Wasting police time?

Like most Tory-hating bloggers, I’ve been watching this Conway Twitty story with interest. It’s nice when they are shown up for what they are. The Tory MP and anyone in his party who knew what he was up to should be punished, made to hand back the money, and be prepared for a knock to their collective reputation. If there is more to come out of the story, then there should be enough there for his opponents at the next election to publicise so that his poorly served electors get rid of him.

But it seems the Liberal Democrats don’t want that to be the way it happens. They would rather waste police time. Now financial irregularities involving the public purse are a serious matter, as is the conduct in particular of MPs. If we didn’t know that before the 1990s then we do now. But as a result of what happened in the 1990s, facilities exist to pursue, investigate and punish bad behaviour. Only if these options are exhausted or a wider fraud seems to be underway should opposing parties call the police.

This is a story because it went to the Standards and Privileges Committee, who investigated and punished Mr Conway. If that had not been the case, there is still the Parliamentary Commissioner for standards. There is also an Electoral Commission, a free press and a ballot box.

All of these things combined can serve to prevent wrongdoing, stop it if it has started and offer appropriate punishment. Ultimately and rightly, this is provided by constituents of the politician. There is a necessary role for the press here in letting people know what is happening, and a necessary role for political parties to make the argument for what is wrong and right.

If it’s Watergate, call the police. If it’s not, investigate and alert the proper authorities and, above all, make your case to the electorate at the next election. But the Liberal Democrats seem to think themselves incapable of making this case, and instead are wasting police time in order to make their case to the rolling news channels.

This seems to be a pattern which could cause serious problems in the future and undermine the voters. Increasingly political events are portrayed with certain features. The culmination of any story is a resignation. To get there, letters to the police are just one item in an arsenal guaranteed to keep the bandwagon rolling. If Derek Conway loses his seat at the next election, and I hope that he does, then his opponents can consider it a job well done.

But it’s not a job well done to turn the ticker tape red/yellow depending on your choice of station for ten minutes in order to make it look like politics is corrupt and unregulated. Nor is it a good job to involve the Metropolitan police in matters that are already being dealt with by perfectly appropriate authorities.

If you’ve got a good case against a politician, you should make it, rather than looking for the next opportunity to call the police. They have better things to be doing.

 

*UPDATE* The Metropolitan police might have more time for sleaze if they weren’t having to arrest Tory MPs on assault charges.

Closing the gap?

Only if the gap is between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Watching the latter on the Andrew Marr show this morning, I am a little bit bewildered. Was he floating a balloon or did he really say the health service (at all levels, it sounded like to me) was to be funded by a top-up to local income tax? If the latter is the case I can only think one of two things – either the Liberal Democrats have come up with one of the most divisive and least progressive policies of modern times, or he is using the trite language of localism to make what he thinks are meaningless statements. Either way he looked pretty cheap.

So, if cash for the NHS is to be raised locally, presumably on a local authority basis if it’s to be a top-up to local income tax, how is that possibly going to be a progressive policy? Of course funding of the health service has to reflect local need. But would it be fair if they were funded locally? Take the former coal mining areas. They are doing much better than they were ten years ago, with far higher employment rates than seemed possible then. But are they, while working hard rebuilding their local economies, also to find the money to deal with the health consequences of fuelling Britain through most of the last century?

This sounds like a fairly solid example of a Thatcherite era Tory policy. Even if there is a safety net for areas with lower incomes, the gap will only get bigger when areas with better health and more money can keep their resources to themselves. Clegg always makes sure that he mentions his Sheffield constituency when he talks about his plans, in order to let people know that he could not possibly be a Tory. But that won’t fool anyone if he really starts to articulate these ideas.

But the other option is that he is just trying the easy hit of the language of devolution, and he doesn’t actually mean to announce such a policy. This is a pretty dangerous move. We need local leadership, and it needs to cover all areas, including health, as health is likely to be the main cause of social exclusion this century. What we don’t need is politicians of any party who are too ashamed and afraid of the power of central government, (and the arguments we have to have about how we use it), to narrow the gap in the interests of everyone.

Are people stupid?

I’m trying to work out why, when a good 60% of domestic political coverage over the last 3 months has been concerned with party funding/spending (see previous rant here); no member of the general public has raised the issue with me, despite doing a pretty constant routine of door-knocking. Nobody has said anything to suggest that they think any situations or people are right or wrong.

There must be a right and wrong, and people are not stupid. They recognise when something is corrupt or unfair, and they care very much about those things. But I wonder who, outside Westminster, cares about the in and outs of what is declared and how. They certainly don’t follow the role of the Electoral Commission or the various forms of enquiry that they hear about in each news cycle.

People notice if they’re hearing a lot from politicians or if they’re hearing nothing. Something in between will leave most people with the most positive impression. Money spent other than communicating with voters won’t have a clear impact, it’ll just leave an impression of the kind of people we in politics and the political parties are.

But the fact that people seem to think the details of the Hain/Osbourne sagas are irrelevant doesn’t mean they won’t influence people’s opinion of politics and in turn their voting behaviour. In both cases, people will think badly of the politicians who spend large sums on what are essentially internal party issues.

In the case of the Labour party, the problem is ostensibly quite old-fashioned. While we are not an exclusive or class-based party any more, we still have our people that we operate for. And they’re not the kind of people who understand how politicians don’t notice sums in the hundreds of thousands, whether it’s theirs personally or part of their campaigns.

That is why it’s so important that the rules are clear, and the authority of the Electoral Commission is clear. It either is the authority in charge or it isn’t. There should be heavy sanctions for corruption, and for outright dishonesty. The parties and the press should not be trying to make the Hain affair into either of those things, because there is no evidence or likelihood for it. There is nothing helpful in pursuing stories to what, if you watch rolling news, appears the natural conclusion - resignation without people ever really knowing why.

But politicians including Hain should be considerably more responsible because of the damage these stories do. If politicians get access to large sums, they should take responsibility for it being declared. But they should also make sure that they are sensible about the spending that goes on in their names, and make sure it’s to the benefit of the party. It’s not hard, they should just spend the money on communicating with the electorate.

Permission to speak

Much as I am loathe to admit to reading Guido Fawkes’ blog (feeling somewhat polluted as I do to read just how many people in the Tory blog world are obsessed with Gordon Brown’s supposed homosexuality, including those who cite Robert Mugabe to back their arguments. It’s also very clever of course of some of his readership to call him Braun instead. I think my sides may split), I was interested to read this document, also linked here, apparently from a BBC analysis of the so-called ‘Cameron project’. It sets out several timelines for the alleged transformation of the Tories away from being the ‘nasty party’, and into the party coming up with the ideas for government.

The main structure of such a strategy, as you’d probably expect, is based on spending a couple of years (now ended) securing the party ‘permission to speak’, i.e. to convince people they aren’t really Tories, and are in no way to blame for 15% inflation and record unemployment. This includes pushing environmental issues and rhetoric on families, before moving back to core issues such as immigration and tax cuts. The period in the middle focussing on the character of Gordon Brown seems to me to be the only one the Tories are currently pursuing with any fervour, suggesting that they are not that confident in getting to the phase of having to look like a party of government and come up with big ideas.

The only one they even heralded as a big idea seems to have come and gone with their return to tax obsession in George Osborne’s conference speech. But we in the Labour party seem to have slightly lost sight of the fact that since this they have done very little that is positive or practical. We however are today announcing a policy that is one of the most progressive things a government can do at the moment. By screening for the conditions that shorten lives across all groups in society, and allowing people to take more control over them, not only do we increase people’s standard of living and length of life, but if, as seems likely, health and lifestyle may become a primary force of social exclusion rather than a secondary one, this is a key way of tackling that.

So in a sense, we want the Tory party to have permission to speak. We want the political situation to be such that we have more of a fight than in 2005. Because ultimately, the Labour party is the force for change that people across Britain still need. And if world politics is becoming less afraid of progressive change, as seems to be happening in the US, we need a government that reflects that. We have one, and a fair fight allows us to make that point and lead better by having an opposition that represents the other side. The fact that they have misrepresented their priorities to get to a point of having that permission to speak only makes it clearer that our job is to make the case for change, because they are not going to.

The structure of public life and the media in Britain is such that we as a party of government get led away from making a political case for what we do, and into more technocratic arguments. We can’t do this when the Tory party is able to get more of a platform to make its case. Unfortunately the way public life if divided up means that making a political case makes change a Westminster story. Today’s NHS announcement is a case in point. While I’m sure that by the 6 o’clock news the BBC analysis will be focussed on what the announcements mean, albeit of course including arguments about funding and allocation, at the moment on News 24, bulletins featuring the story are going to analysis from James Landale, the Chief Westminster correspondent, to discuss what this means for the sparring between the parties. But that is not the only thing we mean by having a political discussion. Parliament is not the be all and end all of politics. We can have a discussion in hospitals and streets across the country, that doesn’t make it less political.

So we are winning by far the battle of ideas. But we need to be stronger in making the political case in a more relevant way. But we can’t fall into the trap that politics and Westminster are synonymous, and the Labour party could help itself by forcing public life in general away from this assumption. The way to lose would be to accept that Westminster politics is the only arena for the political argument, and now that the Tories do have a voice, we can’t let that happen.