TO THOSE in the fetid hiatus of a non-activity space that is the Westminster village, it is all too easily classed as a déjà vu experience.
Remember the dying days of the John Major Government, with its remorseless tales of sleaze, the way the nation longed to be rid of a hapless Prime Minister with little apparent ability to control his own party and little sign of an identifiable political direction? Oh, how we longed for change.
Then along came “new” Labour. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and their creation aren’t responsible for the rules which have allowed venal MPs to bring disrepute and public ridicule on Parliament. Recall Mr Blair’s entreaty to his first meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party as Prime Minister that neither the Government nor they had been elected to enjoy the trappings of power. But it seems many simply got well and truly stuck in anyway.
Tribune would be first in line to defend the role and integrity of the vast majority of MPs who have down the years performed a gruelling and often thankless public service. In a climate in which much of the media treats all MPs by definition as guilty of one form of fiscally enhancing deceit or another it is in the interests of our democratic structures to avoid a knee-jerk driven leap onto a censorious bandwagon.
But the stench rising over Westminster from the parliamentary expenses exposures taints the honourable as well as the dishonourable. And that affects the credibility and perceived integrity of all MPs, all parties, the House of Commons itself and, ultimately, the Government.
Not that this is an entirely “new” Labour affair, as the Tory MPs Derek Conway, Jacqui Lait and others have shown or the traditionally regarded left-wing Labour MP Harry Cohen confirms. When he defends his £20,000-plus-a-year second home allowance as part of his income he might reflect on what the Inland Revenue would say that about that. Moreover, he speaks for the majority of MPs who regard their salary as too small.
Fiddling the expenses, even within absurd rules, does not deal with this grievance except to open the entire House of Commons to the charge of endemic fraud. The latest disclosure about Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s expense claims is more shabby than scandalous.
But never mind the porn on taxpayers’ expense, why were taxpayers paying for any of her family’s television viewing? Ms Smith, who is currently under investigation, has already broken the spirit if not the letter of the rules by claiming what are huge amounts for the average family to furnish her home while claiming to live mainly at her sister’s house in London.
But isolated cases are not the problem, as farcical as they might be. The problem is that the rules are rotten to the core and that our legislators – indeed the Home Secretary, no less – were prepared to exploit them without qualms.
Latest figures reveal that half of all MPs claimed within £900 of the maximum permitted in 2006-07. And, until this week the Commons appeared to be in collective denial, wondering what all the fuss was about and hiding behind the amoral defence that no rules had been broken.
The fact that, until this week, the committee on standards in public life thought the issue so low in its priorities that it was not planning even to begin an inquiry until the autumn, and then report after the next election, smacks of the cosy complacency and invulnerability which infects a Westminster where feathering your nest is taken for granted.
MPs deserve a wage which affords a decent living and attracts the talented without creating a disjunct between them and the people they serve. They need the tools to do their job, and that means financial resources. But without a fundamental desire to perform a public service no MP deserves their office.
The current system of allowances presents two fingers to the public service ethic and to the public itself. The chair of the committee on standards in public service is so wrong when he says: “We do not want a quick-fix”. Yes, we do. And so do all the decent, honest MPs who are mired in this mess.
