A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy by Martin Bell
Icon Books, £11.99
I am often asked: “After 43 years of continuous membership, surely you miss being an MP?” No, I don’t miss the House of Commons, as it has now become. I am pretty sure that I would have missed the Commons had it remained as it once was, and as it was for three decades after I was elected in 1962.
Part of the trouble which Martin Bell eloquently identifies in his latest book A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy – like all his others, enormously worth reading – lies in the mantra of “the full-time MP, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week” on behalf of his constituents. Bell and I are heretics in relation to the conventional wisdom, espoused by Labour, Tories and Liberals alike, about the necessity of being full-time.
In those far off days when I was first elected, a raft of colleagues in the Parliamentary Laboru Party spent more time on the affairs of their trade unions than they did pottering around Westminster. One Denis (Howell) was immersed in the affairs of his trade union (the clerical workers). Another Dennis (Skinner) concerned himself in depth in the affairs of the National Union of Mineworkers. A third Denis (Healey) had a “hinterland” in the arts. A fourth Denis (Coe) was bound up in the teaching unions. And so on. The PLP was all the healthier for it.
I do not make a party point. On my first Finance Bill Committee stages, then taken on the floor of the House, a languid, soft-spoken gentleman in his late 50s would drift into the chamber at about 5pm. This was Sir Henry D’Avigdor Goldsmid, Conservative MP for Walsall, who would tell the Committee what had happened in the bullion market. Consequently, debate was topical and better informed. Parliament mattered.
Bell himself has a distinguished hinterland as a war correspondent. His latest book is scathing about those who become MPs without having done much else in their lives other than politics. He judges – as I do – that much of the recent debacle would have been avoided if so many of those who made it to Westminster had a career pattern other than school, university, researcher, aide to MP, and adoption as Parliamentary candidate.
It may be seen as a matter of profound concern that David Cameron’s curriculum vitae, in his application for the post of Prime Minister, reveals no work unconnected to politics. And, for all his anger, Bell indicates a distaste for Cameron, who had to pay back £680 for wisteria and ivy, vying with the other leaders, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg, to demonstrate who can be the toughest in the treatment of their own MPs.
In his excellent final chapter, Restoring Trust, Bell writes “half of the Parliamentary Conservative Party either volunteered or were required to pay back money which they should not have claimed in the first place, to a total of at least £125,000, plus what they had already returned to the fees office. All three leaders of the main parties were among the refunders.”
Bell argues that the expenses tsunami was not a natural but a man-made disaster. It did not have to happen. It was a conspicuous act of Parliamentary self-harm. But the opportunity which this leaves us is once in a lifetime. If it had been less calamitous – perhaps if the refunders had succeeded in blurring the reality – we would not have this chance.
Bell thinks that we do have it. He contends that we are in this together, responding as a people against the corruption of a failed political class. Adversity, Bell reminds us, can actually be quite useful. He experienced this in his war zone years when, rather unexpectedly, he was bombed by the Serbs and robbed by the French on the same day. (The Serbs fired the mortar and the French ran the UN’s field hospital). Although he took a dim view of it at the time, it taught him what not to take for granted, and to look at the world in an entirely different way. From that point on, Bell saw every day as if it were the first day of his life.
Perceptively, he contends that when a party is challenged from the right, it will move to the right to assimilate the challenge. When it is challenged from the left, it will move to the left. But when something unprecedented occurs, as happened with the sudden disgrace of so many Honourable Members, and it is challenged from the centre ground by ordinary, usually non-party voters concerned about its behaviour – whether in its manner of campaigning or in the integrity or otherwise of its MPs – then it will respond to the challenge, too. So will the other parties and candidates. They will seek to outdo each other in being more frugal, more transparent and, yes, even more humble than they were in the halcyon days before the scandal. A party that carries on as if nothing has altered risks extinction as well as defeat. It is, thinks Bell, a political climate change.
Finally, let me confess to a reservation about Bell’s important contribution and damning condemnation of the political class. He is right, a culture has developed. But this culture was born in the 1960s out of the funk of governments of both parties in implementing recommendations of outside bodies in relation to MPs’ pay. Whips resorted to putting the lid on dissatisfaction by saying: “It’ll be made up to you in expenses and allowances.” Bob Mellish told me that one seriously hard up MP, mired in alimony problems, was “as good as gold” when it was explained how allowances could be maximised.
Indeed, I believe that the much-maligned fees office was instructed to maximise MPs’ claims where possible. This was government thinking to “keep the boys and girls” quiet and in line. Of course, it was a shameful device. A very decent and well-meaning fees office official pointed out that I would be better off designating my “home in London” (two rooms above a public lavatory) as my first home, and my home in Scotland (a large house which my family has occupied for 400 years) as my second home. I could hardly succumb to that particular temptation.
Bell is correct. Things can never be the same again. But be careful that we do not get MPs so concerned for transparency in accounting for proverbial paper clips that they do not have the time and energy to consider Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the global economy.
Tam Dalyell
