up the rest of them who did. So Parliament’s regulatory officials were complicit in this institutionalised corruption. Parliament has thus shown it is simply incapable of policing itself. Therefore, reforming the rules won’t address the real problem. Even the ‘independent auditing body’ being suggested will still be set up by Parliament. It is Parliament that has to be held to account for its malfeasance — and the only way to do that is by calling an immediate General Election so the people can throw out all these wretches. An election is also essential because, as former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has observed, the moral authority of the House of Commons is shot to pieces. A belief in the basic integrity of Parliament is essential if the laws that it passes are to secure popular consent. But how can any such laws command public respect when the institution passing them has not only been revealed to be institutionally corrupt, but refuses to acknowledge this fact? How are people to be expected not to fiddle the system or avoid paying their taxes when the Chancellor of the Exchequer stands accused of ‘flipping’ the status of his residences back and forth to milk the expenses system — including getting his stamp duty paid by the taxpayer? The proposal which has surfaced to get rid of the expenses system and instead raise MPs’ salaries merely shows yet further how out of touch politicians are with reality. It’s as if an employee caught with his hand in the till were to ask the boss he was robbing for a raise, on the grounds that he had only tried to steal from him because he was so poor. It’s not poverty that caused MPs to behave in this way. It is the breakdown of morality, ethics and the very concept of public service among MPs and those in Parliament whom they appoint to police their behaviour. Even a General Election would fail to get to the heart of the problem. What was noticeable over the weekend was the almost total silence from the Conservative party, which was doubtless quaking in its boots for fear that further revelations would show Tory MPs were also playing the system in this way. The real problem is that the entire political class is deeply damaged, thus confirming the already widespread public belief that politicians are ‘all as bad as each other’. The question now is what will be the consequences of all this. For with such an unprecedented breakdown of Parliamentary integrity and loss of public trust, we are surely in uncharted territory. One obvious possibility is that, come the election, people will refuse to vote at all or vote for fringe parties. But our electoral system makes it unlikely that any of these small parties will get very far. What is more plausible is that Labour faces not just electoral defeat, but a possibly terminal wipe-out. When socialism collapsed with the Berlin Wall in 1989, all that was left of Labour’s historic mission — which has hung in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s grin — was its sense of its own moral virtue. This sustained it through the illusion politics of the Blairite ‘Third Way’. But now that Blairism and the claim to moral virtue have been blown to shreds, the demise of Labour that has been so long predicted may finally come to pass. The result of that could even be a realignment of British politics more generally, with a split across the political spectrum between social conservatives, who want to defend Judeo-Christian values against the onslaught being mounted upon them, and libertarians, who support that attack. But in the meantime, the more immediate danger is that Parliamentary democracy is in danger of going down the plughole with the Home Secretary’s dirty bathwater. |
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