The anger is wholly new. During BBC television’s Question Time with Sir Menzies (Ming) Campbell, the respected former leader of the Liberal Democrats, and the housing minister, Margaret Beckett, I thought the audience might be minded to let poor Ming off with 20 years’ hard labor, but that it would surely offer no mercy to a woman who has refused to pay back £72,000 (US$111,000) claimed on her properties and who displayed a defiance not seen since Elena Ceausescu, the wife of Romania’s former Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, was led from court and propped up against a convenient wall.
Make no mistake — this is a disaster for us all. The anger will remain; the wounds will suppurate. It is not just the government that has lost its mandate and moral authority, but the House of Commons. Britain should expect no credible government until after the next election because our elected representatives are — some unfairly — held in contempt. And with the news that two Labour peers have been found guilty of offering to sell amendments for cash and so face becoming the first members of the upper chamber (House of Lords) to be suspended since the English Civil War, there is a sense that we have entered revolutionary times that will see Parliament and politics changed for better or worse.
How this anger will metabolize in the run-up to the election and what should happen in that period must now be our urgent concern. There’s no point going over the details of this scandal. The possible prosecution of members of parliament (MPs) may satisfy the mob, but the serious business must be to decide how we strengthen Parliament and give MPs greater — not less — power to scrutinize the executive and investigate the civil service. In short, we need to take control of our democracy with an unprecedented zeal. And the people we need to involve are the younger generation that has watched the catastrophes and corruption perpetrated by the baby boomers with bewilderment.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
The first step is to recognize that the expenses scandal is part of a pattern of contempt: contempt of the executive for Parliament, contempt of MPs for the public. I don’t say it is universal, but this attitude contains both the exploitation of the taxpayer and the war on individual liberty rights and privacy.
At the heart of the story is the supremacy of the executive and the lassitude of Parliament. As MP Frank Field pointed out in an article on the Comment is Free blog: “Week after week, MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative program to speak of. Even the debates that are put on to fill in time are those that deny MPs a vote. The whole exercise is vacuous.”
The facts bear out his sketch. In the current session, Parliament will spend 143 days in recess. MPs took 24 days holiday at Christmas, 10 days in February, 17 at Easter and now they have the prospect of 10 days at Whitsun, the seventh Sunday after Easter, plus a summer break of 82 days. Not bad for basic pay and allowances of £180,000 a year.
Set against this is the time allowed by the insufferable leader of the house, Harriet Harman, for the debate of yet another criminal justice bill — the Policing and Crime Bill 2008-09. The Lib Dem MP Evan Harris pointed out at the Manifesto Club last week that the bill has been given just six-and-a-half hours for debate. During that time, MPs will be expected to scrutinize measures that will create a new offense of paying for sex, modify the law on soliciting, tighten regulations on lap-dancing clubs, introduce powers to allow police to deal with young people drinking in public, introduce new codes for the sale of alcohol, amend criminal asset recovery schemes and change airport security and policing laws.
That’s a lot of difficult issues to cram into just six-and-a-half hours when there are literally months to spare. What this tells us is that Harriet Harman, Leader of the House of Commons, is hostile to proper scrutiny and that in reality Parliament no longer matters. The government goes through the motions of debate but essentially acts by decree: the house rarely sits after Thursday afternoon, all-night debates are a thing of the past and secondary legislation — largely un-debated and unscrutinized — has doubled in the past 20 years. It is a wonder that MPs have not risen up to reclaim Parliament and tell the whips to get lost, but so many are trapped by the system of patronage and the ambition to be part of a largely pointless government cohort they stay silent.
Against this picture, MPs’ pompous references to parliamentary sovereignty, always used to deny the British a written constitution, make you gasp. What Parliament? What bleeding sovereignty? The public is beginning to sense this malaise, which by the way, has been dreadfully covered over the years by journalists. People are beginning to ask whether David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservatives, understands the need for reform or the swell of interest in political renewal and a constitution and how severely his party has been damaged in the past week.
One fear being murmured among the opposition benches last week is the prospect of a loose-knit party consisting of well-known national and local figures of irreproachable character (on the lines of the actress and campaigner Joanna Lumley and Dr Richard Taylor, an independent MP) who could stand on a non-partisan ticket of parliamentary and constitutional reform, aiming to return power to the people and their representatives.
Founding a party is harder than designing an airliner at short notice, but the merits are obvious, especially to the young who face debt, unemployment and increased tax burdens stretching into the future. They will demand a parliament that has been upgraded to the 21st century, not degraded by a lot of shifty men and women flipping their homes, cleaning their moats and buying porn movies. A new party is probably not the best route, but what we need to do as a nation is focus on the key measures to restore MPs’ authority and their responsiveness to the public.
A reduction in the number of MPs; all expenses to be recorded in public within two months of being incurred and all meetings with lobbyists entered into an open record. Ministers barred from taking a job with companies that have dealings with their former or related department. Committee chairs to be chosen by MPs, not selected by whips. An all-party authority to control whips and ensure the free expression of an MP’s conscience. Minimum debating time for major bills. More scrutiny of secondary legislation, especially that which involves rights, privacy and liberty. Stricter limits on government patronage and special advisers. A written constitution and an entrenched bill of rights. Proportional representation.
It’s an ambitious list, but for the first time I find that I cannot vote for any of the major parties in the forthcoming elections and that seems to be the right moment to think of what Parliament should be.
Politicians have spent much of the last decade blaming the public for Britain’s ills but the expenses scandal has made it very clear that we suffer not from a “broken society” as the Tories claim, but from broken politics. Now society is going to have to fix that.
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