Part and parcel of the decline of the west is the obsession with "corruption" and the minutiae of official rule-breaking; receipts matter more than failure to represent our interests; procedures matter more than an depraved and corrupting behaviour: an example of the latter is the BBC's method of defusing the Ross-Brand affair: procedures were not followed, they said, the broadcast was not compliant with editorial guidelines. We are invited to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.
The real scandal is that MPs are mainly apparatchniks and voting fodder, that our elected representatives support a political system which refuses to deal with issues that matter to those that elect them; many of these issues being dismissed as "populist" concerns: immigration, housing inflation (as it was, and they'd like it to return), crime and disorder, the EU, the continuing wipeout of manufacturing, abortion. On abortion, Labour members went along with the feminist lobby rather than the groundswell of deep "unease" amongst the population. "Unease" is euphemism for horror, but that is the abortion debate for you.
Can you imagine if politicians tried to take account of the views of their constituents and voted accordingly, at least on most issues (which leaves some space for conscience)? But if you are part of a self-serving political elite, selected by your party because you agree with the party view, your conscience is likely to be at odds as often as not with the people who elect you.
I guess political makeweights need their lucre; but the money siphoned off by politicians with their noses in the trough is small beer, compared to the billions
The second homes aspect makes me think of hard-working people who can't afford a first home, or who can't get on the council house list - how disgraceful it has been for many years that politicians are failing to look after the interests of the electorate. The fact that they are simultaneously looking after themselves merely throws the issue into sharper relief.
There will be shameful examples of personal venality, which the petty-fogging expenses-based system seems to encourage (the mindset seems to have been they were entitled). Members of the nation's sovereign body shoudn't be forced to fill in expenses forms - which is demeaning for what should be the country's most important job and a waste of their (presumably) precious time. Better to pay them a high salary instead than this nonsense of a system; yet paying politicians more is not obviously the answer; if you think high salaries are an antidote to corruption, you only have to look at the influence of lobbyists in Washington ...
Alternatively pay them a low salary, so that people who have succeeded elsewhere in life or who have an independent income are more prevalent. There are arguments for this, mainly to reduce the propnderance of career politicians. But notwithstanding the abuses around second homes, it seems to me this approach was more difficult in an era of rapid house price inflation, one of the most important social and economic trends under the Labour Government, and encouraged by Gordon Brown. Rapid house price inflation creates a Hobbesian need to acquire real estate as a defensive measure. It is corrosive of personal integrity and a sense of public duty, because no-one can afford to be virtuous: if you don't speculate in housing, someone else will, and in five years time, you will be hopelessly priced out of the market. Nurses, policemen and firemen might leave London, but MPs can't do this. They did what the rest of the well-off population were doing, namely investing in property.
A lot of voters have been affected by housing shortages, country people priced out by second-home owners, Londoners priced out by bankers and immigrants, or people who are not dysfunctional enough or intentionally poor enough to get a council house. Politicians were noticeably quite about the effect of this on their constituents for 10 years; it is what they failed to do in terms of governing the country, which is truly scandalous.
Concentration on individual abuses achieves very little, except to let us indulge in an orgy of smug, self-righteousness vindictiveness – as if most British people working in that system wouldn't have acted the same way. (Being immersed in a system where everyone is doing it also normalises its outrageousness – someone has said that in the context of the European parliament).
I wonder if we can forgive anymore. During the Asian banking crisis, we saw how Japanese top executives resigned in disgrace, bowing and abasing themselves. A lesson for Fred Goodwin here and a lot of other CEO's and politicoes, whose apologies are rehearsed or forced. Yet I cannot help feel that in the vitriol we feel towards the equivalent disgraced individuals in our banking crisis, we (i.e., most people in the Western world) have also forgotten how to properly forgive or how to accept with grace an apology. We have this vindicative compulsion to draw blood, to extract personal vengeance from these individuals: it isn't enough for them to do the decent thing and resign: we have to ridicule and humiliate them as well, all part of the anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and (supposedly) non-conformist turn in recent Western culture. The bowing and other rituals you find in the East seem to defend everyone from the raw, personal emotion, allowing everyone to retain some personal dignity. They live in a deferential, hierarchical society of course; I suspect our infantile faith in meritocracy increases the rancour and bitterness, especially when we also seem to want equality for 'excluded groups'.
In any case, the wrongdoers these days don't resign, which continues the downward vicious spiral of elite unaccountability and public desire for revenge. Ultimately this is corrosive of something very important both to the inner spirit, the soul if you like, and social trust. There is a symbiotic relationship here: the less people want to own up to their mistakes and accept the responsibility, the more everyone else wants to eviscerate them; but it becomes a vicious circle. It is analogous to the way politicians very rarely answer an honest question: is that a cause or effect of the way politicians have been subjected to the Paxman-Humphreys style of interviewing, which assumes before a word is said that the politician is lying, stupid, corrupt and/or generally dishonest. Dishonest media-presentation techniques become the only defence, which further justifies the self-righteous approach of journalists. Part of the idealism of the post-war culture is that there is an inability to accept personal frailty or moral imperfection - from people in positions of responsibility, that is.
The decision whether to pay high or pay low is not an easy one, although increasingly I favour low pay: basically we need MP's who have already had a life of achievement (or at least independence) outside politics; it would make a great difference also ifthey were loyal to their local constituencies more than to their leadership. The lack of calibre of individual MPs - which shows itself in the behaviour of the main parties and the legislature will contribute to the divide between politicians and the electorate. MP's are subserviant for the most part to their party leadership, a situation you would expect to worsen the more candidates are foisted on constituencies by central party machines. Cue positive discrimination as a sure fire way of accentuating this.
So maybe the most important thing to do now is to look at the kind of individuals being appointed now as partliamentary candidates for the next election. This is especially true of Conservative candidates as they are likely to be the most numerous block.
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