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Leading article

The sense of an ending

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

A party that breaks laws should not make laws

The David Abrahams affair and Wendy Alexander’s travails in Scotland are deeply damaging in themselves. Labour swept to power in 1997 declaring grandly in its manifesto: ‘We will oblige parties to declare the source of all donations above a minimum figure: Labour does this voluntarily and all parties should do so. Foreign funding will be banned. We will ask the [Committee on Standards in Public Life] to consider how the funding of political parties should be regulated and reformed.’

The committee delivered its report in October 1998, and legislation followed in the form of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 — which, in turn, established the Electoral Commission to regulate these matters.

The Prime Minister has already admitted that donations ‘have not been lawfully declared’, and told the Parliamentary Labour party on Monday that he was as angry as any of them about the accepting of more than £600,000 from Mr Abrahams via proxies and go-betweens. Yet in this matter — the flagrant breach of absolutely clear legislation — Labour is in an angry dialogue with itself. It made the law, has proved incapable of abiding by it, and now expects public forgiveness and even respect for agreeing to look into the scandal and to co-operate with the police. But why on earth should the electorate respect a party that cannot even obey its very own laws?

The broader problem for Mr Brown — to which Mr Major alluded — is that ‘sleaze’ refers to much more than specific criminal allegations. It captures the corrosions of time, the aura of deviousness, jadedness and selfishness that clings to a government that has been in power too long. Mr Brown is no more personally corrupt than was Mr Major. But — unlike Mr Major — he has been a very senior Cabinet minister since the beginning of his party’s long spell in power. Try as he and his acolytes might to shift all responsibility to his predecessor, he is as much to blame for the dilapidated state of this administration as Tony Blair.

Small wonder then that, as an ICM poll for Newsnight revealed on Monday, 57 per cent of voters think that Mr Brown is tainted by sleaze: a bleakly ironic fate for a politician who has defined himself by his ‘moral compass’ and the sermons of his father. The consolation for Mr Brown in the same survey was that 43 per cent still believe he is ‘cut out to be Prime Minister’, two points ahead of David Cameron.