The Swiss list, or swizz list, dominated PMQs. Ed Miliband was keen to paint Cameron as the beneficiary of ‘dodgy’ donors who craftily side-stepped their tax bills and funnelled the proceeds back to Tory HQ.
The stink also enveloped Stephen Green, given a peerage by Cameron, who ran HSBC at a time when it helped millionaires to, let us say, ‘overlook their obligations to the Treasury’. Nine years back it was even suggested, by Bloomberg, that the bank had stooped to money laundering while Green was in charge. Nonsense, said his friends, the money wasn’t being laundered, just given a rinse and a whizz over with the iron.
In the Commons today a storm of accusations flew. The miscreants on the list were dodgers, evaders, cheats and so on. Defamation rules lapse at the doors of Parliament so MPs can speak interchangeably of ‘avoidance’ and ‘evasion’. The rest of us have to observe a fine legal distinction. Evaders are crooks who deserve lengthy jail terms. Avoiders are consultants who help HMRC to improve its code-book out of a sense of public duty.
Cameron retaliated, not brilliantly, by listing the tax-loopholes left open by Labour which he has had to shut. And he mentioned Lord Paul, also on the wicked list, who personally coughed up for Gordon Brown’s election campaign, (a deed for which he has yet to be prosecuted).
Not an illuminating session. The leaders combined to create the impression that every party is funded by filchers and conmen. And that each side seeks to claim the moral high ground. This is hardly likely to inspire the weary citizen to cast his vote with confidence and pride.
And this bothers Graham Allen who frets about low turn-outs at elections.
You’ll notice that a politician’s anxiety over ‘voter apathy’ varies in inverse proportion to the richness of his character. It’s code for ‘why don’t the sods find a bore like me interesting?’ Allen believes a ‘written constitution’ might help.
Please, Prime Minister?
No, said Cameron.
The premise of Allen’s question is groundless since there are dozens of statutes governing our democratic procedures. Where does he imagine these provisions are set down? Chalked onto a railway cutting perhaps or tattooed in invisible dyes across the flanks of Herefordshire bulls? Are they scorched onto miraculous slices of toast or inscribed across the heavens in coloured smoke by the Red Arrows from time to time? The significance of ‘written’ and ‘constitution’ seem not to have penetrated the lumpen electrochemical gloop that sparks dully within Allen’s head. Here’s some help for him: ours is a written constitution but it happens to occupy more than one document.
He also begged the PM to set up an ‘all-party constitutional conference’ – God spare us – whose conclusions will be shoved through every letter box in the land. Just what we want. A civics lecture in the post. Allen’s ambition is to give voters the hots for politics again. And to make them feel that, in his words, they ‘own our democracy.’ Interesting slip. ‘Own their democracy’ might have been nearer the mark but his phrase ‘our democracy’ indicates that he feels parliament belongs to MPs. And to no one else.
We knew that already, of course, but it was nice of him to point it out.
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