As we watch another two elder statesmen prepare their retirement from the hurly burly of important office in the British Parliament - via a couple of bribes offered, sadly for them, in a sting by TV station Channel 4, it cannot be any wonder that public faith in British politics is declining sharply. But, as a recent survey, conducted by an international anti-corruption think tank Transparency International, demonstrated;
'In Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer 2013, 90 per cent of respondents believed that the UK Government is run by a few big entities acting in their own interest.'
If it were only a case of just (a few?) rotten apples ...
In the US, politics is conducted mainly by millionaires and votes in Congress are bought by lobbying and donation. But the centres of politics in the US are still significant centres of power. The US still rules through the Presidency and Congress not in every case but still on many critical matters. US political institutions genuinely bring together the US's disparate and decentralised ruling elites, to hammer out a common line, in defence of the future of their class as a whole. When the rulers in business, in industry, in technology and finance and the military, and the East Coast bankers and the West Coast techies and the Southern nouveaus are split; then Congress is split.
Parliament has not held significant authority over wealth and power for decades in Britain. The House of Commons and the ever expanding, £300 per daily signature House of Lords, play with their corruption on the margins, as fascinated observers of how Britain is actually ruled. The magnificent personal scandals of the 18th and 19th centuries have been replaced by relatively tawdry expense frauds and the use of Parliament as the stepping stone up into the real world of influence and wealth on retirement. Tony Blair used his premiership to create the life his ambition really wanted. The understanding of the respondents to the Transparency International Survey seem to look beyond individual MPs and their foibles to something wider when considering the British parliament's corruption. So it is perhaps advisable when analysing it to work from the inside out; from the MPs and their shenanigans to the real forces that seem to move and shake society including the parliamentary tree.
The last Act of Parliament before the coming May 7 General Election will be the product of Prime Minister Cameron's 2010 pledge 'to do something about lobbying - the next, even bigger scandal, facing Parliament.' It turns out that his Act will do little or nothing even to ensure that all the lobbyists now working inside Parliament, in MPs' offices, will need to sign the planned register. Who are these people?
A study by the Guardian (5 March 2015) demonstrates that 1 in 5 of the staff employed in MPs and Peer's offices are lobbyists. 113 in the Commons, 206 in the Lords. These 'workers' are in their majority representing businesses. And while it is difficult to get an absolutely clear understanding of MP's external interests, the Guardian also claims (10 June 2012) that 1 in 6 Peers have paid links to the Financial Services Industry alone.
What arises from such glimpses of life at Westminster is an emergent political class without firm independent roots, with an already existing or with a developing osmotic relationship with a wide range of business. And this is reflected more and more in the background of the people who have started their climb up the slippery pole.
It was the Daily Mail that trumpeted that the new Cabinet in 2010 (see DM 23 May 2010) had 23 millionaires out of its 29 new members. (0.7% of the UK population are millionaires.) The Telegraph told us (5 March 2015) that the combined wealth of the Cabinet was £70 million. The Guido Fawkes website claimed that Ed Miliband (and his brother) had £1.9 million and that there were 7 millionaires in the Shadow Cabinet. (19 September 2013). 35% of UK MPs went to private school; over 50% of Tories. (7% of the rest of us.) 72% of Labour MPs are graduates (compared with 20% in the population at large.) There are 25 MPs who were manual workers and 90, mainly in the Labour Party, who were political advisers of one sort or another. All of these figures come from the HOC Library, 14 December 2010 and the Parliament.uk website. The Telegraph of 10 May 2010 adds that a third of MPs went to Oxford or Cambridge and most MPs in all three main parties came from a business, law, media, public affairs background. Looking specifically at the future of the Labour Party, the Guardian noted (23 June 2014) that 54% of Labour's candidates in their 90 designated marginal constituencies were political researchers by trade. (The equivalent figure for the Tories was 17%.)
So MPs as a whole certainly do not represent the people who elect them - which might be counted as a political corruption of a sort. But they do have predominant characteristics in which they either offer an open face to business and/or an absorption with the intricacies of political mechanisms and state functions. These 'talents' seem Ideal for an emerging political class that wants to lever itself into its own indispensable role within a shared preoccupation with business about the favourable fortunes of UK plc.
What do these people actually do? Some assiduously tend their constituencies. Some fiddle their expenses. Some systematise a high income (see published MPs register of interests. It is revealing.) But the day job mostly consists of the sort of list that follows. And here we come to the point. What is the essential corruption of the British Parliament? The examples below open up the heart of the matter.
These are drawn from various news items found in the Guardian in 2012 and 2013.
The government's subsidy system for gas-burning power stations is being designed by an executive from the Dublin-based company ESB International, who has been seconded into the Department of Energy. What does ESB do? It builds gas-burning power stations. (November 10.) On the same day we learned that a government minister, Nick Boles, has privately assured the gambling company Ladbrokes that it needn't worry about attempts by local authorities to stop the spread of betting shops. His new law will prevent councils from taking action.
The week before G4S's contract to run immigration removal centres was expanded, even though all further business with the state was supposed to be frozen while allegations of fraud were investigated. (November 8)
In fact there were systematic failures by government contractors.The monitoring which was meant to keep these companies honest was haphazard, the penalties almost nonexistent, the rewards fantastic. Yet since 2008, the outsourcing of public services has doubled, to £20bn. It is due to rise to £100bn by 2015. (February 7.)
Thanks to an initiative by Lord Green, large companies have ministerial 'buddies', who have to meet them when the companies request it. There were 698 of these meetings during the first 18 months of the scheme, called by corporations these ministers are supposed be regulating. Lord Green, is currently a government trade minister. Before that he was chairman of HSBC, presiding over the bank while it laundered vast amounts of money stashed by Mexican drugs barons. (24 July 2012). Now he is asked to answer (but doesn't) for the tax avoiding HSBC Swiss bank accounts.
The list is endless, and the last Labour government was a big part of the same story. Most recently, for reasons of politics, but not the politics of ordinary people struggling with austerity, rather the politics of UK plc, Miliband led his Labour troops into the same voting lobby as the Tories when they laid down the guarantee of a further £30 billion cuts in the next three years after the General election. Dianne Abbot, Katy Clark, Dennis Skinner, Austin Mitchell and Roger Godsiff were the only Labour MPs who voted against.
This is the story of the grand corruption of the British Parliament. It has been stolen from the people. It defends business and the status quo. It is riddled with machine men and women who have found a new 'industry' to serve their ambition and promotion. It is part of the armoury of the rich and the powerful and it attacks the already difficult lives of the millions who just want a decent life.
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