This week, the nation beholds Parliament with a collective contempt unrivalled in living memory. We need a modern-day Trollope to do justice to this wave of revulsion, triggered by the remarkable revelations in the Telegraph. Gilbert Burnet, the great ecclesiastical and political historian of his time, wrote of the corrupt MPs elected in 1710 that ‘this is the worst Parliament I ever saw’. And so it seems in 2009: the Palace of Westminster is home not to an ancient institution but to a disgraced rabble of second-rate spivs who have dishonoured the public trust as flagrantly as they have raided the public purse.
It is hard to know whether to be more outraged by the smaller, casual claims for everyday items such as biscuits and women’s toiletries or the ludicrous extravagances presented as legitimate expenses: a chandelier, for example, or the maintenance of Tory swimming pools. Labour probably comes out of the whole wretched business worse, if only because it took Gordon Brown longer than David Cameron to grasp that un-equivocal apologies were necessary. The Conservative leader’s statement on Tuesday was assured and impressive. But the Tories have dropped in the opinion polls, too. The problem is not narrowly party political. Its scope and scale are much broader than the tribal rows between Labour and Conservative.
Rarely does a political scandal truly become a crisis, but this is one such occasion. Yes, there are many individual actions which will need to be taken involving reprimand, apology, repayment, and procedural improvement. Many MPs should be individually disciplined, others deserve to be deselected, others still may find themselves the subject of criminal prosecution for abuse of the second-homes allowance or evasion of capital gains tax. Parliament will find it hard to recover as long as its Speaker is a sweaty, cantankerous shop steward such as Michael Martin.
However, what Tuesday’s Guardian called ‘selective decapitation’ is an insufficient response. Whatever structure of allowances and remuneration replaces the current discredited system, transparency must be at its heart. The auditing of MPs’ expenses could indeed be ‘outsourced’ to the private sector — but only if all such work was open to routine Freedom of Information inquiries. It is sadly clear that parliamentarians cannot be trusted to behave well or honourably: we must therefore rely henceforth upon complete openness. If guilt is no deterrent, let shame do its work.
More immediately, there is a deeply alarming mismatch between the formidable tasks facing this Parliament and its moral authority (which is presently nil). In practice, our political system has become quasi- presidential; but in law sovereignty still resides in the ‘Queen-in-Parliament’. As Bagehot observed, the basis of Cabinet government is the function of the Cabinet as ‘a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state’. The Prime Minister is asked to form a government on the basis of his command of Parliament. It is the institution that writes and scrutinises law, the electoral college that creates a government, the body that holds it to account, the forum where local issues are brought to national attention, and the highest court of appeal in the land. For Parliament to be held in such low esteem because of the morally enfeebled behaviour of its membership is an appalling situation — doubly so at a time of economic crisis and a decline in national confidence.
A reckoning is required, a calling to account that will dramatise the need to refresh and to renew an institution in peril. Only a rapid general election can begin to answer the public’s grievances and symbolise that renewal. The voters are owed an opportunity to reassert their ownership of our democracy and to remind our wretched political class who is boss. The system has crashed; it is time to reboot.
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