Tory localism: Elizabeth Truss and the Norfolk constituency

There is an issue about private morality vs public service - here is a good article about how US politicians and their private actions should be judged. That is by way of an aside, because it doesn't solve the problem in Norfolk, which is about who makes the judgement.

If it were me, I'd say it is significant that the marital indiscretion happened some years ago. But the point is I am not a member of the South-west Norfolk Conservative association. Elizabeth Truss won't be my candidate for MP. She will be the candidate for South West Norfolk and in the end it is the right of the constituency to select her or deselect her, whatever anyone thinks. Isn't that what Localism is all about?

So what if they are too straight-laced, too moralistic for London tastes? The constituency is in Norfolk, not London. The candidate was sent there from London. Elizabeth Truss works for the Reform think tank, based in London. She comes from the London Think tank world; she hob nobs with Conservative functionaries and shadow ministers, who circulate in London. That's her world, not South-West Norfolk. No doubt she is very brilliant. She may be more talented than any of the local candidates; or maybe not. But even if she is more talented, she doesn't have the connection with the constituency that the local candidate has. She is more likely to be oriented to London, not to her own voters. Imagine 600+ MP's whose views and preoccupations are rooted first and foremost in their consituencies. What diversity of thought that would be!

Moreover, she must have had the right views, according to Conservative Central Office, or they wouldn't be promoting her. Allowing local constituencies to select the MPs means that this kind of ideological selection by a clique in the party becomes much more difficult. A greater diversity of views will surface in the parliamentary party. They keep telling us how they want "diversity".

An MP is meant to represent his or her constituents. One of the big themes of the MP expenses scandal is that MPs don't represent the people. So why isn't there an uproar about this? It isn't just South West Norfolk. This is happening in other constituencies, in other parties. The net effect is that most MPs are representative of a London-based political elite rather than the constituencies they represent. Apparently the local conservatives are pretty annoyed with the leadership, which is threatening to impose another candidate. Someone local would be more representative of South-West Norfolk - even a country squire. The gentry are supposed to be part of the privileged classes, incapable of "representing" ordinary people. But most likely they will have lived in the constituency all their lives. And who represents farmers in parliament? or software engineers? or manufacturing towns? (what's left of them).

It is seen as a scandal that the Conservatives don't have all-woman shortlists or that there aren't enough people from an ethnic minority background; but a preponderance of MPs from a closed circle of party apparatchiks, think tanks, journalists and the like doesn't offend the culture police. Yet it is far more toxic, both for an individual constituency and cumulatively for the independence and good standing of Parliament. No matter how talented they are, or how committed or clever, they read similar books, are influenced by the same intellectual fashions and have more in common with each other than with the people who vote for them.

MPs' expenses: parliamentary responsibility

So where is the justice in the resignation of the speaker? What has been gained, in terms of reforming parliament?

Even if Michael Martin was not a good speaker, theexpenses scandal preceded his speakership; there was a collective failure of MPs over many years. If he should have gone, he should have gone later; the honourable course of action was for members of the House of Commons collectively to take the blame, and responsibility.

In an ideal world, and it is ideal given where we are, a parliamentary debate would have been the highlight of the crisis. After this we might have seen the speaker, as house leader, apologise to the people. The party leaders would have the status of individual MPs; they would have deliberately stayed in the background as they are supposed to do for votes on matters of conscience. This is because Parliament is sovereign, which people forget. Such constitutional niceties will be seen today as hopelessly unrealistic ...

Would MPs have voted for a reduction in pay starting after the next election? Part of the answer is the de-professionalisation of parliament, as Charles Moore is saying. The left won't vote for that and maybe the conservatives in their present form won't either; but in a general election, those candidates might have an advantage, who argue that being an MP is a public service, not a job. Lowering MPs' wages would help facilitate the demise of the professional political class.

The fact that the resignation followed a meeting of party leaders shows where the power lies. You might say with the people ultimately; but what they see is determined by the media, whose propensity is to reduce political stories to what key individuals say and (say that they) think; the opinions of the leaders are given disproportionate weight. The voters rage about corrupt politics; party establishments calculate electoral advantage and apply their preferred "change agenda" as panacea, or try to.

MPs' expenses 4: solving the issues that beset our great democracy

Mr Clegg was showing decisive moral leadership on Sunday TV with his principled call to remove that horrible Mr Martin. His solutions in the Observer are innovative and inspiring: "We must finally haul our politics from the 19th Century into the 21st."

To think that MPs expenses went back to the 19th Century. This is breaking the mould of the corrupt political system. You see the scandal had nothing to do with Mr Clegg or any of the others, it was all the speaker's fault.

What courage he displayed, in a world of cynical manipulation of the agenda by politicians, and easy fixes, to go on Television, and put the blame where it really lies - with that scapegoat bad man. For the election, I'm going to vote Lib dem, because they are a nice party. Or maybe the greens, I like the environment, they're nice and fluffy too.

MPs' expenses 3: the scandal is how they select the parliamentary candidates

Consider David Cameron's modernising agenda and compare it to the All women shortlists for 1997. At the time, the Labour shortlist was seen as an advance for sexual equality and garnered some good PR plaudits from the liberal press, however the Blair Babes were very disappointing as MPs. Many thought they were promoted because they were women rather than because they were good enough. They were also known for their loyalty to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, failing thereby to adequately scrutinise legislation in a Parliament with an overwhelming Labour majority.

For the coming 2010 election and no doubt the 2009 Euro-election too, the “A” list (or equivalent) of Conservative MP's will be largely imposed by Conservative Central Office in preference to local candidates, with detriment to the democratic process after the next election.

“A” list Tory candidates will be chosen because the leadership finds them congenial; and of course they will be loyal to the Central Party machine that ensured their appointment, partly for career reasons but also because they would not have been appointed if they had the wrong views. They won't have much connection to the constituency or to the voters who elect the MP based on party colours. Those local candidates who are selected, will still have been vetted for ideological correctness. Anyone not modern or progessive enough on the key issues will be seen as a potential liability - and awkward to boot.

Cameron wants to "detoxify" the Tory brand by burning incense with the equality and diversity priesthood. A key part of this strategy is about avoiding being seen as exclusively white, male, Christian, heterosexual. Consequently the new parliamentary cohort will be diverse in sex, sexuality, religion, ethnicity; however, because this more representative social mix will have been largely imposed, cutting out the democratic process in the constituencies, they will have little real connection with the area they represent. They will be approved by a few people close to the leader, and so one can expect them to be homogeneous in their opinions and hygienic in their attitudes – especially on all the politically correct issues that the media likes to judge political figures by. Within a certain tolerance threshold of course; they won't agree exactly on every issue; but they will have a similar world view, much more so than in political parties of the past. They will be a batch of mass-produced talking heads, parroting the views of the Tory front bench. It doesn't matter what race, religion, sex or sexuality a placeman (or placewoman) is; they will represent the views of the leader rather than the people they are supposed to exemplify. The Labour women in Parliament were not very representative of stay-at-home mothers - by definition; and we saw it in the legislative agenda. The "Diversity" agenda will help to legitimise the lack of accountability to the electorate, even if it only applies to a proportion of "A" list candidates.

Rather than the Tories being detoxified, they will be ideologically cleansed. The toxicity will remain because the electorate will quickly realise that their MPs don't speak for them at all. No doubt there will be a few brave dissenters, who increase in numbers over the years; but most will be largely compliant, loyal to only the voters that count, David Cameron and his close associates. I hope it won't be as pronounced as that; but that is the way political patronage works. Professional journalists from the MSM should take time to investigate the matter, and give the electorate a chance to see what kind of candidates they will be voting for.

Lord Tebbit thought himself regarded by the leadership as too unhygienic for the current Conservative party. He mentioned on the Today programme (Tuesday, 8.10am) the probable effect of quotas and "A" lists on the type of candidate selected, but the interviewer didn't pick up on the issue. Tony Benn suggested we look at Candidates' incomes as much as MPs' but the BBC Newsnight interviewer on Tuesday night wasn't interested either. I posted about the detrimental effect of quotas on the democratic process last year after listening to Tony Benn on the Today programme.

The issue is fundamental to the integrity of parliamentary democracy and the media don't care. They like the expenses scandal though, because it comes in an easy-to-understand form of pigs in the trough and people in power on the make.

Peter Hitchens mentions the selection issue briefly in his blog of 2 days ago. He rightly condemns the sackings of Howard Flight and Patrick Mercer as disgraceful when they stated the wrong views, something which played well with the liberal media, but which further undermines the independence of MP's. You can't have a proper democracy if the representatives of a constituency avoid discussing controversial issues rather than publicly disagree with their leader, or more correctly the groupthink imposed by the liberal-left establishment.

Mary Kenny was writing in the Telegraph some days ago, telling how the candidates for the labour list of the 1990's Labour party had to sign a document, stating that they supported abortion. You can see how this kind of ideological cleansing would exclude traditionalist Catholics for example. The impact of this provision on the voting in the House of Commons could be seen 11 or 12 years later when Labour MP's overwhelmingly voted to keep the shockingly lax Abortion laws, in spite of public opinion, favouring stricter laws. As it was then, so will it be. We can expect that candidates chosen by the Tories now will determine the character of the political scene for the next decade.

As an aside, you should be aware that the Liberal Democrats have the right to abortion as part of their policy. That is why the now Cross-bench peer, David Lord Alton left in the 1980's.

MPs' expenses 2: honourable members hanging from lamp posts

Second homes, moats, swimming pools, the Telegraph's day-by-day revelations have become a seismic political event. However, the issue of how Parliament fails to represent the vital interests of the British people is more important than expenses. Also people should be looking at how new parliamentary candidates get foisted on constituencies by central party machines.

Personal morality or systemic failure? It is easier than people recognise to fall in to the trap of abusing expense accounts. But they are meant to be honourable members; and people are thinking, if they can't get their own house in order, how can they represent the country? When individual MPs are profiting from second homes, people are aggrieved because housing has been one of the major scandals of the past decade, and it is still with us. Easy credit, immigration and changing employment structures (rise of finance, decline of manufacturing) led to inflated prices and also priced people out of the market. MP's have done nothing about it.

For once Question Time was interesting. It was obviously going to be difficult for whichever unfortunate MPs had to face the crowds, but the audience were jeering, hooting, completely furious. They had lost all respect for the political system, if they had any before. People were prepared to clap when one of the panel talked about the good work MP's did, but for the most part “it was like a lynch mob”, as Andrew Neil said. There were people heckling even Menzies Campbell - “ you've been found out” - as well as Government Housing Minister, Margaret Beckett. They stood up for themselves quite well.

In terms of creating maximum effect, the Telegraph played a blinder, I'll give them that. Each day with clockwork regularity, the artillery guns moved serenely on to another nest of miscreants. And we knew that the next day, there would be more. Each new scandal-clad dawn condemned another bunch, looking like prisoners in the Palace of Westminster rather then honourable members of the Mother of Parliaments, to be taken out and shot, metaphorically speaking – or at least to sit in the stocks and get pelted with muck in the laughing, scowling court of public contempt.

But people are furious because it shows what the elites can get away with. But how does fury help make the situation better?. You still need MP's in a democracy, as Hannan states. You could sack all the MP's and replace them with a new bunch, appointed by their central party machines, so they will be inexperienced and even more like ciphers than the ones that went before them. The new cohort will be diverse in sex, sexuality, religion, accent and ethnicity, but homogenous and hygenic in their opinions, selected because they have the same views as the party leadership. After Question Time, Neil and Co mocked the idea that it was the system; which is fair enough, given some of the abuses. But if you just concentrate on the MP's and make them sacrificial lambs, then you might forget to consider 1) how they are selected, 2) the power of patronage and 3) the PC Consensus, which together lead to them voting with the party machines (nearly) everytime. From selling Rover to the Chinese to immigration to the EU to deaths in Afghanistan, the list goes on.

Tony Benn said on Newsnight (Tuesday, I think) that of course this is “muckraking”, which isn't the same as saying that Expenses abuses don't matter, just an old-fashioned view that digging the dirt just for the sake of it is disreputable. Benn's integrity as a grand old man of politics is unassailable. The interviewer ignored him because it went against the political corruption story they want to hype up while ignoring the inconvenient fact that the parties consistently fail to represent their electorate on the issues. On Channel 4 news (Thursday), Khrishna Guru-Murthy seemed to want a whole new political order. Matthew Taylor was arguing for restraint.

Rather than hang them up on lamp-posts, the British people should remember there is a general election coming and examine how their MP's get selected in the first place. Will they be selected on merit or because they have the right views?

The solution is to vote them out - and maybe people are so angry, they'll break the 3-party system. That could be the impact of having the revelations before the election, not after. They'll say a large protest vote in June is due to the extraordinary circumstances of the MPs' expenses scandal, rather than admit it is a judgement on the political failures over the last 10 or 20 years - but so what?

A possible and regrettable dead end for all this fury is that - and on one level this is unfair because, tactically, he had to do something after moatgate - we get a "dynamic leader", like Cameron, playing to the media, in the process centralising party power, and denigrating MP's further, because they are seen as too venal to be trusted.

MPs' expenses: do they matter?

Not "do MP's matter?", you could be forgiven for thinking they don't, but do their expenses matter?, the scandal around which is pretty boring, and not that important in the scheme of things. Yes, it's a poorly-designed system, yes (some) MP's are venal; but so is most of humanity given a bad system. I haven't fully read (yawn) the Telegraph's shocking expose.

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 invested, spent, wasted by public authorities - as recent Telegraph letter have said. Is it any wonder that blogs, the Letter's pages and Any Answers are more interesting than any forum where politicians are giving their views on the state of the country?

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.