The latest from Keiser Report, the best (and certainly most entertaining) business programme on TV today, as Max and Stacy do their established double act on all the current financial scandals. Gets especially good about eight minutes in when we broach the subject of Mr Tony Blair. Oh, and there’s a discussion about shiny metals too, but it’s in the matter of Tony Blair and JP Morgan that our host waxes wroth.
You paid for this photoshoot
May 31, 2009 at 11:44 pm (Corruption, Tories)
Yes, I know, we really shouldn’t begrudge Julie Kirkbride that £1040 claimed for professional photoshoots. After all, the rules allow for public support for MPs’ websites, and it is entirely understandable that Julie would want to make her website as attractive as possible. Since she is one of the most photogenic MPs – there are quite a few who you would pay good money to keep away from a camera – her eagerness to be recorded in living colour seems reasonable to me. At the very least, bearing in mind that the Kirkbride family seem to have been living like a posh version of the Gallaghers from Shameless, it’s surely one of her lesser transgressions.
By the way, I love the way Julie, seemingly unable to grasp her constituents’ ire, is whining that she has been forced out by “my political opponents in the Respect party.” Nice work, Mark.
The important thing, though, about Julie’s failure to survive – well, apart from the invaluable nature of the grassroots campaign in Bromsgrove – is that this went against Cameron’s plan. Allow me to explain.
I’ve been making a bit of a study of Rankin’ Dave Cameron, and there are certain things that fascinate me about the Cameron phenomenon. One is that he’s one of that layer of politicians who consistently and mysteriously get a much better press than they deserve. For one thing, it’s become conventional wisdom that he’s done much better than Brown out of the expenses scandal, because he’s been emoting in front of the public and showing understanding of their anger. Personally, when I see Dave pulling his “angry face” and telling us how incredibly angry he is, I’m reminded of nothing so much as David Brent pretending to empathise with his staff. But then, he is a PR man by profession, and PR men are notorious for this kind of thing. At least Mr Tony was a brilliant snake oil salesman – a transparent snake oil salesman is just unintentionally funny.
There are two aspects, I think, to Rankin’ Dave’s good press. One is, quite simply, that he’s coming down with media contacts, and makes big efforts to cultivate the media. Those leaders who don’t – John Major springs to mind – tend to get an appreciably worse press. The other, which explains why the BBC and the Grauniad are so keen on him, is political. That is, that the leader of the Conservative Party is not a conservative. He and his camarilla – Osborne, Vaizey, Gove et al – are basically liberals. Or, to be more precise, he’s a paid-up member of the post-ideological political class. He openly admires Mr Tony, and casts himself as the brave moderniser battling the forces of conservatism. Which is to say, most of his traditional base. Sound familiar?
So this is essentially how young Mr Cameron, whose main experience of government is having acted as an advisor to Norman Lamont at the time of Black Wednesday, got to be leader of the Tory party. The media puffed him up relentlessly, while disparaging his opponent, the experienced and substantial David Davis. It’s true that Davis displayed a lack of media nous, including this stunt:
which is something even I would balk at. Nonetheless, what counted against Davis is that he’s genuinely principled, and genuinely conservative. In this world of post-ideology, he just isn’t salonfähig for the political-media caste.
Whereas Rankin’ Dave certainly is. As a result, he’s got away with all sorts of daft proposals that would ordinarily have been laughed out of court. There was, of course, his outspoken support for Kartvelian irredentism during last year’s South Ossetia war, although thankfully he wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. There is his harebrained lash-up with the Unionist Party, which he will rue before long. And then there was his bright idea that, if you aren’t a member of the Tory party, you’ve never had any connection with the Tory party, that makes you the ideal candidate to be a Tory MP. Not only that, but celebrity candidates would be especially welcome. My erstwhile comrade Peter Hitchens takes up the story:
David Cameron’s weird appeal to non-political people to join the Tory candidates list is one of those media stories that doesn’t pass the ‘Try it the other way round’ test. This test is very easy to apply. Imagine what would happen if the other lot said the same thing. If Gordon Brown came up with anything so bottomlessly stupid, everyone would say so, and there would be pictures of the Prime Minister running his bitten nails through his greying hair with a look of doom on his ravaged face.
He would be accused of trying to hide behind the glamour or prestige of people like Joanna Lumley (a name which came up during David Cameron’s softball conversation, you can hardly call it an interview, with Andrew Marr on Sunday). He would be accused of desperation, of diluting his party. Labour candidates would be found to protest against the threat the idea posed to long-standing hard-working people etc etc, who had fought their way to nomination.
And quite right too. The idea is patently an unworkable publicity stunt.
You said it, Peter. That’s the sort of scheme just begging to be torn to pieces. Even if he put Lucy Pinder on the candidates’ list, I would still think it was a monumentally stupid idea. Likewise his call for open primaries, which is just a way of covering up the mainstream parties’ collapsing membership. Yet somehow, Dave gets away with this flapdoodle week on week.
And this is where the expenses scandal comes in. Brown has been pilloried for being slower off the mark than Cameron, and while there’s some truth in that, it’s also the case that New Labour has been setting up some kind of procedure for dealing with errant MPs, while the Tory leadership has been unofficially twisting arms and demanding retirements. What’s true in both cases, though, is that this has provided both leaders with a heaven-sent opportunity for score-settling. While I am no fan of Hazel Blears, and would be very glad to see her departure from public life, it’s absolutely correct that she has done nothing substantially different from, say, Buff Hoon or the boy Purnell. What’s different is that factional politics in the Labour Party have come into play.
This is much more blatant in the case of the Useless Tories. One notices that Gove and Vaizey, to name but two, have suddenly become invisible men. Meanwhile, the forced retirements have been of older – and significantly more conservative – members of the parliamentary party, people who never liked Cameron and who he dislikes in turn. This scandal therefore becomes another stage in the de-conservatisation of the Conservative Party. Which explains the encouragement Dave has been getting from his media fan club.
On the other side, the fate of Julie Kirkbride demonstrates the unpredicability of real politics. It has become clear that the resignation of Cameron advisor, and Julie’s other half, Andrew MacKay was part of a deal whereby Julie would be protected. This would work out well on both levels. Since the parliamentary Conservative party contains only four women under 50, three if you discount Julie, she was an important part of the optics of modernisation. It was only her own rapacity and the bolshiness of the good folk of Bromsgrove that got in the way.
Which at least gives us some cause for hope, that the real may at times upset the simulacrum. Indeed, holding onto the Real and denying the Simulacrum is the essential point for any human-centred politics. Baudrillard got plenty of things wrong, but he was dead right about that, and we could use him around today.
Gerry the Prod
May 30, 2009 at 3:32 pm (Catholicism, Corruption, Ireland, Provos)
What is the difference between the backwash of the Ryan report and the conviction of Frank Dunlop? I think here that there’s a rather obvious disconnect between individual responsibility and corporate responsibility. The multiple tribunals on corruption have tended to look for high-profile scalps. Charlie Haughey, of course, is dead, but they did manage to get a damning report out on his finances. Bertie Ahern, sleekit weasel though he is, may yet be done – in fact he’ll have to be, if the astronomical cost of the Mahon tribunal is to be justified.
And so it is with Frank the Canary. Not that Frank can complain about his conviction, but self-evidently he didn’t operate in a vacuum. He bribed politicians to advance the business interests of his clients. His activities can’t be separated from the politicians who willingly accepted his bribes, or from the business clients who profited from those politicians being encouraged by Frank to take the right decisions about planning applications. Furthermore, while the Irish lobbying industry has been straining mightily to insist that Frank is such a singularly bad apple that no conclusions about their industry can be drawn from his transgressions… well, you can believe that if you want.
The Ryan report is something else. Let’s leave aside Biffo Cowen rumbling about prosecutions of the miscreants. That’s not very likely, since all of the institutions investigated have long since been shut down, most of the perpetrators are long since dead and, following previous sex abuse scandals, the Catholic hierarchy has put serious effort into getting an effective vetting procedure in place. So we have the spotlight being turned on the religious orders and whether they’re willing to shoulder responsibility for the sins of their predecessors – which is the point that Archbishop Nichols was discussing. That’s fair enough, but it’s far from being the whole story.
Another point is that much of this is really about catharsis. The 2000 or so victims are a constituency who feel, rightly, that they have been ignored in the past and want to be heard now. Basic human sympathy, and public acknowledgement of their pain and anger, is the most important thing that can be done.
There are other points about Ryan – which is a hefty and complicated document – which shine a light on aspects of Irish society, some of which haven’t really been touched on. It will be argued that the failure of the Irish state to become properly independent, which meant that the historical outsourcing of important social services to the churches was never rolled back, forms a crucial part of the backdrop. (I realise that a lot of the media coverage in Britain and its D4 colony has depended on the frisson of Catholicism. It may be worth asking whether a study of care homes in Britain over the same period would show a difference in the fundamentals, as opposed to the details.) There’s also an aspect of the industrial schools being used as a source of what really amounts to slave labour, and what that says about class structures in Ireland.
While we’re on the class aspect, there was another thing that struck me, which was the broad definition of what constituted abuse. Had Ryan had a narrower focus on serious cases of assault or rape, the report would have been much thinner, but there would certainly have been enough there, and in a focussed way, to make a big impact. The introduction of categories like “emotional abuse” had me scratching my head a little. Perhaps this is a generational thing, as I can remember an educational system where a rap across the knuckles with a ruler, or occasionally a chalk duster thrown at your head, were accepted disciplinary tools, and if you got a clip round the ear at school, you would get another one at home. The revelation that the regime in these institutions decades ago was not in accordance with present-day thinking on the rights of the child is not very startling.
On the other hand, you have to bear in mind that the kids who were sentenced to these institutions were drawn from the poorest of the poor. The religious who administered the institutions were, as a general rule, drawn from more respectable layers of society. There is something to be said for a rounded description of the routine brutality in the institutions, not least for what it says about the extreme class hatred that existed – and still does – in Irish society.
Well, there is a lot of backwash still to come from this. And, if experience is any guide, it won’t be long before the substance of the story is drowned out by the sound of grinding axes.
Anyway, on the same general theme, this provides me with an opportunity to look at a contribution on the issue from someone who’s relatively new to blogging, but whose presence does lend a bit of tone to the Irish blogosphere. Yes, it’s Gerry Adams.
I have to say, I’m finding the Grizzly blog compulsive reading these days, as much for linguistic as political reasons. Gerry can do the folksy thing when he’s down with his constituents addressing local politics, but when he puts on his high politics hat, he sounds like nobody on earth. Or at least nobody in West Belfast. More precisely, he sounds like a Trotskyist sociology lecturer circa 1978, overlaid with a heavy veneer of Humespeak. And I’ve noticed that he has a liking for the impersonal locution “this blog believes…” when he’s dealing with serious issues, as opposed to the “me and my muckers” style he uses for local stuff, or quoting Meat Loaf lyrics.
Anyway, Gerry has been dealing with the Ryan report. And, by and large, he writes well on the subject and I agree with most of what he says. But what struck me was a little bit in the middle where he gets all theological. You see, Gerry agrees with Mr Tony Blair that the Catholic Church needs to be reformed:
This blog has long held the view that the institutionalised Catholic church is undemocratic in many ways. For example women are denied the right to become priests. Church lay members have no say in who their pastors are. Bishops and cardinals are elevated to positions of power and authority for life. Compulsory celibacy is a nonsense and the theology on which it, and other teachings, are based is entirely flawed.
Yes, well, we will skip over the incongruity of the leader of Sinn Féin complaining about the top-down style of the Catholic bishops. But this isn’t totally new. Gerry, when not hugging trees, has publicly bigged up the Protestant churches in the past, having particularly kind words for the democratic regime in the Irish Presbyterian Church. (Your actual Presbyterians are wont to say that it’s a self-serving oligarchy, but at least they have the appearance of a democratic say.) And the other stuff he’s saying, about ending celibacy and ordaining women, looks very much like a programme of radical reform to me. I certainly can’t see Pope Benny going for it.
This poses an interesting question, because Gerry is, as we know, a regular Mass-goer and certainly is at ease with what we might term cultural Catholicism. And, bearing in mind where his support comes from, you can understand why he doesn’t just up sticks and join a Protestant church. But there is a certain fascination in his occasional revelations of Prod tendencies. After all, as I remarked about Mr Tony, I couldn’t figure out why the arch-moderniser had chosen to belong to a reactionary church. As for Gerry? Next thing you know, he’ll be parading on the Twelfth.
Mr Tony and the architecture of corruption
May 29, 2009 at 11:23 pm (Corruption, Journalism, New Labour)
From the current Private Eye, adding some welcome background:
Tony Blair and accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers jointly helped push through a rule change in 2004 that brought the MPs’ expenses scandal to the heart of government. Without Blair’s new rule, explicitly designed to boost ministers’ expenses, many of the current frontbench embarrassments would not now be an issue.
The Senior Salaries Review Board looked at MPs’ pay, using a survey of MPs prepared by PwC, and the firm was happy to support a point that Private Eye understands was pushed by the Prime Minister. Its report said: “There were comments made about the rules which require ministers and other paid office holders to elect their London residence sa the main residence and the constituency as their second property. The rules mean that the ACA [Additional Costs Allowance] is used against costs on a property which in many cases has been owned by the MP and his or her family for a significant number of years and where the mortgage is typically low.”
The report makes it clear ministers complained that because they were deemed to live in London, they could not “flip” homes in order to claim higher expenses; they could only claim on their generally cheaper properties outside the capital. According to the review board, the rule was dropped in February 2004.
Hazel Blears’ property ladder, Maria Eagle’s flipping, Caroline Flint’s new London flat, the bulk of Shahid Malik and Shaun Woodward’s expenses and Kitty Ussher’s war on “bad taste” Artex all depend on the 2004 rule change, as do the bulk of Gordon Brown’s own additional costs claims.
The Commons members’ estimates committee of senior MPs told Private Eye that it changed the rule in February 2004, reflecting the concerns in the PwC report.
The former PM’s support for the change was no random act of greed (indeed, Blair did not personally use the change to raise money himself, relying instead on a complex mortgage transaction on his constituency home.) He was actually trying to increase his ministers’ income while publicly appearing to keep a lid on their headline pay.
He did so by following a model set in 1985 by Margaret Thatcher, who, trying to hold back public sector pay and wanting MPs to appear to set a good example to teachers and the like, had introduced the crucial change in the Additional Costs Allowance which allowed MPs to begin claiming their mortgage costs rather than simply hotel bills or rents. Thus began the great Westminster property speculation game – Blair simply extending the perk to his London-based ministers who were always whingeing that they didn’t earn enough.
Quite so. I would simply add that this is another classic example of the law of unintended consequences coming back to bite New Labour in the arse. Back in the day, when MPs would vote themselves a generous pay rise, there would be a few days of bad headlines and it would all blow over again. It’s precisely the desire to avoid those few days of bad headlines that has led to the culture of systematic dishonesty, and thus directly to the last three weeks of shocking headlines. Who knows, maybe it’s karma.
Frank the Canary goes down
May 29, 2009 at 11:16 pm (Corruption, Ireland)
I’ve come across Frank Dunlop several times down the years, and I must admit I always liked him on a personal level. But then, Frank never handed me a brown envelope full of banknotes. The bastard.
As longtime readers will know, I’m not massively enamoured of the judicial tribunal system in the Banana Republic. This has not so much to do with the problems they’re supposed to address – which are real problems in Irish society – as with their sociological function, which is a) to give the impression that the powers that be are doing something, and b) to provide an enormous state subsidy to the legal profession. Well, that and they take an inordinately long time to tell us what we already knew, and what wouldn’t need these tribunals if there was a properly functioning criminal justice system.
I may well be coming back to the report of the Ryan Commission presently, as it demands some thought. For the moment, I’ll just pose the question of whether the systematic brutality of the industrial schools was such a deep, dark secret that it took a ten-year judicial process to whether or not it happened.
Anyway, back to Frank the Canary. Frank is going to chokey, and he can’t say he didn’t ask for it. Nevertheless, there are one or two things niggling away at the back of my mind. The most obvious one is the time frame. That is to say, Frank took the stand way back in 2000. Having taken the stand, he then remained on it for months on end, testifying in stupefying detail about how he’d bribed councillors to encourage them to vote the right way on planning decisions. So the guy cheerfully admits that he’s a crook, but then it takes nine solid years to get any sort of conviction against him. I do remember that old crack about the mills of God, but bearing in mind that Frank’s going to be out in less than a year, grinding exceeding fine doesn’t really come into it.
Then there’s another thing that follows on, as if you say A then you must also say B. Namely, Frank has been shown to be corrupt. The fact of him having bribed politicians is now legally established. So, are we soon going to see the politicians who accepted bribes from Frank before the courts? It’s not as if he physically pinned them to the ground and stuffed money into their pockets. And corruption on the council is at least as unsurprising as sadism at the industrial school. Certainly, those in the media who celebrated the property bubble must have known how profoundly dodgy the planning system was. All the same, I suspect it will be some considerable time, if ever, before elected representatives are brought to book.
On the other hand, and I know I’ve said this before, these epic tribunals, lasting many years and spending hundreds of millions of euro, mostly on legal fees, inquiring into political corruption, have to justify their existence somehow. The best way to do that is to claim a major scalp, and the obvious man is Bertie. At this point, I have long since lost interest in Bertie’s labyrinthine personal finances and am prepared to write them off as one of those great historical conundra, like the Marie Celeste or the Man in the Iron Mask. The guy is out of power and his reputation is shot to pieces, and that will do to be going on with. You don’t need to be a died-in-the-wool Fianna Fáiler to question whether the Irish judiciary needs to spend from here to doomsday on the former taoiseach’s bungs.
To return to the point, we’ve got here a situation where the judicial tribunal as an institution was invented by Charlie Haughey as an expedient to stop Des O’Malley walking out of their coalition. But, having proved a useful expedient, and judicial activism being what it is (excuse me for sounding like a member of the Federalist Society for a moment), the bastard things were soon popping up all over the place. The enormous time – and more pertinently, the enormous cost – involved in these tribunals does at least raise the issue of whether, in the new age of austerity, this is the way to deal with corruption.
Actually, you really don’t need an elaborate legal inquisition to clean up politics. Most importantly, you need a change of culture – and recall that, in the much-maligned de Valera era, politicians were often ostentatious in their austere lifestyles and high-minded commitment to public service. This would require some big changes in personnel, but that’s no bad thing. The second thing you would need, as I’ve mentioned, is an effective and efficient criminal justice system that will deal with transgressions with the required severity. Finally, a combative press that gets up off its arse and does its job. The Freedom of Information Act isn’t there just as a decoration, but can actually be a useful tool, believe it or not.
Rud eile: Garibaldy is very good on the sectarian murder of Kevin McDaid, beaten to death by a mob of drunken loyalists in Coleraine. I noticed that the area’s MP, Gregory Campbell, was remarkably understanding of the situation. Also, the news bulletins picked up quickly on the talking point that there were clashes between rival gangs – that would be those with pickaxe handles and those without.
Rud eile fós: The always readable Justin Raimondo tells it like it is on Korea.
House of ill repute
May 21, 2009 at 9:49 am (Corruption)
The late Brian Clough’s brief sojourn at Leeds United has gone down in footballing folklore for two reasons. One is Cloughie’s magnetic personality, which positively lends itself to the Liberty Valance treatment. The other is that, back in the 1970s, a team revolting against their manager and forcing him out was unheard of. It isn’t unheard of now, and perhaps in thirty years’ time someone will write a novel about Big Sam’s time at Newcastle.
It’s a less deferential culture now, of course, but economics feed into it too. Thanks not least to Jimmy Hill overturning the maximum wage for professional footballers in 1961, you often have a situation in the top flight where a good half of the squad are earning more than the manager – in one or two cases considerably more – and on such silly money that financial penalties don’t bother them. So it’s difficult to crack the whip, unless you have an Alex Ferguson who can weld together a disciplined team through sheer force of personality. (Though Ronaldo is still a lazy, disloyal shit, demonstrating that even Fergie’s powers have their limits.)
But what strikes me is that, at least if the balloons ringing TalkSport are anything to go by, huge numbers of fans seem eager to buy into the silly-money culture for the sake of instant gratification, what was known as “living the dream” when Leeds bankrupted themselves for the sake of Ridsdale’s vaulting ambition. In this context, Arsène Wenger’s approach of bringing through talent from the youth team while being cautious in the transfer market’s bubble economy strikes me as sensible, if you’re willing to think in the long term. But every summer you get the more gormless Arsenal fans kicking up and demanding Wenger splash out £80 million signing some galacticos. For even more of this nonsense, you can look at Formula One, where the money is even sillier than the Premier League. For some considerable time, Max Mosley has been making a strong case for imposing financial restraint before the sport goes bust. But it’s not very often anyone on the phone-ins says, “You know, Max has a point worth thinking over.” No, it’s the “Max Must Go” brigade who make all the noise.
I think the explanation of all this is that, while the Ron Manager spirit lives on in the more impecunious areas of sport, at a certain level you enter the entertainment industry. Case in point, women’s tennis, where commercial endorsements mean that the players with the most sex appeal (think of Anna Kournikova’s bra adverts) can earn a good deal more than more talented but less marketable players. And, once you cast things in showbiz terms… well, we don’t really begrudge entertainers much.
Anyway, on the principle that politics is showbiz for ugly people, this brings me back to the Westminster expenses scandal. One thing that amused me was the confrontation on News 24 between George Foulkes and Carrie Gracie. Let me say at the start that I like Carrie Gracie, and have done since she was reporting from China – she has obvious intelligence and journalistic ability, and while there are plenty of people on News 24, of both sexes, whose main function is to look pretty while reading an autocue, she’s not one of them. And I have long had an intense dislike for George Foulkes, a man who has never seen an imperialist war he didn’t like, and who might be described as Denis MacShane minus the wit, charm or sophistication. But Foulkes did have a point. I was taken aback to hear that Carrie’s salary was £92,000, which is nearly half as much again as a backbench MP. (But not as much as her male co-anchor, I notice.) It goes to show, I suppose, that while there are plenty of underpaid and overworked journalists about, at the higher level – news anchoring, say, or the op-ed pages of the papers – we are entering the world of news as showbiz, where Chris Morris is as good a critical guide as Nick Davies.
And at the top end of earners, we really are in showbiz territory. Richard Littlejohnson, who’s been fulminating in the Daily Mail about MPs’ extravagance, has a salary roughly equivalent to a dozen MPs put together. Jeremy Paxman earns even more. You could say that, in terms of his contribution to the body politic, Paxo is easily worth a dozen MPs, but it’s a little incongruous when he’s supposed to be holding them to account about their expenditure. You may as well have Jonathan Ross or Katie Price presenting Newsnight. And that’s without even getting into Fleet Street’s slush fund culture. I wouldn’t be sorry if the investigation into MPs was extended into other areas of society.
But there are good reasons for the intensity of the anger that we saw demonstrated on last week’s Question Time. Firstly, it’s our money. Secondly, while the old system of MPs voting themselves generous pay rises every year led to a few days’ bad headlines, the milking of the expenses system as a means of bridging the gap between what they think they’re worth and what the public think they’re worth, has led to a much fiercer reaction, thanks to the attendant dishonesty, which in many cases looks very much like obtaining money under false pretences. There’s the culture of putting everything on the tab – in terms of the rules, Jacqui Smith’s bath plug is one of the more justifiable claims, but claiming 88p back from the taxpayer for something she could pay for out of her loose change just looks incredibly tacky. And there’s what the claims have revealed about MPs’ lifestyles, fanning the impression that they belong to a metropolitan elite remote from the concerns of their constituents.
While I’m not personally theological about the left’s historic demand for an MP on a workers’ wage, this sort of thing demonstrates why it can be a very good idea – it’s one reason why the late Terry Fields was such a good constituency MP, because he was still living the kind of lifestyle that he had as a firefighter. At the very least, public representatives should not live lives vastly removed from those of their constituents. What might be the best way forward in the interim is to simply link MPs’ pay to that of, say, division heads in the Civil Service, which would take their salaries out of their own hands, and to have a fairly restrictive expenses regime subject to regular audit by HMRC.
And this whole saga does at least demonstrate the virtues of openness. On one level, it’s yet another example of New Labour’s actions coming back to bite them in the arse. They bring in these measures, like the Freedom of Information Act or the Human Rights Act or the Sexual Orientation Regulations – which may be completely defensible in their own right – as cheap progressive-looking measures to keep their luvvie element happy, and then find themselves caught in the unintended consequences. But these disclosures are very much a Good Thing. The odium makes some sort of reform inevitable, although I am less than impressed by El Gordo’s plan to outsource parliamentary administration to yet another unelected quango. The exposure of financial scandals – which is a rare enough thing, remember that the scandals of the Major government were nearly all about shagging – the mass nature of the exposure weakens the whipping system, as all this information coming into the public domain means it’ll be harder in future for the whips to blackmail MPs into voting the right way. And it has also shaken up the lobby system, where the symbiosis of journos and politicos had become so cosy that some correspondents had become little more than gossip columnists. The Torygraph‘s declaration of war on the entire political class can’t be sustained in the long term, but it makes it more difficult to go back to the old backslapping ways.
Parenthetically, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for the hapless Speaker Martin on his being hounded out of office, even though in the end he had to go. A lot of this is due to the background of years of personal attacks by people who found it either hilarious or outrageous that a working-class Scottish Catholic could hold such a high position. (Step forward Quentin Letts, who finds it impossible to mention Martin without going into a tedious “See you, Jimmy” routine – that’s when he isn’t sniggering at Jacqui Smith’s tits.) But to return to the proximate cause, we’re dealing here with the outworkings of decades of corruption – it’s been made known that the sainted Betty Boothroyd is livid, but you had the same set-up under Betty’s speakership and she didn’t exactly bust a gut to change things. Martin didn’t force MPs to fiddle their expenses, still less did he fill in their claim forms for them. In resisting transparency, he’ s only been reflecting the will of the House. And let’s have some light shed on the House of Commons Commission, a committee chaired by the Speaker, yes, but stuffed full of grandees from the Labour, Tory and Liberal parties, and which has been one of the most powerful pillars of the status quo. But yeah, the captain had to take a fall for the team. Greater love hath no man, than he lay down his sinecure for those of his friends.
And you can see a sort of rough justice in action all round. It is entirely correct that the most egregious offenders are seeing their careers go up in smoke. In particular, Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears look like dead women walking, which gives me no end of satisfaction. Not to mention Shahid Malik, who’s always reminded me of a minor character from Minder and whose fall from grace surprises me not in the least. It would be nice to see this followed up by a mass round of deselections, or if all else fails a raft of anti-sleaze independent candidates. On the other hand, there are those who have been honest and frugal with taxpayers’ money – people like Alan Johnson, Vince Cable, Martin Salter, Theresa May or the incomparable John Mann – who deserve to come out with their reputations enhanced. Whether or not you agree with them politically, they have demonstrated themselves on the personal level to be decent public representatives who aren’t in it to line their pockets. And if there is a political dividing line, it is that the Labour left, Harry Cohen notwithstanding, have tended to come out better than the NuLabour apparatchiks, while proper old-fashioned Conservatives seem to be doing better on average than the Cameroons. That is, people for whom politics is about ideas and public service, not about “governance” and PR.
Speaking of PR men, it’s the little juxtapositions that are so telling. Like socialist Luton MP Kelvin Hopkins, who actually commutes to Westminster while his New Labour neighbour Margaret Moran has been claiming expenses on her third home, a hundred miles away. Well done that man. And Geoffrey Robinson has gone up in my estimation because, although he’s a very wealthy man who owns multiple properties, he won’t claim expenses on any of them on the very reasonable grounds that he can afford to pay his own way. Compare that to the Tory leader, who’s been getting great headlines by using his PR training to strike “decisive” poses. David and Samantha Cameron are estimated to have a joint worth in the region of £30 million, which rather begs the question of why he needs a mortgage at all, let alone charging twenty grand a year from the taxpayer to finance it. Or is that the point?
But this is a question the media have not asked, and I suggest that’s because the political-media class has far too much invested in Rankin’ Dave. Just as Mr Tony Blair saved the Labour Party from socialism, and is now trying to save the Catholic Church from Christianity, so it falls to young Mr Cameron to save the Conservative Party from conservatism. Therefore, Dave must be protected.
Rud eile: Although I’ve heard some grumbling in the queue at Asda about the Swish Family Robinson and their enormous expenses claims, I don’t expect this scandal to have more than a marginal effect on votes in the north of Ireland. We don’t vote on those issues, and anyway our Soviet-style economy means we don’t have the taxpayer culture that plays such a big role in Sasanach politics. But I must give an award for optimism to the News of the World, which has launched a campaign to unseat Gerry Adams over his having milked the second-home allowance. As if that was the worst thing Gerry had ever done. And, knowing the West Belfast scally mentality, it’s more likely to make Gerry even more popular.
Rud eile fós: First Hazel Blears, then Shahid Malik, and now Denis MacShane stands accused of sharp practice. The Decent Left’s poster boys and girls aren’t running a very good batting average, are they? Actually, Brian Brivati was on the Bill Turnbull Show yesterday morning, but while he did waffle a little about Bagehot, I was disappointed that he didn’t have anything specifically Decent to say. Perhaps Professor Geras can dust off some old ethics texts, and explain how being signed up to TGISOOT gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card for fiddling your expenses. Or we could have some mea culpas, like Nick Cohen did over his boosting of Hassan Butt… oh, hold on…
On the pig’s back
May 13, 2009 at 4:47 pm (Corruption)
Well, the MPs’ expenses saga rumbles on and on, with no end in sight, and I’m wondering whether our own Assembly is even more of a shambles. But you can see how this is feeding into the general mood of disillusion shading into anti-politics. The economic crisis, the decay in party organisation, and the parties’ convergence on some supposed centre ground that excludes consideration of all but a small proportion of swing voters, have created the conditions for a crisis of legitimacy; this looks like a catalyst. And actually, this rotten parliament at Westminster is just crying out for dissolution. The government is a disgrace and should be sacked; it would be ideal if we could also sack the gutless, sleazy opposition.
Well, at least the exposure and humiliation of a raft of elected representatives has spurred on proposals to do something to clean up the system. On the other hand, before we get carried away with ourselves, let’s remember the Tangentopoli scandals in Italy. The corrupt edifice of Christian Democracy was brought down; and it was Berlusconi, Fini and the Lega Nord who stepped into the breach.
What’s interesting me is the background. I think there are a few strands to be drawn out. One is the question Paul Routledge raised in yesterday’s Mirror, that of the changing sociological composition of MPs:
At the heart of the Westminster expenses scandal lies a huge, but largely unnoticed, social change in the make-up of Parliament.
Gone are the days when trade union stalwarts finally made it to the Labour benches after a lifetime on the shopfloor.
Gone too, are the pinstriped Tory knights of the shires and eminent Queens Counsel, who saw politics as the highest form of public service.
In their place, right across the political spectrum, has come a new elite of young, full-time careerists who bring to the job the cynical, exploitative attitude of managers on the make.
They don’t just want to run the country (which is bad enough), they want to be rewarded in a manner that fits their grandiose self importance.
I think that’s true.The increasing dominance, even at the highest levels, of superannuated student politicians like Phil Woolas or Jim Murphy is a sign that things have changed, and not for the better. Events in Erith, where the New Labour apparat is trying to saddle a working-class constituency with the 22-year-old daughter of Lord Philip Gould, are just an extreme example. And much the same could be said of their Tory oppos. Just because you’ve been to Eton doesn’t make you George Orwell, or even Douglas Hurd.
Then there’s the remuneration issue. Your backbench MP has a basic salary of £64,000, which puts him in the top 7% of earners. Unless your MP is Sir Malcolm Rifkind in Kensington and Chelsea, this will be considerably more than his average constituent. On the other hand, it doesn’t compare all that well with MPs’ peers who went into law, medicine or the City rather than politics. I’m sceptical of the idea that most MPs could earn much more in the private sector – many of them don’t really have any marketable skills – but there’s no doubt that they have fallen behind those who they see as comparators.
What’s also come into play is that, due to the odium surrounding MPs’ tradition of voting themselves an annual pay rise, the optics have demanded some restraint on headline pay. But the expenses system, which we can now see has been very lightly policed, can effectively become an additional income stream. It’s tempting, as long as you can get away with it. Once the details come out, though, it just looks dishonest.
I don’t think anybody disputes that there has to be some allowances system. The second home allowance was introduced in the 1970s to end the situation where MPs from Manchester or Glasgow had to sleep in their offices. I don’t think the public would begrudge something towards rents, utility bills or council tax. But when someone like Geoff Hoon can use the allowances system to build up a sizeable property empire, you know the spirit of the system isn’t being adhered to even if it’s technically within the rules.
It is about time Westminster stopped being so precious about self-regulation and brought in proper audit checks, such as you have for other public bodies. And such is the anger that that just might happen.
By the way, Stephen Fry’s comment that this is all a fuss over nothing tells us more about Stephen Fry’s bank balance than anything else. But the old humbug detector has been going into overdrive lately. It’s been instructive to see TV anchors or newspaper columnists (one thinks of Richard Littlejohn spewing bile from his gated community in Florida) getting on their high horse when they take home a multiple of an MP’s salary. Not to mention the press’s notorious expenses culture, something the Lobby isn’t very anxious to have investigated.
But, to end on a heartwarming note, there’s always one man you can rely on to defend our political class’s indefensible actions. Yes, it’s David Aaronovitch, whose take on events is that the public is suffering from some sort of mass psychosis causing them to somehow form the belief that the government is dishonest. By the way, Aaro has a new book out on conspiracy theories, wherein he derides a gullible public for being taken in by a systematic scepticism towards power. One might object that Aaro systematically gives those in power the benefit of the doubt, but then that’s what he’s there for.
San idirlinn, sa Phoblacht na mBananaí…
September 28, 2007 at 8:28 pm (Corruption, Fianna Fáil, Ireland)
I rather like Éamon Gilmore. Had I been a member of the Labour Party, which I’m not, I’d be quite happy with him taking over the leadership. He’s a smart guy, has some ideas, knows how to express them and isn’t hemmed in by the inherited orthodoxies of Stickiedom. On the other hand, I can’t quite figure out what he thought he was doing coming up with the idea of a no confidence motion in Bertie. Grabbing a cheap headline with a motion that was bound to fail is something you might expect from Electric Enda, who, all credit to his persistence, is still trying to put himself forward as an alternative taoiseach. But I would have hoped for a slightly more sober approach from Gilmore.
I’ve written before about my views of the Tribunal system (apologies for the repetition), and I also direct readers to WorldbyStorm on this issue. Just to recap, the Tribunals, apart from their dubious constitutionality, have become an enormous white elephant. Their main material function – apart from their political function – is to provide journos with easy copy and multimillionaire barristers with a very substantial state subsidy. With no end in sight, and a projected bill that could well top a billion euro, a sane body politic would have introduced strict anti-corruption laws (and maybe stricter ones than those currently in place are called for) and then moved to wind the Tribunals down. Unfortunately, since Des O’Malley browbeat Charlie into setting up the Beef Tribunal in 1991, no government has had the balls to get a grip on the legal eagles.
So we have this current situation with Bertie. We should reiterate that there has been no proof, nor anything like it, that Bertie has done anything illegal. Unethical and dishonourable probably, but no smoking gun of illegality has been found. All that Mahon has been able to demonstrate so far is that Bertie is a bit dodgy, a bit of a geezer, a little bit werrrr, a little bit weyyyyyy, a little bit arrrrgggh. But we knew that already. Did anyone really expect him to break down in the Dáil and wail that his entire political career had been a complete fraud?
Then there is the partisan aspect. The one thing that keeps me from straight out calling for the Tribunals to be scrapped is that that’s what the gaimbín wing of Fianna Fáil would like to happen. But that’s not to say that they don’t have a point. No matter the fact that Frank Dunlop paid off politicians of all parties; both the official opposition (Fine Gael and Labour) and the real opposition (the Irish Times) have shown a touching faith in the idea that endless exposés of “Fianna Fáil corruption” would oust the Soldiers of Fortune from power. (The gormless left of course also cling to this notion, with their little placards calling on the gardaí to arrest elected representatives.) The recent election should have proved otherwise, but I suppose that for a certain type of political mind it just proves that the Irish population get the leaders they deserve.
But there is a dynamic here that FF supporters are keenly aware of, and it’s a dynamic that undermines the credibility of the entire Tribunal system. Multiple judicial tribunals have been sitting for so many years, at such hideous expense and with so few tangible results that the only way they can be redeemed is by claiming the scalp of the Taoiseach. And, in the absence of a smoking gun, that means poking around in Bertie’s personal finances and trying to make him look so shifty that he becomes too much of a hot potato to remain in power. Trouble is, Bertie’s personal finances are so convoluted and his brass neck so tough that we could see this whole saga drag on for the rest of our natural lives. Well, maybe a few people would be satisfied with that, but it doesn’t do much for the public good.
Rud eile: No, I haven’t forgotten Gail Walker this week, she just didn’t interest me that much. We had the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, Sir Hugh Orde’s bit on the side and yet again some slagging off of the BBC. Elsewhere in the Telegraph this week, Lindy McDowell branched out from local politics to have a pop at Ahmadinejad, although not surprisingly she managed to bring the Provos into the argument. For another view of Ahmadinejad’s American adventure, you may find Justin Raimondo interesting.
