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. 

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.

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.