In terms of democracy the British have often had a patronising attitude to states where the political system seems to be corrupt. Of course, with only half of our parliament elected, we have little ground to stand on when commenting on democracy anyway. However, as the suspension of three former ministers yesterday Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon because of their 'lobbying' activities shows that we have no basis on which to criticise foreign political systems when ours is so clearly corrupt. Parliament is very good at keeping its dirty secrets secret, but occasionally evidence comes out. Back in 1994-6 we had the 'cash for questions' scandal that MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, in connection with Ian Greer's lobbying company, had received payments in order to ask specific questions in the House of Commons. Other MPs were subsequently criticised by the Nolan Committee for behaving in the same way.
Starting last year we had a whole string of allegations against MPs who had been doing various dubious things with their expenses, in particular around their second homes, supposedly to allow them to attend parliament more easily. This followed rumbling complaints against certain MPs from both the Labour and Conservative parties, in 2007-8. It included ministers like Ed Balls and Jacqui Smith. In 2009 a whole raft of 'fiddles' by numerous politicians came to light. The scandal compelled Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin and Jacqui Smith, Geoff Hoon, Hazel Blears, Tony McNulty and Kitty Ussher all resigning their ministerial positions. A number of Conservatives involved, Andrew McKay, Douglas Hogg, Anthony Steen, Sir Peter Viggers, Sir Nicholas Winterton and Lady Ann Winterton (how come a married couple can both be MPs anyway, is that not wrong in itself?), Christopher Frasier and Ian Taylor all said they would stand down from parliament either immediately or at the next election. Last night the BBC News Channel gave details of 20 MPs, many of them Labour ones, who have regularly received free holidays in places like Gibraltar, Cyprus, the Maldives and Sri Lanka and then have tabled motions and asked questions in parliament for the benefit of those territories/countries.
The saying is that 'power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely'. This is why during John Major's terms of office it was the Conservatives who were most prominent in having corrupt MPs and now it is Labour who is at the forefront in such illegal behaviour. It seems that numerous MPs and ministers, tens of them, have been involved in taking gifts and payments in order to exert influence on the behalf of vested interests. Stephen Byers was seen likening himself to a taxi, available to exert influence in exchange for payments. Has Byers never realised what the concept of prostitution is? Stephen Byers is a prostitute. He does not give sexual favours, but he gives himself entirely in exchange for money. How have we got to this position? I suppose part of it comes from the incomplete job that the Nolan Committee did in stemming corruption in the 1990s and that even this year's reaction to the scandal has been muted. We need to be arresting and imprisoning corrupt MPs otherwise we will not root out this behaviour from the centre of our civil society. In such a context are we surprised when we find large companies such as BAe are paying bribes to win contracts? Parliament and its members set an example to the whole of society and at present are showing us that we need to be prostitutes to get on.
I supported the Labour Party until the mid-1990s when it became the Blairite Party. I think that era when we moved from traditional political parties to the personality focused ones, that keep reminding me of the Peronist politics of Argentina and Gaullism in France. Tony Blair himself, while not being charged with corruption, has gone on to an extremely prosperous career being paid large sums to speak and share his 'wisdom'. Having a party which focused on personalities rather than policies and clearly elicited people seeking influence, the whole Bernie Ecclestone, Hindujas, Cool Britannia scams, characterised politics in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London (2001-8) and a Labour MP 1987-2000 (he remained an MP until 2001 but without the Labour whip), sees the era of Tony Blair's governments with their focus on money rather than policies as being crucial in moving us into an era of very widespread 'sleaze' going beyond just a few corrupt MPs to tens of them behaving in this way.
The fact that Lord Mandelson was compelled to resign twice due to dubious dealings and yet was still able to return to official positions and then receive a peerage because he was favoured by Tony Blair sent out a signal that a blind eye would be turned to such dubious behaviour. After his first resignation in 2000 over an improper payment for his home, Mandelson should never have been allowed to come anywhere near government ever again. The fact that he was appointed a minister again and had to resign in 2001 over his connection with the Hindujas again on the basis of improper influence being wielded showed so many MPs that might have been thinking about behaving corruptly, that they would not suffer a great deal even if caught behaving that way. Even while Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission questions were asked about Mandelson connections with leading business people under investigation by the EU. Mandelson was made a baron in 2008 and entered the government for the third time. Is it surprisingly that so many have followed this role model's behaviour?
How do we resolve this situation? The first step is to press criminal charges. If taking money for asking questions or exerting political pressure is not yet strictly criminal behaviour it must become so immediately and people must be arrested and imprisoned when found guilty of breaking that law. The second thing is that we need to entirely flush out parliament of all of those who have been there in this corrupt phase. I would say that any MP currently in the House of Commons must stand down at the next election and we have an entirely new house that would come in on the basis of the new laws. I acknowledge that that would leave us with an inexperienced parliament and government, so the compromise would be to limit all MPs to only two terms of office. Thus, we could retain anyone who was elected in the 2005 election or by-elections since. Anyone who has been in parliament any longer must now leave. Anyone elected in 2005 would have to leave in 2015 at the latest and anyone who is elected this year would have to go in 2020 at the latest. Five years is more than enough time to build up experience. Of course, some MPs will again become corrupt, but hopefully the new laws would punish them and importantly a culture like Britain of the old days, would be established that eschewed what has become an acceptance of corrupt behaviour. It always has to be challenged. Ernest Bevin, Labour Foreign Secretary 1945-51 used to dine with business leaders and they probably exerted influence through him. However, it seems that corruption was far less rife than it has become today.
While I would not advise that we move to the Chartists' demand of a parliament every year, I certainly would reduce the life of parliaments say to 3 or 4 years to stop people becoming established in the post and so prone to exerting influence in the interests of others. Perhaps we could make it so that an MP could sit only for 3 x 3-year parliaments or if you insist 4 x 3-year parliaments. People argue that short governments lead them to make crowd pleasing policies, but that happens even now with 4 or 5-year parliaments. The UK has constantly neglected long-term planning anyway. I would have more confidence if policies were not being introduced by MPs doing it because they were being paid to behave that way and who were not corrupt in themselves. We need to flush out the corruption from parliament. It is already a gift to the extremists such as the UKIP and BNP who argue that they are untouched by such corruption, because if they gained influence then a lot of us would be finding policies and behaviour that we would find unpalatable in terms of equality, democracy and personal freedom. We are at a turning point. Voting in a Conservative government will bring no change as their MPs are as mired in this corruption as those of Labour. We need thorough reform and new ways of parliament being run to finally clear away the corruption we are seeing and to ensure as best we can that it does not return to our political life in the future.
Showing posts with label Parliament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parliament. Show all posts
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Encountering Michael Foot
I met the veteran British Labour politician, Michael Foot, who died last week at the age of 96, twice, with a spread of twenty years between the two occasions. The first time I met him was in the Autumn of 1979 a few months after the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had come to power that May. He was 66 at the time and had broken his ankle. I remember hobbling up to the urinal next to the one I was using. I engaged him as best I could while we washed our hands. He was speaking at a talk on 'Forty Years On' from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, something he had witnessed as an MP and in 1940 had written 'Guilty Men' attacking the appeasers of Hitler. Interestingly he wrote it under the Classical pseudonym Cato and later wrote another book under the name Cassius. In some ways I feel an affinity with him in terms of the need to protect your private life and especially those you love, when making political points.
The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life. He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them. On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel. It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out. I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.
I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999). He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected. I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier. Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy. I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath. He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life. One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him.
Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself. I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered. The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared. The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere. Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question. The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it. It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.
Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83. He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive. However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives. In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume. There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry. If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did. Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'. Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.
Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime. The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics. This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament. Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion). A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that. However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.
Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party. While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy. The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party. Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century. Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher. Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.
Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament. He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s. The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped. To replace them will costs £130 billion. These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor. The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) . If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today. We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to. The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime. Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too. British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons. The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician. He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era. Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office. However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary. For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.
Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring. In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers. His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured. These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error. However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.
Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had. He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views. He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented. Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with. Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy. Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters. Foot could not have lied to the public that way. Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right. In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.
Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now). One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.
The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life. He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them. On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel. It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out. I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.
I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999). He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected. I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier. Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy. I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath. He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life. One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him.
Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself. I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered. The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared. The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere. Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question. The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it. It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.
Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83. He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive. However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives. In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume. There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry. If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did. Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'. Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.
Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime. The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics. This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament. Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion). A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that. However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.
Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party. While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy. The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party. Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century. Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher. Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.
Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament. He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s. The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped. To replace them will costs £130 billion. These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor. The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) . If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today. We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to. The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime. Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too. British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons. The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician. He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era. Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office. However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary. For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.
Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring. In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers. His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured. These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error. However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.
Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had. He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views. He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented. Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with. Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy. Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters. Foot could not have lied to the public that way. Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right. In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.
Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now). One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.
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