This political swine flu is about more than receipts

On 6 December 1648, Captain Thomas Pride, an officer in Cromwell’s army, stood at the door of the House of Commons chamber. He and his colleagues on that day prevented 140 MPs from taking their seats and arrested over 40 of them. The door was then locked, and the key — together with the Mace — was carried away by a Colonel Otley. Today, Britain is in the midst of another lacerating, and self-lacerating, parliamentary crisis which has long to go before its course is run. Political swine flu has not only doomed the Labour government, but damaged parliament — the ‘origin of all just power’ — and the country’s self-esteem.

The range of those who succumbed to parliament’s ruinous ethical disorders has been staggeringly wide. Cabinet and shadow cabinet, political war horses and newcomers, men and women, left and right, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Jew are all involved. Tory toffs and Labour toughs caught this flu together; not surprising when their snouts were so close, and they were feeding from the same trough on the trampled pigsty ‘centre ground’, or Animal Farm, of British politics.

Comment has not got the full measure of this: a betrayal of parliament and the citizen-body by parliamentarians themselves, led by their Speaker. The torrent of publicity given to MPs’ wretched expense claims for TV sets and scotch eggs has itself got in the way of true judgment. Installing a home cinema, removing a wasps’ nest, spending a night in a spa — all at public cost — are relative trivia. Even the concentration upon MPs’ publicly funded profiteering, their false mortgage claims, tax evasions and ‘flippings’ of second-home allowances has been too narrow.

Instead, it is the moral disablement of parliament which is the greatest harm it has suffered. Both individually and collectively, its members have been rendered unfit (in the eyes of most of the public) to pass judgment on others, to make the law, to represent the interests of their electors and thus to fulfil their political functions.