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It is often a useful question to ask: who benefits from this? Senior Libertarian Alliance honcho Sean Gabb, who not surprisingly is grimly satisfied at seeing the discomfiture of this partly corrupt, oppressive and pointless bunch of political boobies, asks whether his one-time adversary, a certain Boris Johnson, might be a prime long-term beneficiary from the current expenses crisis. Mr Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator, a Daily Telegraph journalist and former member for the safe Tory seat of Henley-on-Thames, is now Mayor of London. Being outside the House of Commons, Mr Gabb argues, confers upon the colourful Mr Johnson the chance to pose as a man untainted. Quite possibly so.
But maybe Mr Gabb is in danger of being caught up in his own cynicism, understandable thought that may be (full disclosure: I am an old friend of Sean Gabb whom I have known for more than 20 years). Mr Johnson, does, of course, have other potential skeletons rattling in his cupboard, as do many of us mere mortals who do not happen to be moral saints. But right now, all that I want is a politician with the sense to roll back the state to the extent that Sean Gabb and I share. In other words, roll it back a long, long way. That surely has to remain the prime focus of our energies, long after stories about expense fiddling have faded from view.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, is due to speak about his position at 3:30 pm today (about an hour from when I am now writing this). There is a high chance he will resign in disgrace, rather than risk the even greater ignomy of being forced out by a vote of no-confidence from MPs. It appears that even fellow Scot Gordon Brown will not explicitly back him. The scandals over the outrageous arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, and now the relentless series of stories of MPs abusing expenses for things like mortgages on second homes, has damaged confidence in Parliament so badly that fringe parties such as UKIP and the British National Party – a party of hard-left economic views, let it be noted – may do relatively well in the upcoming June European Union elections.
This whole saga demonstrates the truth of the thesis that politicians increasingly have come to regard their own interests as set apart from the country as a whole. It adds to the notion, put forward by Sean Gabb, of an “Enemy Class” that is quite consciously at odds with the more conservative (small – c) values of the country. Of course, there has always been an element of this – it is naive to imagine that Parliament ever quite met some Greek ideal – but it is now in a particularly bad way.
Let’s hope Mr Martin sees sense and takes the proverbial bottle of whisky and the loaded revolver into his study. He will be the first Speaker to be ejected from his role in more than 300 years. Not a record to be proud of.
As an aside, it surprises me still how little this whole saga is registering in the foreign media. Anyone got any examples of US, French, German etc coverage of this? It might be nice if even Instapundit mentioned it.
Norman – now Lord – Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido’s take on the matter.
Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers’ money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP’s claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.
As a book it has its flaws – it does not pay enough heed to the role of Web 2.0 media – but in the light of recent events about politicians’ use of taxpayers’ money, Peter Oborne’s study of UK politics reads better than ever.
A question worth asking, in the light of all this, is whether a less corrupt political class would be better, or worse, at reining in public spending? In the 18th Century, for instance, the UK parliamentary system was deeply corrupt; there was a vast network of jobs and sinecures doled out to enforce political loyalty. And yet despite the drawbacks, the UK managed to forge an Industrial Revolution, build a large and effective navy and help to defeat Bonaparte and all those supposedly more efficient Frenchmen. The central point that needs to be remembered is that the corruption and venality of the UK political class of today coincides with a point in our history when about 80 per cent of the laws and regulations affecting we great unwashed are not written in Westminster, but in the EU; and further, that the state exerts a vastly greater degree of control over our lives now than was the case in the era of Pitt, Burke and Fox. So this stuff is both a sign of the unseriousness of our political class on the one hand, and also a sign of how much more the state and its functionaries matter, on the other. Cleaning up politics will not address the central problem that the state plays far too big a role in our lives in the first place. Take away the jam, and the flies will not be such a pest.
The first 10% off public spending could be painless for the public and popular.
– John Redwood
There has been endless fuss about MPs expenses. Most of it is either with a tone of envy, or focussed on the apparent dishonesty of some claims. I’d like to suggest thet there has been a much more malign effect in the massive inflation of the parliamentary allowances system in the last 20 years.
Career politicians with no outside interests have been effectively exempted from the tax system as it applies to everyone else. Their tax returns are even dealt with by a special office. (For a while the Revenue has produced a special suplementary return form for parliamentarians. I saw one in the early 90s when helping an MP with his bookkeeping.)
This makes it easy for them to tighten the screws: raise rates and rake-offs, increase the tax-collector’s powers, without caring to comprehend the consequences. It also gives them the idea that everyone else must be milking the system: that rich people have got rich by postitional parasitism, since that’s how you get rich either as an MP, or as one of the providers of government services that they deal with among the quangocracy and PFI tsars.
The Prime Minister’s reaction to this: to try to isolate MPs further, by ‘naming ang shaming’ those who make money honestly in the outside world, and do therefore have some idea what things are like for the rest of us.
I couldn’t give a damn about peculation. It is the isolation of politicians, particularly, but not exclusively, politicians of the present ruling party, as cushioned servants of the state that is fundamentally corrupting. The theory of parliament, the root of its legitimacy, is that it stands between us and the rapacity of the crown, and holds taxes to what are fair and reasonable and are applied in the interests of the kingdom as a whole. That was the ground for the Great Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution. It was the ground on which de Montfort set up the first parliament, attempting to settle an earlier revolution.
Once parliament was filled with the independent rich, well-heeled professionals, and the sponsored, among the latter the old Labour members whose unions or philanthropy paid for them to live in Westminster. They had interests, they had views, but they were self-chosen, not neatly alligned with one another, not bound by a party machine, not tied to the public purse-strings or the rehearsal of instrumental populism.
That is what has been corrupted away almost completely. MPs have been reduced to gold-edged agents of the state, and have prospered the more, the less resistance they have offered the executive. Ministers are often closer to mouthpieces for their departments than their masters. They don’t control the state for us, because the state devotes our resources to keep them in a distanced shadow-world, immune to the effects of what they do at its motion.
I can’t wait for Mr Brown to publish what he thinks are damning details of member’s outside interests. We have had quite enough of inside interests. It will be an excellent guide who to vote for.
On the day that the UK starts to roll out its planned and useless ID card project, in Manchester, there are pictures all over the web of the Prime Minister. The background seems appropriate. I mean, it was obviously not deliberate but how the f**k did Brown grin away in that ghastly way of his and not realise what was in the background? We have to face the rather sad fact, in my view, that the PM has lost it.
I bet the Private Eye picture editor is working hard to come up with a nifty headline and quotes for its next edition.
I guess it was inevitable. Football, like other aspects of life, has been hit by the credit crunch. In the case of Southampton, a team that once graced the top flight of the English league and has boasted some notable cup wins – famously winning the FA Cup in the 1970s – it has suffered terribly. It is now in danger of extinction. My own team, Ipswich Town FC, was in administration a few years ago although it has been since taken over by Marcus Evans, the man who owns the eponymous conference organising company. Ipswich also has appointed former Manchester Utd and Ireland international player Roy Keane as its manager (gulp, nervous laughter).
Henry Winter, one of the main football scribes in the print press, believes Southampton’s local council should buy the team. He argues that the council and the lucky taxpayers of the south coast will be getting a bargain. Maybe. But it is not the business of councils to be spending money on what has been the money pit of professional sports, particularly when a place such as Southampton has many competing demands for public funds, such as policing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on. As I said, when my club was in financial dire circumstances, no doubt some people would have been happy to see the Suffolk taxpayer foot the bill to put The Blues back on top. But wiser heads prevailed.
The sad fact is that football clubs can die if the finances run out. We have seen teams like Leeds Utd hit by unsustaintable debts in far happier economic conditions. Even mighty Man Utd has heavy debts stemming from the leveraged buyout by the Glazers, while Chelsea is kept in the lifestyle to which it is accustomed due to Abramovich’s huge Russian oil wealth. The economics of sports clubs are a murky affair at the best of times. So my message to Southampton fans is that it is better for a hard-nosed private investor to sort out the club than a bunch of politicians. If Southampton really is a bargain, why are public funds needed – surely a canny entrepreneur will spot the opportunity? I hope someone does.
I sometimes wonder why as, a football fan, I put myself through all this heartache. My wife shakes her head in wonderment.
Mary Riddell, who seems, as it was once said of Oxford University in the 19th Century, to be the home of lost causes, has a column with this glorious headline in the Daily Telegraph (WTF?) today:
“Brown is a better hope for Labour than his rivals”.
In other words, all the other remaining senior figures in the party are even worse, even madder, more delusional, more statist, tax-grabbing, unpleasant, devious and venal than this guy.
That’s the end of that lot, then.
Hazel Blears (not one of our favourite people here) has just, in among a lot of ignominious verbiage about what a fine job the government is doing, done something unignominious, by contriving the following deadly soundbite, in today’s Observer:
YouTube if you want to. …
Which echoes Margaret Thatcher. This lady’s not for tubing, it would seem. (LATER: Except that … she is.) This collapsing government has been, like all collapsing governments as described by their members, failing to get its message across. No, the message has well and truly got across, but people don’t like it.
And the YouTuber himself has contributed another memorable one-liner, in the form of this outburst to a journalist last week:
“You are impugning my integrity.”
Well, yes.
Many have declared themselves baffled by Brown’s protestations concerning his own extreme moral excellence, which they often take as true merely because Brown himself appears to believe them, and his actual moral depravity, as if the two things together make no sense. Well, if you agree with him that he really is morally excellent, then indeed you will be baffled, because clearly he is morally repulsive. Actually it all makes perfect sense. He is, in his own hopelessly non-functioning eyes, a morally excellent person, doing an excellent job. Therefore all means, however depraved – intimidating colleagues shamelessly, robbing the rest of us blind – are excusable, obligatory even, to keep him in that job, and to prevent anybody else, obviously truly depraved, from trying to take the job away from him. Gordon Brown’s moral excellence in his own eyes and his moral depravity in all other eyes are logically intermeshed, his delusion of moral excellence being just one more item on the long list of all his actual depravities.
Taxi drivers have a place in British political life not unlike the Oracle of Delphi in the affairs of Classical Greece. And they are now, based on my admitted rather small sample, speaking with one voice. Following my mother’s death earlier this year, I was yesterday lugging possessions from home to home, so to speak, and had need of two such oracles. Both, without any encouragement from me, even as they were steering me from and to Egham station, also steered the conversation towards the expenses being run up by Labour MPs. Specifically Labour MPs, please note. “My grandad who was in the miner’s union – Labour all his life – know what I’m saying? – must be turning in his grave …” “If any of us did that kind of thing, we’d be up before the Old Bill.” Shouldn’t that be arrested (“nabbed”) by the Old Bill and up before the “Beaks?” No matter, he was in full flood and in no mood to be interrupted about side-issues.
I recall being a bit scornful here about how this issue seems now to dominate the thinking of so many voters. But, as commenters pointed out, there is a direct connection between the grand larcenies being committed by our government in its panic reactions to the banking crisis and the petty thievings of our MPs. MPs should have their minds on All That. Instead they have been contriving second homes for themselves, and fourth giant flat screen televisions, and are now most concerned not about the state of the nation’s finances, but about being caught out in their own little thievings. Recently I read somewhere – link anybody? – about a Labour MP saying something like: “I don’t care if Gordon Brown ruins the world economy; but he should keep his hands off my expenses.” The failure of MPs to exercise oversight over the big stuff was directly related to their over-concentration on their own little living arrangements, and I apologise for not seeing that more quickly. It’s a variant of that Parkinson’s Law (so many of these are now relevant) about how people who are fussing about their new headquarters building are going to do that actual job rather badly for the duration of the move.
Can it be an accident that (a) one of the most splendid new pieces of sports architecture in London in recent years has been the resplendent new curved stand at the Oval cricket ground, the home of Surrey CCC, but that (b) the mere Surrey cricket team has gone from heroes to zeroes during the period of this new stand’s construction and opening? I digress, although not that much, because another even more striking (if far less handsome) recent addition to the London architectural scene has been the brand spanking new office block that has recently been constructed across the road from Parliament, for … correct: Britain’s MPs.
Maybe unfairly, those oracular taxi drivers, as I say, and contrary to what I talked about in my earlier piece (where I suggested that it is now MPs of all parties who are in the firing line), homed in on Labour MPs. Labour MPs, they said, are supposed to be better than that. What’s happened to them? Conservatives look after themselves better, but at least they do this, at least partly, most of them, with their own money, which they have obtained either by inheriting it, or by doing more elevated versions of driving taxis.
But one bit of that earlier posting about the smallness of MP thieving compared to the bail-out thieving at least stands up very well, namely the bit that said that it is electorally very portentous when the voters decide who the biggest thieves are, and if it is true that the voters (as represented by their spokesmen the taxi drivers) have decided that it is actually Labour MPs, then that spells electoral doom for Labour. Sacking Gordon Brown won’t save any of the doomed, which is perhaps why they may not now bother to sack Gordon Brown, despite all my recent imprecations. No wonder they’re feeling suicidal. This government is not just topped by a spectacularly rotten Prime Minister; it is backed by a rotten party.
I realise that I owe Samizdata a separate piece about why I take the particular rottenness of Gordon Brown so much more seriously than, according to strictly libertarian notions, I am supposed to. Surely they are all just as bad. Briefly, my argument will be: no they aren’t. There are degrees of rottenness among politicians, and it is foolish to deny this. As for the other argument I hear here, that we need a spell of absolute darkness in order to educate The Masses and build a Movement truly capable of ushering in a genuine New Dawn, well, that kind of talk scares me. Briefly (this is a huge subject I know) what if we get the absolute darkness, but not the dawn? I say that the sooner this country switches from the deepening gloom of Labour to the relative if flickering and fitful illumination that might (although I agree: might not) be the Conservatives under David Cameron, the better. If that means (which actually I don’t think it does mean – see my future posting if it ever materialises) that it takes rather longer to find our way to the Promised Land, well so be it.
A great article on why the opposition Tories need to have the cojones to take on the flat-earth economics of confiscatory tax.
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