Yesterday it was David Blunkett and his
privately funded trip to South Africa, which he forgot to own up to. Today it
is Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her £116,000 expenses claim. According to
the BBC: ‘Ms Smith reportedly claimed £116,000 in expenses for her home in
Redditch, Worcestershire, after telling the Commons that her sister’s home –
where she stays while in London – was her main residence.’ The tax-free
Additional Cost Allowance is worth up to £24,006 a year at present.
In response, the parliamentary standards
watchdog John Lyon has rushed into inaction and declared that he will not be
taking this matter any further – evidently "there is not sufficient
evidence for an inquiry." Ms Smith claims that she has ‘…abided by the
rules. Everything I have done is above board." All this may be technically true but consider
this – when people who are living on benefit make claims which are technically
‘above board’ but nevertheless are deemed (usually by people who are on vastly
higher incomes) as being excessive, they are attacked as being scroungers on
the take, abusing the system and so on. The most vocal of these protectors of
the public purse are often MPs, yet these very same people are more than a
little queasy about dealing with abuses among their own ranks. The reason is
simple. As one observer put it, they are all pushing what they can get away
with to the very limit.
It was only last year that we had the
scandal over MPs paying various relatives huge state funded salaries for doing
often very little work. Older readers will of course remember the scandals that
engulfed the Tory party during the last years of the Major government. Three MPs were accused of taking money to ask
questions in the House and one, Neil Hamilton, managed in a blaze of publicity
to lose both his seat in 1997 and later a series of libel actions as jury after
jury confirmed his quilt.
But is all this just confined to the House
of Commons? Evidently not. Only a few weeks ago, we had the Sunday Times story
about four Labour members of the Lords being caught in a sting operation.
Undercover reporters approached ten peers pretending to be business-backed
lobbyists looking for friendly Lords able to help get a planning bill changed.
Four responded saying, ‘OK, but they would need some financial inducement to do
so’. Not little money either. One demanded £120,000 a year to ‘whet his
appetite,’ another £2,000 a day. Buy one, get one free is not the rule here.
Since all this was recorded there seemed little point in denying this. However
what has happened as a result? Once again very little. Again the guilty men are
using the get-out that no actual money changed hands and no ‘work’ was done,
therefore no crime has been committed. However it may come as a shock to
discover that 145 peers do paid consultancy work and 20 earn money from various
firms for ‘political advice.’ Needless
to say, none of the requirements to register interests exist for those in the
Lords.
What we see here is a huge web of links
between various business lobbying influences and those who sit in the Houses of
Parliament. Why waste time trying to get people elected to defend your views
when you can just buy one over the counter – often quite legally it appears.
What is even more shocking is how often the people involved turn out to be
Labour members. When they talk about a Labour MP or minister being ‘business
friendly’ you cannot help but wonder what that really means.
It is time to raise again the demand that
all Labour MPs should be totally open on their finances and work on a worker’s
wage. Being an MP is, or should be, a fulltime job. Parliamentarians should
neither have the time to take up consultancies and other outside financial
interests nor should they expose themselves to the inevitable conflict of
interests that entails. Living on a worker’s wage may teach them that they
should think more about the interests of working people and less about the
interests of big business. The sleazy culture of ‘get what you can’ which seems
to be the norm for many MPs must be cleared away if we are to have
representative worthy of representing our class. As for the House of Lords,
abolition is now long overdue!
