THE Conservative U-turn on overhauling parliamentary standards shows that the government massively underestimated public resentment of corruption in high office.
As with previous U-turns, it underlines the fragility of the status quo in Britain despite the Tories’ seemingly invincible majority.
Conservative MPs will be deeply unhappy that Downing Street whipped them into backing a revision on standards transparently designed to get Owen Paterson off the hook — and then immediately dropped the idea, having made them tar themselves with the accusation of voting for sleaze.
MP Peter Bone’s report that his office was vandalised overnight because of the vote indicates the level of hostility many can expect to face as a result. Leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg has been forced to acknowledge that reform could not be used retroactively to shield Paterson, who has promptly resigned.
Labour will congratulate itself on having landed some punches on the Tories. Together with the Scottish National Party, its decision to boycott a cross-party body to review standards made it unviable.
And it will hope the charge of corruption sticks — there is, after all, plenty to justify it. Paterson’s conduct is not worlds away from former PM David Cameron’s lobbying for Grensill Capital, or former health secretary Matt Hancock’s allocation of public contracts to firms belonging to friends and relatives.
Yet there is little evidence that Labour grasps the reason the issue is so explosive.
Keir Starmer’s indication that he would support a ban on ministers taking paid second jobs is far weaker than Labour policy under his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, which would have applied this rule to all MPs. It is left as usual to the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs to keep the red flag flying, with Leeds East’s Richard Burgon proposing a worthy private member’s Bill to this effect.
Commons standards committee chair Chris Bryant manages to combine condemning the Tories with familiar self-congratulatory drivel about the supposed integrity of British politics. “It’s not what we do in this country, it’s what they do in Russia.”
This is palpable nonsense. As Italian investigative journalist Roberto Saviano, who spent over a decade exposing the crimes of the mafia, pointed out back in 2016, Britain has some claim to be the most corrupt country in the world, because of the huge role of the City of London in facilitating tax evasion and money-laundering worldwide.
Few other states have outsourced the actual drafting of legislation to companies that might profit from it, in the way parts of Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill 2012 were written by consultants McKinsey.
The depth of anger over the Paterson affair is a reminder that Parliament has not redeemed itself in the public eye since the expenses scandal of 2009.
Quite the opposite. In recent years its tortuous efforts to overrule the will of the majority on Brexit and the sordid spectacle of vicious infighting in the Corbyn years have left Westminster lower than ever in popular esteem.
And Brexit and Corbynism themselves were indications that the mutinous feeling engendered by scandals like that over MPs’ expenses (but also by the bankers’ crash, the exposure of government lies over Iraq, the Panama Papers and more) is still with us.
Tories exploited it in 2019 to win an election by posing as the champions of the popular vote. But this week’s U-turn will remind Boris Johnson that the Brexit election did not indicate any particular enthusiasm for the Conservatives and that their dominance can easily come unstuck.
Labour can make use of that — but only if it recognises that it is the whole Establishment, not just the Tory Party, which is the focus of public resentment.
Restoring faith in Parliament will take a democratic revolution — one to which Starmer, with his determination to further privilege the Parliamentary Labour Party in leadership elections and shield MPs from reselection, appears resolutely opposed.
