Members of Parliament are aggrieved at the “rough justice” meted out to them by Sir Thomas Legg. Apparently, animosity towards the Prime Minister boiled over at a recent meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He was heckled by Labour MPs who are angry at his decision to pay back cash claimed for cleaning while urging them to follow his example.
Venom is aimed at Gordon Brown for seeking to sort out the expenses scandal by asking Legg to audit the expenses. Instead of shuffling the whole mess into a file marked “best forgotten”, Sir Thomas threw a hand grenade into the proceedings and demanded that MPs repay what he regards as extravagant past claims.
After the “fightback” of the Labour conference, MPs were faced with the payback and the mood reverted to demoralisation. There are no words other than utterly spineless to describe some Labour MPs. Britain is just a few months from a general election where, perhaps for the first time in a decade, the electorate is faced with a clear ideological choice. The stakes are high. David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party was a throwback to the Thatcherite 1980s. Were he allowed to launch his attack on “big government”, the consequences would take us back to the 1930s.
The collapse of the global financial system was not brought about by big government, but by reckless banks without regard for their wider responsibility to society. Their main interest was their own self-interest, accumulating massive bonuses for activities accurately characterised by Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, as “socially useless”.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity, this is what Labour MPs should be focusing on. For all his faults, the Prime Minister called it right when faced with big judgements to make about the economic crisis. Cameron and the Tories got it wrong.
We can – and must – argue that the public sector should not be made to pay for the bankers’ catastrophic failings. And the priority is also to take the fight to the Tories ,who want much smaller government and perhaps even no government at all.
The Tories would slash public spending, not just because of the deficit, but because cuts accord with their ideological position which deems government intervention to be intrinsically bad. It should be replaced with individual responsibility. That’s a recipe for ruin and Labour should be tearing into Conservatives over this.
It is contemptible for MPs to blame the Prime Minister for trying to sort out the mess they caused. Following the receipt of letters from Sir Thomas Legg, Gordon Brown was on the receiving end of more virulent heckling than was hurled at Tony Blair by the PLP over the Iraq war. That sums up the whole sorry expenses saga and the wretched attitude towards an illegal conflict. Iraq was where the rot set in for Labour. The expenses scandal merely added to wounds already inflicted on the body politic.
Retrospective justice may seem harsh and asking that money claimed for cleaning and gardening should be repaid doesn’t go to the heart of the matter. As Labour MP John Mann said, Sir Thomas had been too lenient in not looking at the cases of MPs who have “flipped” homes and benefited from capital gains tax rules. But Mann is right to conclude: “The idea that he [Legg] has been unfair is an absurdity.”
MPs should bite the bullet, stop contemplating their navels, pay up and get on with confronting issues that really matter. The list is a long one: the quagmire that is Afghanistan, the climate change talks in Copenhagen running into the sand, the Tories’ despicable allies in Europe and the pig-headedness of Royal Mail managers who are happy to wreck talks in an attempt to shift opinion in favour of privatisation.
The bankers may regard the crisis as over, with their bonuses and swagger returning, but these are tough times for millions – particularly those who have lost their jobs. There is still time for MPs to redeem themselves, but they need to pay up first.
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By the time you read this, British National Party leader Nick Griffin should have been granted the establishment’s prize of a seat on the panel of the BBC’s Question Time. It’s conceivable that the programme had to be cancelled following a mass demonstration outside Television Centre. Unfortunately, it is more likely that it went ahead, with Jack Straw and the others valiantly attempting to expose Griffin’s neo-Nazism, with the abysmal event presided over by the feeble David Dimbleby.
Impartiality and evidence of electoral support at a national level were the reasons the BBC gave for inviting Griffin. But the corporation is wrong. And even if you think the best way to address the BNP threat is to expose its leaders to media interrogators, that should not mean inviting them onto programmes which bestow a veneer of legitimacy.
Confronting the issues is the way to defeat the BNP, not deluding ourselves that it can be defeated by rigorous interviews. On the day of transmission, rolling news will have covered the story ad infinitum. Question Time will have made headlines, producers will tell themselves that they have fulfilled their remit and Griffin will be laughing all the way to the ballot box.
