Britannia Radio

From The Times

June 20, 2009

Drop the noble platitudes, what’s in it for me?

We shouldn’t be shocked that MPs have shown us they are an interest group like any other. Politics is about who benefits

Matthew Parris

This latest turn in the tale of our MPs’ expenses is intolerable. What blithering, blethering idiots. Have the Commons authorities and their black ink contrived deliberately to twist the knife into these pathetic parliamentarians? Now the MPs mumble something about being warned by the authorities that if they had stuck their necks out and published their uncensored expenses independently they’d be infringing the Data Protection Act.

So infringe it, you ninnies! Don’t you see you’re fighting for your lives? Wasn’t it obvious to you how those big blacked-out blocks on newspaper front pages were going to look? Those front pages could haunt our politics for a generation. Can’t you see that only a mass decision by most MPs to ignore the jobsworths’ legal warnings and volunteer everything that The Daily Telegraph had already knew, fast and early, could have saved you from being pitched by the media right back into the muck? In the face of such peril, fear of infringing data protection should have counted about as much as fear of a parking ticket.

But they just couldn’t let go, could they? Aptly did Kipling write: “That the dog returns to his vomit and the sow returns to her mire? And the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire.”

Parliamentarians’ cowardice, and the Commons authority’s goonish PR incompetence, have contrived to set this story alight again just when the flames were beginning to subside — and all without the fuel of a single big new discovery. They’ve made the cover-up the story. Again. What next? New leaks about how much black ink the MPs themselves added to the authorities’ first draft?

I’m afraid that this is teaching the British public a sad but valuable truth. MPs are all on the same side. They behave as an interest group, just like any other interest group. They defend their own interests. And they are monumentally incompetent at doing so. Many of them have — or had — a halfway decent story to tell about this expenses business, if only they could be heard. They won’t be now. Many had nothing serious to apologise for; but under the weight of a collective sense of solidarity, they have allowed themselves to be dragged down by their more culpable colleagues.

Marx was right. How persistently this question of the interests in politics, and the clash of interests, keeps raising its head from the murky deep. Democracy is only partly about the clash of ideas. Often, and more profoundly, it is about the clash of interests.

As a fresh-faced 29-year-old just elected to Parliament I was disillusioned to find my surgeries besieged by farmers angry at a scheme to introduce milk production quotas; householders wanting planning permission for a porch; parents worried by plans to charge for school transport; and endless claims and counter-claims about entitlement to welfare benefits. Some people wanted more money from the State; others sought ways of making more of it themselves. Some complained that immigrants were undercutting their wages. Some wanted extra subsidies for farmers. Others wanted less subsidy for coalminers. And everybody complained about government cuts.

There were times on a Saturday morning when, weary of it all, I came close to greeting each new petitioner with a simple “How much?”. Were I still an MP and awaiting my Saturday surgery this weekend, then I might reasonably expect my constituents to ask me the same question. Parliament too is looking like an interest group.

Voters and those they choose as their representatives do sometimes have sincere ideas about the public good. They do sometimes pursue altruistic causes. They are capable sometimes of disinterestedness; and clashes of honest belief and opinion are a genuine part of our politics. But Margaret Thatcher was not wrong when in careless moments she lapsed into talking of “our people” and “their people”. A nation is not only, but is at least, a set of groups each with vested interests, often economic. Interests may clash with other groups’ interests in what may often be a zero-sum game of competition for finite resources.

We know this. It is hardly a stunning new insight — indeed it’s the subject of a hoary old debate among historians and political scientists. But this is a dimension of politics we at times overlook in daily commentary, and the past 17 years have been one of those times. All through John Major’s and Tony Blair’s leaderships we grew too accustomed to embrace an optimistic, classless, “one-nation” rhetoric as though that were all politics was about. When the national cake is growing fast, anxieties about how it is divided are put in abeyance, and visionary talk and moral argument become affordable.

Now the cake shrinks. Next year, as we begin the struggle to redeem our vast national debt, it will shrink further. From the Labour Government of the 1970s I remember sharply the clash of supposed interests between unionised and non-unionised workers; between public servants with inflation-proofed pensions, and private sector employees with inflation-eroded ones; and between the millions in state housing, and the millions who weren’t.

The decade ahead will provide (as the intervening years did not) new versions of this ancient clash of interests. The rancour over pension schemes is already returning. There is already an incipient clash between the interests of the old and those of the young, a balance that the PFI philosophy (borrowing against the future) has secretly tipped against the young. As cuts in public service costs bite, those who depend on the taxpayer for their wages may be pitted against those who don’t. In some parts of Britain the proportion of workers employed by the State approaches — and even exceeds — 50 per cent.

For the moment Gordon Brown and David Cameron talk the florid language of visions, destinies and moral compasses. They will not find this language as suited to the era ahead as did Sir John and Mr Blair to theirs. Party leaders on the 21st-century stump may mouth noble platitudes about fairness, justice, progressive governance and “values”, but their hearers next year will be stirring uneasily, the classically educated muttering under their breath cui bono?” (to whose benefit?), the students of Lenin repeating his cruel maxim “who — whom?” (the dash between those two words being interchangeable with the word “shafting”), and the rest of us simply wondering “how much?