Expenses: MPs in the right, shock.

  MPs were in the doghouse again last week - or should that be the duck house - over  their expenses.  Employees at the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, who process MPs’ expenses claims, say they have been threatened, insulted and abused. Called  “f..ing idiots” and  “monkeys” by irate MPs one of whom described their computerised system as a “f...ing abortion”.  Mind you that’s nothing compared to the language voters used about MPs when their expense abuses became known last May. However, in this case, MPs aren't wholly to blame.  IPSA is being called to put its own house in order

Christmas in the House

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me: twelve bags of compost; eleven hanging baskets; ten Tudor beams; nine toiltet seats; eight trouser presses, seven leather arm chairs; six porno films; five flat screen TVs, four Ikea kitchens; three garlic presses; two second homes and a duck house in a bell tower.  But not any more, they won't.

Forget Christmas Day in the Work House, what about in the House of Commons? Has there ever been a Yuletide so drear for Members of Parliament, who will no longer able to buy nice presents off their Lewis's List.  They might even have to pay for their own Christmas cards. The indignity.  Having to buy their own Christmas trees and deck the halls of their London homes at their own expense.


Time was when MPs could spend, spend, spend on everything from moat dredging to organic dog food. It's all there in the latest batch of expenses claims published by the House of Commons Auditor, Sir Thomas Legg:  seagrass carpeting, ride on lawn-mowers, robotic vacuum cleaners.  Ann Cryer  MP  bought duck egg-coloured Majestic velvet carpet at £73 a square and a toilet brush at £18. The former defence secretary, Geof Hoon claimed for two televisions in two years.  No wonder all the shops are holding pre-Christmas sales this year.  MP penury is surely a major reason why Britain is slower out of recession than other European countries.


And spare a thought too for the homeless this Christmas. No, not those people sleeping on the streets or the beggars who unreasonably block your way into the Sainsbury's No – the really deserving: the Members of Parliament who, through no fault of their own,  now face also the loss of their second homes. Now you can scoff – most of us make do with only one abode. But "second homelessness" can be psychologically damaging for individuals who have grown used to multi-residential living. MPs are going to have to rent, or – shock horror – stay in hotels. They are likely to suffer a profound sense of deprivation and loss of self-esteem and will no doubt claim for psychotherapeutic counselling.


   That nice little bolt-hole in the New Forest where they used to take their secretaries and researchers for team bonding sessions. Gone forever. Those nice croft houses in the Hebrides or cottages in the North West of Scotland, where the local peasants used to cheer their MP's arrival from the porches of their homely caravans,  celebrating as house prices rose ever higher.


But that isn't all. There's another group of dispossessed needing your sympathy this Christmas: all the wives, husbands, sons, daughters and other relatives who are to be thrown cruelly out of work by the penny-pinching Scrooges who now run British politics. Even in the Scottish Parliament, last bastion of honest nepotism, MSPs are to be barred from putting close relatives on the public pay roll. What a grim Christmas for them. Dig deep – they'll need your help.


Think of that fine young chap, the flamboyant Henry Conway, the self confessed “Queen Sloan” employed by his father the Tory MP Derek Conway.  Has anyone given a thought for his welfare this Christmas? He and his brother were paid £10,000 a year as parliamentary researchers while they studied in remote universities and organised parties in Chelsea with fun titles like: “F@@@ Off I'm Rich”.   What will they do now? Derek Conway collected £260,000 of tax payers money employing his family. Now the Conways might even have to work for a living.


The expenses row, broken by the Daily Telegraph after it received a CD stolen from the parliamentary fees office, has led to the greatest upheaval in parliamentary lifestyles since MPs started getting paid a proper salary in 1911. MPs had come to see their expenses as a salary top up. After all, how could anyone be expected to get by on a pittance of £65,000 – a mere three times average wages. Barely enough to send a couple of sons to Eton.


Now that the party is over, we are told that MPs will desert in droves come the election and that the new intake will be of low calibre because of the poverty pay. Able individuals will shun parliament. There will be no towering intellects like Sir Anthony Steen, the Tory MP for Totness who rounded on jealous voters after it was revealed that he had claimed £87,000 for his “little Balmoral”. The Commons will have to get by without those great parliamentarians  Sir Nicholas and Ann Winterton, whose ingenious schemes for personal self-enrichment baffled Her Majesty's Revenue. Gone also, Sir Peter Viggers who achieved international celebrity by claiming for a duck house.


   And so now, in the bleak midwinter, as our few remaining MPs sit around their one bar electric fires in some grim housing estate in south London, they will dream dreams of the good old days.  And wake up to the reality of living within their means - just like the voters of Britain who put them there.

What about the homeless ducks?

  But what about the ducks?  Has anyone thought about them? It’s all very well cutting MPs expenses, but what about the mallard  community, deprived of shelter at this crucial time of the year. 

  As the duck houses of Britain fall into decay and disuse, we face a major scandal of homeless ducks, geese, coots, grebes and other winged aquatics wandering around the gardens of suburban Britain cold and destitute, unable to raise their families, at risk from predators like cats and rats. Spare a thought for them this Christmas, after Sir Christopher “Duckling Killer” Kelly cut off  this vital source of government support. 

 And then there are the moats. These are a vital natural resource, part of our great British heritage, a home to many and varied life forms, including primitive creatures like the Douglas Hogg MP.  The Kelly clamp down  means that the moats of Britain will now go uncleaned and unloved. Putrid circles of shame surrounding some of our greatest historic houses.  A blot on our national character. 

  And at a time of recession, when millions are losing their jobs in manufacturing, is this really the right time to be destroying a vital market for toilet seats, bath plugs, fake tudor beams, porn films and many other consumer industries which were being supported almost entirely by MPs misusing their second homes allowance? Have the parliamentary standards commissars given no thought to the impact on the wider economy? 

    And what about family life?  It is widely reported that, once MPs are banned from employing their wives, members of parliament will start wife-swapping.  There is nothing in the new rules to stop MPs hiring their colleagues’ wives, husbands, children and mistresses.  But this is surely nothing less than state-sponsored prostitution.  For we all know what MPs get up to with their secretaries and researchers on those long and lonely all night sittings.  What example will our legislators be giving to the people of Britain if they turn the Palace of Westminster into a bordello?

   Parliament must act.  A new bill, the Duck House Compensation Bill, should be passed as a matter of urgency to provide a fund for the protection and shelter of all endangered acquatic birds.   There must be doubling of parliamentary salaries forthwith to allow MPs to keep a proper roof,  or two,  over their heads.  And as of tomorrow, this column will be accepting contributions to the Lords and Members of Parliament Relief Fund.  They need your help now and there is no more worthy cause this Christmas.   So, please, please give generously. 

Nepotism -keep it in the family.

 “Bob’s your uncle” always struck me as a curious catch phrase. Why should Bob being my uncle be of any benefit to me?   Well, phrase is said to date from the 1880s when, the Prime Minister, Robert Cecil, appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, to the prestigious and lucrative post as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Bob was indeed his uncle, and found him a nice little earner. It is all about nepotism: abusing a position of public trust to promote the interests of family members.  

   

   The British civil service managed to stamp out nepotism 150 years ago.  Now, finally, the House of Commons may be about to follow suit.  On Wednesday, the report into MPs expenses by Sir Christopher Kelly called time, finally, on the cosy practice of MPs employing their wives, children, lovers as secretaries and researchers.This has provoked a pre-emptive wave of righteous indignation from MPs’s who say this is as an unfair assault on the hard working women who tirelessly service our  legislators. 

 

   I’m sure that many wives do a very good job, but that doesn’t alter the fact that there is a massive conflict of interest here. It’s  not just the obvious abuses such as the Tory MP Derek Conway paying his sons as parliamentary researchers when they were actually away at university.   How can an MP be expected to assess whether public money is being spent wisely when it’s being paid to his or her spouse and other members of his close family?  Nearly a third of MPs employ their wives or children.   The Rev Ian Paisley employs two daughters and a son according to the Register of Member Financial Interests.  The Tory MP for Tewkesbury, Laurence Robertson records that he employs both his wife Susan Robertson “from whom I am separated”, as his secretary, and also employs his “new partner”, Anne Marie Adams. That must make office life interesting.   The practice has been abused and it simply has to stop.  MPs cannot be allowed to continue enriching themselves and their families in this way. 

   There were predicable howls of anguish too  when it emerged that MPs will no longer be able to claim mortgage interest for second homes.   In future they will have to rent modestly priced accommodation when they’re in London -  and only if their constituencies are more than sixty minutes from parliament.  It might seem astonishing that MPs were ever allowed to claim for second homes in London when they already lived in London, but they did. And they didn’t even have to live in them.  Tony McNulty, the Labour Minister, gave a grudging apology to the house last week for claiming expenses on a “second home” that was occupied full time by his parents and was only a few miles from his real family home.  This was a calculated abuse of the system and should surely have led to his being thrown out of parliament. 

   McNulty insisted that he was ‘only following the rules’ and that it wasn’t his fault.  But this is a feeble defence.  The rules are laid out  in the parliamentary “Green Book” which sets out MPs terms of employment.  It says MPs can only claim expenses that are “wholly, exclusively and necessarily”  for “the purpose of performing their parliamentary duties”.  It says nothing about buying houses for your parents.  Nor does it say you can use the second homes allowance to play the property market as so many MPs have done, evading capital gains tax. 

    The former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was challenged on the BBC’s Question Time last week to pay back the £100,000 she wrongly claimed by designating a room in her sister’s house in London as her “main residence” and her real family home in West Midlands as her “second home”.  Forget the porn films her husband claimed on her expenses, what about the public money she misappropriated?  Ms Smith accepted that she had been “disgraced” for what she did, but curiosly her contrition stopped short of actually paying back the money she accepts she should never have received.  Tony McNulty says that he “doesn’t have the money” to pay back the expenses, despite him and his wife erarning £300,000 and living in a £900,000 home.

    The Tory MP Roger Gale said that Sir Christopher Kelly  “doesn’t live in the real world”.  I’m sorry, but it is MPs who are clearly on another planet.   In the ‘real world’ of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, tax evasion is a criminal offence. If anyone other than MPs had been caught claiming expenses that they were not entitled to, they would be have been prosecuted, even if their employers had agreed to pay.   Perhaps it could come to that.  The Plaid MP Elfyn Llwyd, who sits on the parliamentary standards committee, said last week that “three of four MPs..will end up in jail”.  If they go down, might others follow? 

    After his not-my-fault-but-sorry-anyway speech, McNulty said it was “time to move on” as if this were all a tiresome and insignificant affair blown out of proportion by the press.   People say that hacks like me should be concentrating on the real issues - like housing, unemployment, the postal strike and not the pecadillos of MPs.  But there is a connection.  We are now seeing the mechanism whereby our elected representatives - who rarely go into politics for personal gain -  were compromised and corrupted by a system of petty corruption.  They lost touch with the “real world” they talk of to such an extent that they thought fiddling expenses, evading capital gains tax and employing their relatives is perfectly normal.  No wonder they can’t understand why a postie earning £14,000 might go on strike.  

   MPs have allowed house prices to inflate to such a ludicrous degree that a first time buyer in London now requires a salary of £93,000 to get an average home.  The average wage in London is £26,000.  If MPs had had to buy their own London homes out of their £65,000 salary, instead of having them bought for them, would they have allowed this to happen?  Well, we’ll see, because after the next election, after the duck house generation of MPs have stood down, there will be a new wave of MPs coming into politics who have not been speculating on the London property market.  I suspect the housing crisis may suddenly rocket to the top of the political priority list. 

MPs Expenses: what is to be done.

 “It’s a revolutionary moment”, said the former standards commissioner, Alistair Graham. “This is like the storming of the Bastille, only the prisoners aren’t being let out”.  The historical comparison was perhaps a little over the top, but everyone seems to accept that British politics will never be the same.  The question is, what comes next?

   Westminster certainly can’t be allowed to return to the bad old ways.  At least there is a political consensus on the need for change.  Mind you, we said that about the banks and the bonus culture, and at the slightest hint of an economic recovery, the bankers have gone right back to the trough. How can we prevent the MPs scandal ever happening again? 

  Well, first of all by demanding complete transparency. One of the most common excuses given by shamefaced MPs dragged before the cameras to explain why they claimed for expensive flat-screen TVs, moat-cleaning and flipped houses is that the system was deficient.   It wasn’t their fault; the rules were wrong.  Trouble is, they only discovered how wrong the rules were after they had been exposed by the Daily Telegraph.  Clearly, if they had known that their expenses claims were going to be made public, many MPs clearly wouldn’t have made them.  As Lord Nolan put it, during the last great sleaze scandal in 1995, “daylight is the best disinfectant”. 

   Transparency has to be policed of course, and the precondition for disinfecting parliament is for the Speaker to take a moral lead/  The last Speaker, Michael Martin,  long regarded himself as the keeper of the perks, even before becoming Speaker.  I discovered this in the 1990s when I was a lobby hack in Westminster and wrote a column about MPs expenses, describing some of the practices that everyone knew went on.  Michael Martin accused me of defaming the parliamentary group of MPs and had me reported to the deputy sergeant at arms.  As Speaker he likened himself to a trades unionist defending pay and conditions - this is completely inappropriate, as are the methods used to silence dissent.  The new Speaker, John Bercow, came in promising to change, but the jury is still out on whether he actually has.  His attempts to limit the Legg inquiry and prevent the parliamentary auditor from taking on board wrongly claimed mortgages does not inspire confidence. According to the Daily Telegraph, Bercow himself made substantial capital gains through "flipping" not one but two properties - declaring them as his "main residence" for tax purposes, but designating them as "second homes" for parliamentary expenses. .

   As the former standards commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, discovered when she tried to investigate allegations about Scottish MPs, the Speaker is the apex of a system designed to protect MPs from scrutiny.  She resigned in disgust.   Speaker Martin doggedly refused to allow MPs expenses to be made public under freedom of information.  Indeed, he spent tens of thousands of pounds of public money in legal fees trying to prevent the public learning how their money was being spent. The Speaker's role will have to change, from shop steward to moral guardian.  Mr Bercow must spend his time not defending disreputable practices, but saving MPs from themselves by telling them how the world sees them. 

   Needless to say the expenses rules have to be changed.  MPs, like MSPs in Scotland,  - entitled to claim legitimate expenses.   But this does not give them the right to make substantial capital gains on properties paid for by taxpayers.  In my view the flipping scandal is of far greater importance than all the ridiculous manure and trouser press claims.  One MP, Greg Barker, made £320,000 profit out of buying and selling a second home in London financed by his allowance.  That is as close to public theft as it is possible to get without actually robbing the Bank of England.   This culture of property speculation made every MP a stakeholder in the greatest property bubble in economic history.  If MPs had been required to pay their own way, and buy their own houses, they would have been rather less relaxed about the house price spiral that has crucified their constituents and left a generation unable to afford a home.  

  Which takes us onto MPs pay.  The former minister, Michael Portillo, said grandly on BBC recently that there is no way he could be persuaded back into politics “because it would mean trying to live on £63,000 a year”.  His point was that no one could reasonably be expected to survive on such a pittance.  We have heard variants of this argument all week from MPs and apologists  It reveals an astonishing detachment from reality.   Only MPs who have been cosseted and pampered at public expense for years, and have lost touch with their constituents, could believe that £63000,  plus legitimate expenses, is not enough to live on. It is more than three times average earnings. 96% of the British population live on less than £63,000 a year.  If last week was the Bastille, just wait until MPs demand a 40% pay increase - which is what many think they are worth.  The tumbrils will be trundling down Whitehall, a guillotine erected in Parliament Square, and MPs’ heads impaled on railings on Westminster Bridge.  Just don’t go there. 

   A lot of people, like the comedian Michael Fry,  still say that we are getting this out of proportion and that most MPs are perfectly straight and hard working public servants.  But that is only partially true.  Anyone who has seen parliament evolve in the last twenty five years knows that the character of MPs has changed.  They have become less principled, less independently-minded, more career-oriented.  Even Labour MPs became preoccupied with reward, complaining that they would be making much more in the private sector - sometimes correctly, as in the case of Tony Blair who walked out of Downing Street and into a sinecure at JP Morgan for a reported £2m a year.   Peter Mandelson summed it up when he said that Labour was now “completely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”.  Or rather didn’t as was the case with MPs and their second homes. 

   We need fewer MPs - now that we have devolution, we don’t need 650 in Westminster and a third could  go tomorrow without anyone noticing.  The remainder need to show more independence.  What is the point of parliament when it voted for the Iraq against MPs own consciences; which allowed the biggest property bubble in history to grow unchecked.  We need a new kind of MP - one who wants to enter parliament out of principle -  to change society, not change houses.  I just don’t believe that there aren’t people like that in Britain anymore. Hopefully, when this discredited and disgraced Labour government falls from office they will find their voice. 

   

Give MPs a proper job.

   Why have members of parliament lost their sense of purpose and self-respect?  Why do so many of them apparently see elected office as a means of enriching themselves rather than improving the lives of their constituents?  The reason is that ordinary MPs in Westminster have very little power: they are in a very real sense a waste of space, superfluous, lobby fodder. Many  have become self-centred careerists, happy to do the bidding of the party whips, provided they get to put their snouts in the trough. 

   We need to make give MPs a proper job, with real responsibility.  There is a fundamental deficiency at the heart of our democratic system which is the source of much of what is wrong in Westminster: the unfair electoral system. We do not have democracy in this country, but elective dictatorship by prime ministers given inflated majorities by a fundamentally unsound and unrepresentative method of voting in general elections.  This allows the executive to ride roughshod over parliament and ignore the will of the people. 

  

  To revive parliamentary democracy we must first of all make parliament democratic.   In 2005, Labour won an overall majority of 66 seats on just 35.2% of the vote. No government in history has rested on a flimsier base of popular support.  In England, the Conservatives won a majority of the votes but Labour won 92 more seats in parliament than the Tories.  I don’t know what you call this exactly, but it isn’t democracy. 

   It’s not just Labour governments that have benefited from artificially inflated majorities.  In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher brought near revolutionary change to Britain - destroying the power of trades unions, privatising state assets, selling council homes - yet she never won more than 43% of the vote.  In Labour’s largest landslide in 1997, Tony Blair won a 179 seat majority on the basis of only 43% of the vote.  And it was very much a personal victory for Tony Blair, who proceeded to run the most centralised and personalised administration in modern times, ignoring parliament - he rarely turned up apart from Prime Minister’s Question Time - and ruling through a cabal of trusted advisers from his sofa in the den of Number Ten. 

   The electoral system is not an abstract issue but a very real cause of bad government.  Consider Iraq, when a million people demonstrated against the invasion and the government faced the two greatest backbench rebellions in Labour history.  Because of his artificial majority, Tony Blair was able to ignore  parliament and the people and launch an illegal  war without a second UN resolution.   Tens of thousands of lives lost, billions wasted simply on the whim of a Prime Minister who seemed to believe that his judgement was based on divine inspiration.  Yet the war would never have happened had the composition of the legislature in Westminster reflected the votes cast in the country at the 1997 and 2001 elections. Tony Blair would not have had a majority for the war because he would have needed the support of the Liberal Democrats and his own backbench to govern.  He would have had to come to parliament and argue his case, as in the Scottish Parliament where votes are finely balanced. 

   Critics of electoral reform say that PR leads to instability.  But we have seen in the Scottish case that a minority government elected on a proportional system can govern very effectively, and above all responsibly.  Alex Salmond has had to bend to the will of parliament on issues like local income tax - an SNP election manifesto pledge which the Scottish government has abandoned because it could not win the support of the house.  That is surely better than a system in which the First Minister had been given unlimited power to get his way.  If the Holyrood had been elected under the Westminster system, Alex Salmond might have delivered a unilateral declaration of independence by now,  even though a majority of Scots oppose separation.  I don’t see how that can be seen as more stable than the balanced and  

  But this isn’t just about Prime Ministers.  Consider the position of MSPs in Holyrood.  In almost every significant vote, they have to examine their consciences and study the issue at hand before they vote.  This is because every one of them  in the governing party knows that their votes matter, and that they could bring down the government.  Similarly, opposition MSPs in Holyrood realise that they can’t simply indulge in for opposition for opposition’s sake.  If they vote against the government they have to accept the possibility that the government might fall and that they might have to step up to the plate. This gives MSPs a clear existential purpose, a profound sense of responsibility as stakeholders in a truly democratic assembly where they and not the executive hold the ultimate power.  

   Westminster will only be reformed when it grasps the nettle of electoral reform.  Tony Blair promised a referendum on the electoral system in 1997,  but after he won a landslide majority he conveniently forgot about it. The two party duopoly is underpinned by the electoral system which locks out minor parties.  The entire focus of politics becomes the need to win the support of some 800,000 swing voters in key marginal constituencies.    Hundreds of MPs in safe seats get a job for life and forget about their constituents. Voters stop voting because their votes don’t seem to count for anything.

    No one can be in any doubt now that our parliamentary system requires urgent reform.  We need openness and transparency at Westminster so that the public can see how public money is spent.  We need more powerful select committees and a reduction of the power of the party whips.  The unelected House of Lords needs to be reformed following scandals there, and the power to set the date of the general election needs to be taken out of the hands of the prime minister of the day.   But before any of these changes can work the balance of power in Westminster must shift fundamentally and irrevocably to parliament and away from the executive.  Only fair voting can achieve this, and spark the revival of democratic culture that Britain desperately needs.

Martin Bell and the expenses scandal.

 “A Very British Revolution - the expenses scandal and how to save our democracy”  By Martin Bell. Icon Books

   “Honesty, integrity, openness, objectivity, leadership, accountability and selflessness” - these were the seven principles of public life set out by Lord Nolan’s committee standards in public life in its 1995 report into the sleaze scandals of the Tory years.  MPs even were given a wallet-sized card with the Nolan principles to remind them.  A kind of ‘ethical credit card’, as the former independent MP Martin Bell, described it.  Unfortunately, they have maxed out and have no moral credit left.

    Bell was, himself, one of the products of the last great parliamentary sleaze scandal.  The former BBC war correspondent, won a famous victory in the 1997 general election campaign against the Conservative MP Neil Hamilton, regarded then as one of the sleaziest members around because of his allegedly receiving £20,000 in brown envelopes from the Harrods boss Mohammed Al Fayed.  And no, the years haven’t softened Martin Bell’s contempt for Hamilton. He doesn’t accept that the expenses scandals retrospectively lessens the degree his wrongdoing. 

   But whatever happened to the Nolan principles?  The expenses scandal of 2009  revealed our elected members to be dishonest, secretive, evasive, selfish and lacking any sense of moral judgement let alone integrity.  The  failure of leadership is symbolised by the Prime Minister himself having to pay back £12,000 in cleaning and gardening expenses wrongly claimed.  Sleaze nineties style was largely about taking sums of money from outside interests to perform parliamentary duties.  It was cash for questions, cash for amendments, cash for access. Now it is cash for duck houses, cash for second homes, cash for porn films, cash for almost anything - an even sleazier form of sleaze.  Bell doesn’t mince his words condemning the “corrupt” politicians who have “lost our trust because they picket our pockets”.  But he doesn’t answer the central question of just how MPs - Labour especially - failed to learn the lessons of what went before.

    I spent the winter of  1994/95 attending the weekly Nolan hearings on sleaze.  A succession of shamefaced MPs, lobbyists, businessmen, civil servants came before Lord Nolan’s untouchables and insisted that they were ‘just playing the rules...doing what everyone else did...learned lessons...won’t do it again, honest’.  We naively thought that the establishment of a Commissioner for Standards would ensure that parliament cleaned up its act.   Clearly it did nothing of the kind.  Bell rightly focusses on the shocking treatment in 2002 of the tough minded Standards Commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, who was driven from office after she pursued the former Defence Secretary, Dr John Reid, for allegedly misusing his parliamentary allowance and intimidating party workers.  

  Bell had left parliament by 2002, but in a sense he shares some of the collective responsibility for the expenses scandals.   As an MP, Bell sat on the Committee on Standards and Privileges, which was set up after the Nolan Report to ensure, well, standards would be upheld.  They clearly were not.  Should he have blown the whistle louder?  He says himself that he believed the lax expenses was an accident waiting to happen. “I believed that the regulatory  regime such as it was would on day hit the buffers”, he writes, “I had no idea the crash would be so sudden”.  Could he have pulled the communication cord perhaps?  Well as politicians always say, you’d have to ask him that. The point is that his example was not enough. 

   Bell wrote in the heat of the 2009 scandal, as the Daily Telegraph was delivering daily bulletins on MPs’ corruption. He believed that Britain was undergoing a revolution - that the crisis presented a “once in a lifetime opportunity to revive our democracy” in a very British, constitutional way. The clearing out of the sleaze generation at the next election, and the large number of young newbie MPs, believes, should ensure that parliament will itself be renewed.  He calls for transparency, electoral reform, open primaries for selecting candidates and, of course, the adoption of a strict regime on expenses, similar to that which exists in the army. 

   I’m afraid that looks like wishful thinking.  MPs seem incapable as a class of learning from the past since they don't appear to believe they have done anything wrong..  One of the most astonishing aspects of the whole expenses scandal is the almost wilful disregard MPs showed for their own moral and political well being. Surely they must have known, as they bought their flat screen TVs and flipped their second homes, that they were doing wrong, even if they appeared to be within the rules.  Actually, they were no where near within the rules.The House of Commons Green Book makes clear that only expenses can only be claimed if they are “incurred wholly, necessarily and exclusively in the performance of their parliamentary duties”.  It says nothing about duck houses and property empires.  If only MPs had looked at themselves through the eyes of their constituents, most of whom live in low income households where, if you fiddle your benefits, you go directly to jail and don’t pas Go.  But no. Like the Bourbons, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.  

MPs expenses- how did we get here?

“UK opposition leader dumps lawmaker over duck pond”, said the Taiwan News. It was the story that caught the imagination of the world. The duck island, charged to expenses by theTory MP Sir Peter Viggers, turned the great British parliament into an international laughing stock.  Quackers...out for a duck...you silly ducker".  The pond ornament was even spotted on Google Earth, until it mysteriously disappeared from aerial view.  What had the mallard community done to deserve this indignity?

   Today presenters were reduced to helpless laughter, but in the House of Commons they weren’t laughing as parliament’s dignity and authority finally collapsed under the relentless bombardment of sleaze stories from the Daily Telegraph through May 2009.  MPs cowered in disgrace, afraid to face to their constituents and some - we are told - were contemplating suicide. The Speaker, Michael Martin,  was forced to resign - the first to do so for three centuries. Not to be outdone, the House of Lords suspended two Labour peers, Lord Taylor of Blackburn and Lord Truscott for offering parliamentary services for money -  the first in three hundred and fifty years. 

   Both institutions have been declared dysfunctional, unfit for purpose, ready for the knackers yard.  A very British revolution, said the newspaper that had for fourteen days exposed the venality of MPs.   It seems that the Fourth Estate - the press - is the only part of the British constitution that is still functioning.  Just think what Westminster would be like if there had been no newspapers?  What would politicians be doing now - buying duck mansions?

    As the revelations rolled on and on, a window was opened into the private lives of  Honourable Members.  From tree surgery to trouser presses; from alarm clocks costing £250 to 28 tonnes of manure.   MPs who claim to be servants of the people had been dipping deep into the public purse for their own enrichment.  Buying London flats for their daughters at public expense; building property empires through  “flipping”  = dishonestly doubling and tripling their second home allowances.  Lavishly equipping their own homes and gardens with luxury items paid for by the taxpayer. 

 . “The public are just jealous because I have a very, very large house”, complained the Tory MP for Totness Anthony Steen   questioned about £80,000 worth of work to his country estate. “What right does the public have to interfere with  my private life?”.  What right?  What right do voters have to ask how one of their MPs could justify claiming that £80,000 garden improvements was necessary for the conduct of his parliamentary duties? This arrogant sense of entitlement is what has most outraged voters - ordinary mortals who have to pay for their own houses, their own food and their own taxes.  Who do not regard £63,000 as poverty pay and cannot understand how MPs could have become so morally deficient, so divorced from reality and so poisoned by greed that they would casually defraud the taxpayer of tens and even hundreds of thousands of pounds, and then claim that the public has no right to question it. By their own mouths they have condemned themselves. 

   Enough, cried political leaders, leaping onto the bandwagon of public anger. The tumbrils, we were assured, were trundling down Whitehall to claim the miscreants.    Except of course that they weren’t. If this is a revolution, then it has been a largely bloodless one.   Very few MPs stand to lose their jobs over this epic scandal, the worst since the Great Reform Acts of 1932 ended the rotten boroughs. There has been a lot of talk about criminal charges, about resignations and deselections,  but no sign of handcuffs.  A number of superannuated knights of the shire have stood down to spend more time with their moats and arboretums.  A couple of Labour MPs have thrown themselves on the mercy of their constituency parties - though in the cases of Hazel Blears and Shahid Malik, the local parties backed the disgraced MPs.  The report into the expenses scandal by Sir Thomas Legg, confirmed that the former home secretary, Jacqui Smith, had wrongly claimed over £24,000 a year on her second home allowance - but all she had to do was deliver an apology.  Any benefits cheat would have been jailed. 

    Gordon Brown ruled that the Communities Minister Hazel Blears’ flipping her second home and avoiding capital gains tax was “unacceptable behaviour”.  But it appears to be acceptable in Her Majesty’s Cabinet.  For, after pressure from Blears, the prime minister cravenly back-tracked and said that she was "doing a great job".   We soon learned why Brown had to give in : other cabinet ministers were in the same disreputable boat and were making clear that if the PM didn’t back them the government might fall.  Geoff Hoon, the Transport Secretary had made a gain of £300,000 on his second home,  paid for on expenses, without paying any capital gains tax, and despite having had the use of a grace and favour residence at Admiralty House in London.  James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, had also flipped homes in order to avoid tax on profits made on a London property financed by his expenses. He even billed the taxpayer for an accountant to help him avoid tax.   Brown is not secure enough in his post to stand up even to a cabinet of crooks. 

   Of course, they were victims of “the system” as they keep saying; MPs didn’t break any rules. But in the court of public opinion - as Harriet Harman memorably put it -  they are guilty as hell. Pocketing hundreds of thousands of pounds on properties bought with public money is legal theft. MPs expenses are there to allow parliamentarians to do their jobs, to give them accommodation when they are in London. The second homes allowance is not there to provide not seed corn for property empires.  Any financial gain  made on property transactions financed by the public purse should to back to the public purse. 

   Resignations and deselectons are needed, not just for spectacle or to appease the mob, but to vindicate the honest MPs who didn’t stick their snouts in the trough.  And yes there are some.  The Labour MP, Laura Moffat, could have cashed in like Hoon, but chose instead to sleep on a camp bed in her office when the house is sitting late.  Not all MPs were waiting nervously for the four o’clock phone call from the Daily Mail. The Stroud MP David Drew travels standard class to London and stays in a Premier Inn.  Chris Mullin, the former Labour minister shot to fame last week for claiming a black and white television licence. There are hundreds of MPs who have not been flipping, bending, fiddling and dipping - but if the guilty ones are exonerated, what incentive do they have to stay clean?  Where is natural justice?

  At least David Cameron has been prepared to condemn the worst practices of Tory MPs without equivocation, and has made clear that any member not willing to pay the Legg levy will not be allowed to stand as a Conservative MP .  Mind you, since half of them are standing down, this is something of an empty threat.  Cameroan made clear to Anthony Steen that the public did have a right to know, and that it was time for him to go.  He condemned the duck house MP, Sir Peter  Viggers unreservedly and while he has not actually withdrawn the whip from  the miscreants, he has been prepared to draw a moral line in the sand.  He forced his closest aide, Andrew Mackay, to resign after it emerged that he and his wife had been “double flipping” and charging both their London and their constituency homes to expenses. Cameron has not condemned the practice of profiting from second homes. This may not be unconnected to the fact that he is one of the beneficiaries of this arrangement. He also claimed money to have his wisteria removed which is not quite in the duck house league, but an eyebrow-raiser nevertheless. 

   There’s no doubt that Gordon Brown has come out worst from this affair, and not just because Sir Thomas Legg told him to pay back £12,000.  He has been weak, blustering, confused.  He told MPs at prime ministers question time last May that holding an  election would cause “chaos”, a remark which betrayed a contempt for democracy in a leader who gained his office without any election at all.   Brown’s premiership is now beyond hope, his government heading for the rocks, his reputation destroyed. . 

  However, there is something more to be considered here than just the constitution, desperately though that is in need of reform.  The collapse of parliament’s moral authority has not taken place in a vacuum; it is part of a general decline in standards of public life over the last three decades.  We have seen the leaders of great institutions, like Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, shamelessly enrich themselves why they helped to destroy their own companies and undermine British economy.  Anti social behaviour by plutocrats has wrecked the security of a million of families who face unemployment in an economic recession caused by excessive leverage and risk-taking by the banks. And now politicians are up there with the bankers as candidates for the lamp post decoration. 

    I have spent  nearly thirty years watching politicians in Westminster and Holyrood, but even I have been astonished to discover what has been going on.   Of course, the Fees Office is partly to blame for running a lax system, but that doesn’t explain why so many Labour  MPs, none of whom came into politics for the money, turned to self enrichment.  I think it may go back to the “prawn cocktail” offensive in 1992, when the late Labour leader, John Smith, with colleague Mo Mowlem, launched a campaign to persuade the City of London that they were safe with Labour.  Thereafter Labour MPs became much closer to the financial world, and many rising Labour politicians, like Patricia Hewitt, spent time working for city institutions. Mo Mowlem married a banker.  Financiers from Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch spent time in the cabinet office, and took prominent roles in government, like Baroness Shriti Vadera, Brown’s key city adviser.

   Some time after the turn of the century, as the property boom began in the South East of England, and bankers started paying themselves colossal bonuses, MPs stopped measuring themselves against the standards of their constituents and took to comparing themselves to the financial types they had taken to rubbing shoulders with in the City.  From Tony Blair down, they resented seeing people with no better qualifications then they had earning mega-salaries.  Unable to afford decent London houses, they used their flexible friend, the expense account, to even the score, surfing the housing boom to make themselves feel just that little bit richer.  What never seems to have occurred to them was that the property bubble they were benefiting from was crucifying young families with debt. 

   Now the property bubble has burst and so has their credibility. Labour was captured by the financial interests in the city in much the same was as were the regulators in the Financial Services Authority. They felt both financially and intellectually inferior to the money managers, which is why they allowed the credit and property bubble to inflate to disastrous proportions.  Tony Blair, true to form, got out when the going was good, and now has a comfortable sinecure in JP Morgan bank.  But the rest of them, now dreading the prospect of having to face the voters in an election, have been left high and dry.  They are loathed by their constituents, abused by the media, and laughed at by politicians in countries with much lesser claims to parliamentary probity.  The members of the duck house parliament will go down as among the most disreputable in the long history of British democracy. The only positive is that they have ensured, by their behaviour, that parliament and the British constitution, must now be subject to radical and irreversible reform. 

MPs expenses- unfair to the pig community

  It’s the question on everyone’s lips. Can you get swine flu from sticking your snout in the trough?  Should the snuffling pigs of parliament and the City be required to wear face masks while in the pursuit of self-enrichment.  Snout to snout contact can only be a major transmitter of the deadly disease, which has killed all of zero people in Britain so far.  

   Actually, it’s really an insult to the pig community to talk about swine flu. It should really be called non-specific animal-related influenza since it’s not even clear that it comes from pigs.  And comparing pigs to porcine parliamentarians might also be seen as offensive to four-legged sty-dwellers.  For all their reputation for gluttony, pigs are social and very intelligent creatures, which is more than you can say for many politicians. 

  You can put lipstick on Jacqui Smith but she’s still Jacqui Smith. Pigs don’t get porn films on expenses, or bath plugs = not that they would have much use for them. And they’re clean as a whistle when it comes to the second homes allowance.  True, pigs have been known to eat their own young when under severe stress, but that’s just part of their culture. 

   Winston Churchill was on the money when he said that: “Dogs look up to man. Cats look down to man. Pigs look us straight in the eye and see an equal”. Though it has to be said that in Westminster you also find them looking down from the press gallery.  In July, when the full horror is revealed about the exotic uses to which MPs have been using their expenses - resignations and even suicides are being talked about - the pigs of the press will be looking down in disgust.  

    But back to swine flu.  We all suspected that God was angry with us for the credit crunch and global warming so it should come as no surprise that He has sent us a final warning not to take him for granted. Fair dos.  But it seems, well, just a little indiscriminate.  It’s all very well punishing antisocial elements like bankers and four-by-four drivers, but is it really necessary to inflict  a global pandemic on the rest of us?  Could He not send a narrowdemic that targets the real pigs like Sir Fred Goodwin and Jeremy Clarkson?   The rest of us would get the message soon enough and change our ways.  Then again, I suppose pigs might fly.

 Poor benighted Gordon Brown is trying to frighten us all into supporting him again by issuing alarmist posters showing people spraying deadly germs from their mouths like a viral monsoon.  This is beyond personal hygiene. Personally I think all people of working age should wear life-size condoms to practise safe socialising. It’s the only way of keeping it all in. Choose life.

Look-at-me MPs is not the answer to sleaze

A national newspaper phoned me last week asking if I was planning to stand against any of the sleaze MPs caught in the expenses row. My first reaction was that I couldn’t imagine see myself sitting in parliament with Esther Rantzen and I don’t look good in white.

But, look, you should never rule anything in or anything out. The fact that we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer intending to stand again for parliament after flipping his house four times in four years and charging tax advice to expenses in direct contravention of his own Inland Revenue rules, is enough to drive anyone to desperate measure. If there were a way to arrange a kind of electoral citizens arrest for the worst offenders, without actually electing active Members of Parliament, I would be first in the queue.

But fantasy politics aside, I really don’t see that electing a lot of media pundits and c-list celebrities standing for parliament is the answer to the crisis. I can’t think of any independents in the Scottish parliament or in Westminster who have made a significant contribution, apart from the magnificent Margo MacDonald - officially the country’s most cost-effective politician - and she of course had a long history in front-line Nationalist politics before going indie.

If a lot of self-opinionated populists were to stand for parliament, like the Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer - who is threatening to stand against the Tory MP Sir Alan Haselhurst - or like Kelvin MacKenzie or Richard Littlejohn, we could end up with the politics of the mad house replacing that of the duck house. How does Richard Branson MP or Sir Alan Sugar MP grab you? The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi is what we might end up with ultimately - a media personality politician who is elected because he controls most of the media. The political parties may seem an anachronism, but they remain the only plausible aggregators of policy ideas and the only organisations capable of forming a government.

However, something needs to be done to kick start the rehabilitation of the parties. The two main party leaders, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, seem paralysed by the crisis, unable to act because of the enormity of the consequences of cleaning up the Commons. They have tried to divert attention from the expenses scandal by making declarations of constitutional and political reform. All well and good, but the public want action to remove miscreant members, now, before changing voting rules.

And where is the Prime Minister at this moment of crisis? Gordon Brown has hidden himself in his flipped home in North Queensferry hoping that if he keeps his eyes closed long enough that the story will go away. Both parties have been waiting for the public to get bored and the press start to turning on the Daily Telegraph for getting the scoop of the century. But it ‘s not going to happen. There is an arrogant assumption in in Westminster that the voters are essentially stupid people with very short attention spans. But the public anger shows no sign of abating, and events are now moving out of party control. The departures last week of the “double dipping” Tory MP Julie Kirkbride and Labour’s dry rot specialist, Margaret Moran MP, suggest that the process has developed a momentum of its own.

David Cameron, who had promised swift and decisive action, slipped badly last week. He defended the indefensible Kirkbride, who seemed to be supporting most of her family her expenses, until she was eventually forced out. Cameron was hoping to get away with losing a few old buffers, already heading for retirement, and keeping the younger telegenic Tory MPs like the Bromsgrove MP. But this strategy no longer looks plausible. The line is not holding, and the public want blood. Shadow cabinet figures like Alan, “constant gardener” Duncan, Cheryl “dog food” Gillan and David “lightbulbs” Willetts must be feeling their collars. Looking at the Daily Telegraph lists, there could be another forty Tory members following them out the door. Conservatives have been responsible for the most of the headline-grabbing expenses, like moat cleaning, duck houses, tree surgery, learing moats, extending mansions, building servants quarters at public expense. Cameron claims he is stunned by these revelations, which suggests he is completely out of touch with his own party. He is promising retribution, and it will have to be swift.

Over at Labour, up to a quarter of the cabinet may have to go, led by Hazel Blears, Geoff Hoon and Alistair Darling, and followed by a similar number of Labour MPs as depart the Tory becnhes. Brown’s course of action was determined the moment he condemned Blears’ behaviour, rightly, as “totally unacceptable” two weeks ago. The communities secretary flipped her house three times in one year in order to maximise tax free capital gains and pay for improvements. As the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley said on Newsnight last week, Blears’ behaviour is simply incompatible with membership of the Labour Party, let alone the government. Brown can’t escape the consequences just because he is afraid to antagonise the Labour sisterhood. Eventually, she will have to join Margaret Moran on the dole queue, and her departure will drag down other flippers like Geof Hoon.

Some say this is arbitrary and against natural justice. Due process should be observed and all given a right to defend themselves. Maybe. But the problem here is that they will all say that they were only obeying the rules, victims of the system, couldn’t help themselves. Strictly legal standards of guilt and innocence don’t really apply in politics, where MPs are subject to the court of public opinion. The reality is that these MPs have been found guilty as charged and will be removed at the earliest election, if Labour doesn’t move first.

There are wider issues here too. The implosion of parliament’s moral authority is a serious matter. I spend a lot of time speaking to students and organisations like the Scottish Youth Parliament. In the past I have always told them that, while there may be problems with individual MPs’ expenses, the vast majority of politicians are not corrupt, and don’t go into parliament for personal gain. I can no longer say this in all conscience. There is simply too much evidence of conscious and premeditated dishonesty. Too many MPs were systematically milking the system and making tens and even hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax free gains. By any reasonable understanding of the word, they are crooks. It is intolerable that any of them are still in their jobs, when in any other walk of life they would be out on their ear. We are waiting.

Pigs might fly

It’s the question on everyone’s lips. Can you get swine flu from sticking your snout in the trough? Should the snuffling pigs of parliament and the City be required to wear face masks while in the pursuit of self-enrichment. Snout to snout contact can only be a major transmitter of the deadly disease, which has killed all of zero people in Britain so far.

Actually, it’s really an insult to the pig community to talk about swine flu. It should really be called non-specific animal-related influenza since it’s not even clear that it comes from pigs. And comparing pigs to porcine parliamentarians might also be seen as offensive to four-legged sty-dwellers. For all their reputation for gluttony, pigs are social and very intelligent creatures, which is more than you can say for many politicians.

You can put lipstick on Jacqui Smith but she’s still Jacqui Smith. Pigs don’t get porn films on expenses, or bath plugs = not that they would have much use for them. And they’re clean as a whistle when it comes to the second homes allowance. True, pigs have been known to eat their own young when under severe stress, but that’s just part of their culture.

Winston Churchill was on the money when he said that: “Dogs look up to man. Cats look down to man. Pigs look us straight in the eye and see an equal”. Though it has to be said that in Westminster you also find them looking down from the press gallery. In July, when the full horror is revealed about the exotic uses to which MPs have been using their expenses - resignations and even suicides are being talked about - the pigs of the press will be looking down in disgust.

But back to swine flu. We all suspected that God was angry with us for the credit crunch and global warming so it should come as no surprise that He has sent us a final warning not to take him for granted. Fair dos. But it seems, well, just a little indiscriminate. It’s all very well punishing antisocial elements like bankers and four-by-four drivers, but is it really necessary to inflict a global pandemic on the rest of us? Could He not send a narrowdemic that targets the real pigs like Sir Fred Goodwin and Jeremy Clarkson? The rest of us would get the message soon enough and change our ways. Then again, I suppose pigs might fly.

Poor benighted Gordon Brown is trying to frighten us all into supporting him again by issuing alarmist posters showing people spraying deadly germs from their mouths like a viral monsoon. This is beyond personal hygiene. Personally I think all people of working age should wear life-size condoms to practise safe socialising. It’s the only way of keeping it all in. Choose life.

MPs expenses: revolution now?

“It’s a revolutionary moment”, said the former standards commissioner, Alistair Graham. “This is like the storming of the Bastille, only the prisoners aren’t being let out”. The historical comparison was perhaps a little over the top, but everyone seems to accept that British politics will never be the same. The question is, what comes next?

Westminster certainly can’t be allowed to return to the bad old ways. At least there is a political consensus on the need for change. Mind you, we said that about the banks and the bonus culture, and at the slightest hint of an economic recovery, the bankers have gone right back to the trough. How can we prevent the MPs scandal ever happening again?

Well, first of all by demanding complete transparency. One of the most common excuses given by shamefaced MPs dragged before the cameras to explain why they claimed for expensive flat-screen TVs, moat-cleaning and flipped houses is that the system was deficient. It wasn’t their fault; the rules were wrong. Trouble is, they only discovered how wrong the rules were after they had been exposed by the Daily Telegraph. Clearly, if they had known that their expenses claims were going to be made public, many MPs clearly wouldn’t have made them. As Lord Nolan put it, during the last great sleaze scandal in 1995, “daylight is the best disinfectant”.

Transparency has to be policed of course, and the precondition for disinfecting parliament is for the Speaker, Michael Martin, to go and go now. He has long regarded himself as the keeper of the perks, even before becoming Speaker. I discovered this in the 1990s when I was a lobby hack in Westminster and wrote a column about MPs expenses, describing some of the practices that everyone knew went on. He accused me of defaming the parliamentary group of MPs and had me reported to the deputy sergeant at arms. Now as Speaker he likens himself to a trades unionist defending pay and conditions - this is completely inappropriate, as are the methods used to silence dissent.

As the former standards commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, discovered when she tried to investigate allegations about Scottish MPs, the Speaker is the apex of a system designed to protect MPs from scrutiny. She resigned in disgust. Speaker Martin must resign also, not just because he is an irascible buffoon who can’t even read a prepared statement coherently, but because he doggedly refused to allow MPs expenses to be made public under freedom of information. Indeed, he spent tens of thousands of pounds of public money in legal fees trying to prevent the public learning how their money was being spent. The best suggestion I’ve heard all week is that he should be replaced by Kate Hooey, the Labour MP who got an inarticulate
ear bashing from Martin last week for daring to challenge his handling of the expenses issue.

Needless to say the expenses rules have to be changed. MPs, like MSPs in Scotland, - entitled to claim legitimate expenses. But this does not give them the right to make substantial capital gains on properties paid for by taxpayers. In my view the flipping scandal is of far greater importance than all the ridiculous manure and trouser press claims. One MP, Greg Barker, made £320,000 profit out of buying and selling a second home in London financed by his allowance. That is as close to public theft as it is possible to get without actually robbing the Bank of England. This culture of property speculation made every MP a stakeholder in the greatest property bubble in economic history. If MPs had been required to pay their own way, and buy their own houses, they would have been rather less relaxed about the house price spiral that has crucified their constituents and left a generation unable to afford a home.

Which takes us onto MPs pay. The former minister, Michael Portillo, said grandly on BBC last week that there is no way he could be persuaded back into politics “because it would mean trying to live on £63,000 a year”. His point was that no one could reasonably be expected to survive on such a pittance. We have heard variants of this argument all week from MPs and apologists It reveals an astonishing detachment from reality. Only MPs who have been cosseted and pampered at public expense for years, and have lost touch with their constituents, could believe that £63000, plus legitimate expenses, is not enough to live on. It is more than three times average earnings. 96% of the British population live on less than £63,000 a year. If last week was the Bastille, just wait until MPs demand a 40% pay increase - which is what many think they are worth. The tumbrils will be trundling down Whitehall, a guillotine erected in Parliament Square, and MPs’ heads impaled on railings on Westminster Bridge. Just don’t go there.

A lot of people, like the comedian Michael Fry, still say that we are getting this out of proportion and that most MPs are perfectly straight and hard working public servants. But that is only partially true. Anyone who has seen parliament evolve in the last twenty five years knows that the character of MPs has changed. They have become less principled, less independently-minded, more career-oriented. Even Labour MPs became preoccupied with reward, complaining that they would be making much more in the private sector - sometimes correctly, as in the case of Tony Blair who walked out of Downing Street and into a sinecure at JP Morgan for a reported £2m a year. Peter Mandelson summed it up when he said that Labour was now “completely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”. Or rather didn’t as was the case with MPs and their second homes.

We need fewer MPs - now that we have devolution, we don’t need 650 in Westminster and a third could go tomorrow without anyone noticing. The remainder need to show more independence. What is the point of parliament when it voted for the Iraq against MPs own consciences; which allowed the biggest property bubble in history to grow unchecked. We need a new kind of MP - one who wants to enter parliament out of principle - to change society, not change houses. I just don’t believe that there aren’t people like that in Britain anymore. Hopefully, when this discredited and disgraced Labour government falls from office they will find their voice.