It’s the small details that are so lethal. The junior minister claiming £1.60 for Jaffa Cakes. The nappies and women’s toiletries for which Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, was reimbursed. Loo seats, lilies, make-up mirrors. Silk-covered cushions (Keith Vaz). An Ikea carrier bag. A lemon. We have grown angrily accustomed to senior politicians milking the systemover their housing arrangements and mortgages, the mockery they make of the second-home allowance system. What nobody had grasped was that our representatives at Westminster get us to pay for everything. It doesn’t bother me that Gordon Brown reimbursed his brother for the cleaning of his London flat. It bothers me a lot that you and I – the taxpayers – ended up paying Gordon more than £6,000 to keep his Westminster bolthole spick and span. Why? Why do MPs believe that is a legitimate use of public money? Why did David Miliband think it was reasonable to claim £199 for a pram and £80 for “baby essentials”? Why did the PM claim for children’s window blinds? Yes, their applications for reimbursement were rejected. But the point is that they made the applications in the first place. I marvel at the detachment and stupidity that this reflects. Both ministers are meant to be very clever. Could they not see how wrong it was to make such claims? Why should the hard-pressed taxpayer, fretting about his own family’s costs and the needs of his own children, subsidise the needs of Cabinet ministers’ children through the PAYE system? In what parallel moral universe is that anything other than outrageous? One almost yearns for old-fashioned “cash-for-questions” corruption and wicked self-enrichment by a handful of wrong ’uns. This is far more worrying than a few bad apples; what we see here is the whole orchard gone rotten. The Telegraph’s remarkable investigative series continues this week and senior Tories are bracing themselves, with good reason, for political damage and personal humiliation. David Cameron, if he is wise, will take robust action in the most egregious cases, and show that he grasps the level of public anger. Mr Brown, as ever, has responded by insisting that he is already taking the necessary action, blaming the impersonal “System” and refusing to apologise. As prime minister-in-waiting, the Conservative leader needs to be much bolder and to show, as dramatically as possible, that he stands shoulder to shoulder with the public in this, rather than with the wretched parliamentary elite. Yes, these practices are universal in the Commons, and the problem is not limited to one political party. Yes, the whole story is terrible for politics in general, tearing yet another hole in the already ragged garment of public trust. But there are reasons why Labour in general, and Mr Brown in particular, will suffer from this scandal more than other parties and politicians. This, after all, is the former Chancellor who presided over severe toughening of collection methods by the Revenue, over a bewildering range of “stealth taxes” and now, as Prime Minister, over big increases in the top rate of income taxation designed to punish the affluent, rather than to raise money. Those who have been through a VAT or tax inspection during the New Labour era can attest to the state’s ever-greater rapacity. So it is quite something to discover that, even as the Labour Government was squeezing more money out of the taxpayer, by increasingly aggressive and pitiless means, senior ministers and Labour MPs were fleecing us all through the allowance system and “rules” that were so lax as to be barely worthy of the name. The word “Orwellian” is one of the most over-used by journalists, but this really was conduct reminiscent of the Inner Party in the system of “oligarchical collectivism” described in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It also reminds me of Lewis Namier’s great work, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which examined the true motives of MPs – enrichment, advancement, the pursuit of contracts – and showed that “the seat in the House was not their ultimate goal but a means to ulterior aims”. In the 18th century, it might be a government contract or a lucrative sinecure. In the 21st, it is a new bathroom, a plasma screen, or a pack of Jaffa Cakes. More to the point, Gordon promised so much as custodian of the nation’s ethics. He knew that his authority would never flow from novelty or charm. So, flourishing his moral compass, he pledged a system – governmental and social – based on fair play. On May 11 2007, he launched his leadership campaign with the promise: “If you play by the rules, we’ll stand by you.” In his conference speech that year, he demanded “an understanding that if you come to our country you not only learn our language and culture: you must play by the rules.” He said: “I continue to reach out to all those who work hard and play by the rules.” At Labour’s annual gathering last year, his theme was the same: “Our duty is and will be fair chances for everyone matched by fair rules applied to everyone… And so the new settlement for our times shows how Britain can meet all these challenges too and it’s more than about a fair prosperity – it must be about fair chances and fair rules too.” You get the idea: fair play, playing by the rules. This mantra has been at the heart of Brown’s political message. And yet his ministers, and even he himself, have made a mockery of that mantra. Sure, they had their own parliamentary code, the so-called “Green Book”. But we can now see that this was less a rulebook than a daisy-chain of loopholes. This was a system specifically designed to ease the snout into the trough and to oil the wheels of the gravy-train. Anthropologists have long argued that, as societies develop, they shift from a “shame culture” (based on the fear of social sanction and of the way one is perceived by the tribe) to a “guilt culture” (based on conscience and a self-enforced, internalised moral code). On this basis, the British polity seems to be moving backwards, to be growing more primitive. It is not guilt but shame that has driven MPs to come clean and promise to reform the system; only pressure applied by Freedom of Information requests, by the Information Commissioner and by the press. I see no evidence of contrition, either, in the Prime Minister, his Cabinet or his MPs. Son of the Manse? You must be kidding. What a wretched bunch of spivs. What a diabolical liberty. Isn’t it time you were all leaving? Matthew d’Ancona is Editor of 'The Spectator’MPs' expenses: It's easy to blame 'the system' without taking responsibility
The Labour Party promised us a new era of fair play, but they have treated the parliamentary rulebook as if it were a daisy-chain of loopholes , says Matthew d'Ancona.
Sunday, 10 May 2009
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