We cannot legislate for a better class of criminal to sit in Parliament

There is talk about Conrad Black taking his seat again in the House of Lords, against the continuing debate about whether those who have served time in prison should be allowed to do so. But to ask whether a convicted criminal should be banned from the Lords – and therefore, by implication, Parliament as a whole – is also  to ask whether grassroots campaigners including all kind of protesters as well as many feminists should therefore never be allowed to stand in Parliament either.  

Better to ask the question whether Conrad Black should have been given his seat in the first place – an action which has been just one small part of a long-term institutionalised and ongoing corruption of the second House, that is to say a House still peopled by too many rich powerful industrialists who thereby gain an excorbitant influence in Parliament.

Do we want messenger gods in parliament?

by Nick Trench

Am I the only person in the UK (surely there are others) who finds the continuing and long-drawnout revelations of politicians’ expenses fairly tedious? The Daily Telegraph could, of course, have published the whole thing (peers included) in a booklet form six weeks ago, much as they did yesterday with the Commons MPs. They knew what they were doing though. In releasing the information – complete with ongoing commentary - in a drip-drip fashion they have pandered (as indeed is traditionally their remit) to middle (and lower) England moral outrage – and massively increased what were nosediving circulation figures into the bargain. Perhaps even they didn’t realise what a grand spectator sport it would turn into. 

I am a hard copy fan but it has to be said that the internet, given access to the leaked CD back in early May, would no doubt have had everything up on the web within minutes. It’s a dead cert that the DT will get journalism awards for such slow reporting! 

Sebastian Berger, journalist for the Rheinischer Merkur, gave us a measured response when he said on the Today programme a few weeks ago that the amounts involved, in the scheme of things, were ‘peanuts’. George Monbiot tactfully suggests that a much worse scandal was the £6.2 billion that will be spent on rebuilding sections of the M25. George Monbiot is one who has earned the right to criticise MPs’ expenses but chooses not to waste print on it. The scandal, for the most part, fills a space normally occupied by a public disinterest in political matters.   

And yet… it is clear that the knock-on effects may yet prove significant, as the current focus – at least in the Sunday Times today – is, quite correctly, on the directorships and consultancies held by many MPs. These they possess clearly because of what companies think they can get out of it, something which proves more than anything the clubbish, masonic character of Parliament.

The scandal tells us far more about the state of mind of the British public than anything else. Although the current mess is a result of the internal arrangement made to bolster MPs’ salaries in the 1980s with a consequently lax expenses system, I think that decades ago most people’s more deferential attitudes towards those in power would have meant that to them any and every perk simply went with the job.   

In our changed (more ‘public eye’ than Private Eye) climate, it is ironic that the public distrust of politicians and the authority they represent is also the same distrust responsible for the widespread attitude of ’fooling’ the system wherever one can get away with it.  The official public argument today is that ‘it’s the principle of the thing’ (not necessarily the amounts involved). Yet take a random sample of  1400 or so (the total number of MPs of both houses) from any of us on the same kind of salary, and I doubt very much whether the reality behind a proportion of our tax returns would stand up to any better scrutiny. Hand on heart, how many people running small businesses, for example, can say they have never claimed against ‘phantom expenses’ of one sort or another, even if it is ‘only’ taxis, buses or whatever… ? And can you imagine many members of the public with a smart accountant (that of course being the crucial thing) not agreeing to switch a second home to avoid paying capital gains tax? For those who would be in a position to do so of course, which introduces another major factor into the equation, namely the sheer envy apparent in TV interviews with members of the public.  So where, on the one hand, the public will to a large extent show a ‘healthy disrespect’ for authority and the ‘system’, on the other we somehow believe that MPs should abide by other rules entirely.

The public gives off very confused signals about what kind of MP it wants.  It is clear that we want them to behave better than us – in other words to act like ‘gods’ in an ethical and moral sense. At the same time we want them to be more like  ‘ordinary people’ (but of course ordinary people lie and cheat). We want them to be more honest. Yet of course to be more honest they would have to stop being our servants – or servants of a political party for that matter. And if they are our servants (or messengers) they cannot ever properly or freely express their own deep-seated opinions - something that a part of us does want them to do. In other words, in their current incarnation, MPs are as truthful as they can be when they are so strongly pulled at least three ways – between their own consciences, their parties and their constituencies.

Are there vultures waiting at the gates to the Fees Office?

How much more than the expenses themselves will it cost us if in the end a private company gets its hands on parliamentary accounts as, for instance, has indeed already happened with the BBC ten years ago?

One move towards democracy

by Nick Trench

 The public we understand are angry. How about then 50 of these angry men and women sitting in parliament without having to go through the standard rigmarole of becoming an MP? I would like to propose, on an experimental basis, that a group of about 30-50 people drawn by lottery from the whole country should sit in the House of Lords. Each person would sit for three years and entrance would be staggered.

This takes forward one step the current suggestions recently made in the national press (for instance the Guardian and the Sunday Times) that citizens’ juries could be used within government structures – a demonstration in itself of how far into the mainstream the idea of citizens’ juries has now proceeded.

The idea is of course not new – it was even included, more for the sake of thoroughness than anything else, in the 1999 House of Lords reform consultation paper. I myself put forward this proposal over ten years ago (Hansard, March 30, 1999) in the Lords during the last period of parliamentary reform debate.  I was the first – and, I believe, still the only member of parliament – to recommend a random selection of members within parliament as a serious step forward in further democratising the parliamentary process. (I, as a hereditary peer, outside the safe confines of the Labour Party, also in the same debate signalled my intention of voting for the removal of the hereditaries).

Much of the talk at the moment is of involving citizens’ juries in government decision-making, rather than having citizens as actual members. But there is a crucial difference here between government and parliament. In one sense government is already strong enough if (without proportional representation) certainly not fair enough; it is parliament as a whole that needs to be invigorated. Power has moved both outwards and inwards – outwards to the constituencies where constituents, starved of the strong local government seen for example in German cities, demand more and more of their MPs. Inwards as party executives (including central government) create an ever greater stranglehold on the parties and also therefore on the MPs, and ignore parliament entirely. MPs are therefore pulled in both directions, leaving a vacuum at the ‘centre’. Strangely therefore despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary, torn between the entreaties of their constituents and a blind loyalty to their party there is little room in a sense for MPs to ‘be themselves’.

The issue is not one of accountability but of presentation.  It is perhaps self-evident now the degree to which the main political parties are like families with all their consequent loyalties and tendency to look inwards, with the members of these families loyal first and foremost to the ‘family’ cause, but we do not ponder on the degree to which this has a deleterious effect on parliament.  Parliament should be a palpably exciting place where MPs ought to be freely debating and formulating their own beliefs within the chamber itself. Yet, because of its largely safe and mechanistic atmosphere, we are left with a parliament that has become commented on and scrutinised less and less in the same forensic detail that it used to be even twenty years ago. A dangerous situation as so much can get by without proper public ratification or debate.

What struck me very quickly after my arrival in the Lords in 1996 was that while fellow MPs in both houses would privately demonstrate often sophisticated and complex views on the issue of the day, views expressed in the chamber and in the lobby rarely properly reflected these – I would say more honest – arguments. This was less so in the Lords where individuals – particularly the Crossbenchers – could to a greater extent argue and vote according to their own thoughts and conscience. (Of course there are the so-called mavericks and backbench rebellions – but mavericks by their very nature are scarce and backbench rebellions are rare, and safety is sought in numbers.)

We desperately need a parliament where there are at least a significant number of people who are able to ‘be themselves’ – who are there not as ‘experts’ or through the patronage, in any way, of the political parties, who have no interests other than in presenting themselves and their own views. In short we need ‘presentatives’ as much as ‘re-presentatives’.  One clear way in which this can be achieved is through having a citizens’ jury element.

The manner in which the public’s attitude to politicians has changed over the last few decades backs up this argument. It has changed from being a regard for them as authority figures who did a difficult job and (like royalty) deserved all the perks they got, to a belief that they are our servants who ought to act in the same manner as we should ourselves ideally like to (not quite yet as we do). Having taken politicians off their pedestals, we are, little by little, getting closer to saying they are actually us.

We can become very complacent in a western democracy with regard to our political process, although it is at times like this when this complacency is questioned. Democracy is still something we don’t yet by any means have – how can it be when the ordinary citizen’s only real connection with politics is through the vote, important though that is? Democracy is still a goal whose form we probably even do not know yet. The traditional childrens’s book view of the nascent parliament is of the humble subject making representations to the king on behalf of their own village. A future scenario might – however that may achieved – with no king or any other authorities present – simply be ourselves talking to ourselves, no different to a discussion amongst any of us at a bar or around the dinner table today, a discussion that is free for everyone in the land to join in – but one that is happening right at the centre of things.