MPs' expenses
A dark day for Parliament. A new dawn for democracy?
Michael Brown, an MP for 18 years, reflects on a historic day at Westminster
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Independent Minds
Every so often, parliamentary history is made that subsequently shapes the centuries ahead. The signing of Magna Carta still has implications for our democracy. The events surrounding Charles I and the Civil War live on today as the monarchy bows to the will of the House of Commons when, at the State Opening, the doors of the Commons are slammed shut as Black Rod approaches. The next speaker may have such a chance to lead a historic reform of our tarnished democracy.
The developments of the past two weeks, culminating in yesterday's announcement by the Speaker, will have repercussions down the centuries. Future A-level history students will be answering questions not only about the Long Parliament and the Rump Parliament, but also about the "Moat" Parliament (otherwise perhaps known as the "Manure" Parliament) presided over by Speaker Martin – the first Speaker to be forcibly removed from office in 300 years. His name will be as familiar to future historians - for the wrong reasons - as Speaker Lenthall was in the 17th century.
That Mr Martin had to go became inevitable. He has been identified as the commander-in-chief and defender of the culture of Commons secrecy and corruption. His resistance to the Freedom of Information Act made matters worse. But the scenes witnessed in the last few days made me weep. I have no brief for Mr Martin but the manner of his demise is tragic. Never, ever, in my 18 years under Speaker Thomas, Speaker Weatherill or Speaker Betty Boothroyd did I see such scenes of open rebellion. The mere swish of Betty's gown as she admonished a recalcitrant MP was enough to bring order. All three commanded instant respect, in and out of Parliament, and it is a crying shame that Mr Martin - a personally decent and kindly cove - should have been so badly advised.
Of course Mr Martin was not up to the job - that was precisely why he was chosen in 2000 - when Labour had over 400 MPs. This was the time when Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were neutering the Commons and when Betty Boothroyd was trying, heroically, to defend the Commons from the New Labour reign of terror. But they wanted a pliant stooge. So instead of following convention and allowing a Tory to be nominated, the Labour whips' organised for Mr Martin.
But all that is over. Mr Martin is over, Mr Blair is over and Gordon Brown is nearly over. A new era may be upon us. While Mr Brown belatedly recognised this new era with his hasty announcement of a system of independent adjudication of MPs pay and rations (which he put before other party leaders at the Speaker's meeting yesterday afternoon) he still fails to recognise that the people want retribution. At his press conference He made much of disciplining wayward Labour MPs, yet Elliot Morley and David Chaytor merely remain suspended. (Incredibly, Mr Morley continues to chair a select committee for which he receives an additional £20,000 on top of his salary.) But Mr Brown could have announced their expulsion.
The Prime Minister was at his worst as he promised that any Labour MP who had broken the rules would be de-selected, yet he made the lawyerly distinction that Hazel Blears was within the rules – even though he disapproved of her actions. Instead of promising reviews, committees, inquiries and commissions a few sackings would carry more conviction.
But the people want revenge against the MPs who have defrauded them out of their taxes to pay for the outrageous expenses claims. Voters want prosecution, de-selection, dismissal, defeat and defenestration. (Already Douglas Hogg is to stand down.) But they also want rejuvenation - a new Speaker, a new Parliament - and a new electoral system based on open democracy.
After the farce of Mr Martin's original election there are new rules - involving a secret ballot for the election of the new Speaker. There is still a majority of Labour MPs - some of whom might be tempted to follow"party" line. Similarly Tories might coalesce around a single candidate. Runners and riders will probably include Sir Alan Haselhurst, Mr Martin's deputy. But he is in trouble over gardening expenses. Sir George Young, an Old Etonian Tory, will have another try but he is simply too establishment. Sir Menzies Campbell might have had a chance before his £10,000 flat renovation became public.
But if constitutional reform is the voters' clarion cry - including electoral reform - then MPs should consider candidates regardless of party labels and regardless of the previous convention that "it's our party's turn". Given the need for the public - as well as the Commons - to have confidence in Parliament restored, I would vote for Frank Field or Vince Cable. They would certainly be the peoples' choice.
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Comments
Not just a handful of junior ministers ousted from government but the resignation AND repayment of proceeds and profits of every MP who has lined his or her pockets at the expense of the tax payer.
If they refuse, jail them and seize their property.
Our parliamentary system is infested with corruption, inappropriate special interest influence, foreign powers with dangerously disproportionate influence and with corporate influences that spread like tentacles through a lobbying system rife with blatant disregard for the interests of those whom parliament is charged with protecting.
So much of our parliamentary system needs attention, exposing, cleansing or dismantling that I find it inconceivable that history will do more than simply footnote the name of Martin in the fullness of time. He may have been the figurehead of what has gone before, on THIS topic, but the wider issues are so much more far-reaching than simply spearheading a failed attempt to block a small component of the freedom of information act.
MPs will wonder how much they will have to do, to pacify the electorate, but until we have the representation in Parliament that we were SUPPOSED to have, hundreds of years ago, no amount of stuffing dummies, or pacifiers, in our faces will address the colic we feel.
The way many people feel we would rather have a monster raving loony government than the lying, prevaricating, corrupt, unconsciounably mendacious, dishonourable, grabbing, self aggrandising, out of touch, self serving, egotistical, unjust, elitist, stupid, greedy, arrogant crowd we have now.
Gordon Brown take care. Your name will be mud for centuries.
General Election NOW!
So are they all, all "personally decent & kindly coves" - but that's not the point. They are liars, cheats, traitors to the good faith of the British Electorate. Allowing a pregnant woman to take the taxi you have just hailed might be laudable as a "personally decent & kindly" act, but is an irrelevancy when set against the situation in which that same pregnant woman is having her hard-earned taxes filched by parliamentary freeloaders - one of whom might just be the "decent cove" who recently surrendered his taxi to her.
Enough! - This petty mitigation game could go on forever. There's no mitigation. They are crooks. They have been caught. Et tu, Michael.
One quibble. You say "Mr Brown belatedly recognised this new era with his hasty announcement of a system of independent adjudication of MPs pay ... "
I agree that Brown was slow off the mark. But you're contradictory to say he was also hasty!
The one comfort I find in Brown's slowness is he does look into things before he makes a jump. I believe that is what he has done this time.
Cameron jumped in fast - and he did it well with a ringing call to examine and exile his own cheating gang. But he is now clamouring for a General Election. Here HE is being hasty. Providing we do get a goodly number of evictions and deselections, there is no need for that. It is not Labour alone who is responsible for this, after all.
Otherwise I heartily endorse your concerns that Brown has not made a strong enough commitment to cleaning up. He says he will chuck anyone who has broken the rules. But then he endorses the worst abuser: Hazel Blears! Clearly there will be mega wiggles to allow all except a few unimportant scapegoats to stay untouched.
Finally the most important question has not even been touched on. Who will be the ultimate authority for the new version of the Fees Office?
Yes, he looks carefully. And then invariably jumps the wrong way. A man as in competent, timid and reactionary as ex-Speaker Martin.
I thank you
Firozali A Mulla
Should he fail to act, could see him embroiled in the machinations of his own Party and replaced by one of his own comrades. Better to dissolve Parliament than face internal humiliation.
In the absence of a Cromwell, vote BNP, if you can, otherwise abstain from the pseudo-democratic circus
The Euro elections work on proportional representation in which EVERY vote for EVERY party counts, unlike the archaic and abused first-past-the-post-system. So every vote cast against the Labour/Tory continuum and the fascistic BNP (yes, fascistic, read their forums, check out their on-line communities, don't listen to their propaganda) will count against them by lowering the proportion of votes for them.
Unlike the first-past-the-post system we don't have to vote en-masse for one party in order to block any other. The BNP have been fairly active in promoting the idea that they represent the only electoral alternative if you want to stand against the Labour/Tory consensus, but it's not true. It's a lie, designed to trick electors by exploiting their misunderstanding of the proportional representation system.
His past articles (Op Eds) have proven correct with the passage of time, and his snout has not been anywhere near any trough.
---------------------------
board_member's comment included this brilliantly lucid paragraph, which I would like to endorse:
Our parliamentary system is infested with corruption, inappropriate special interest influence, foreign powers with dangerously disproportionate influence and with corporate influences that spread like tentacles through a lobbying system rife with blatant disregard for the interests of those whom parliament is charged with protecting.
----------------------------
Foreign interests have been dallying with our Parliaments for a lot longer than the life of New Labour! It is high time we rejected the artificial "sciences" that sprang out of the revolutionary zeal of Zionists right across Europe (Boas, Freud, Bernays, Marcuse, Fromm, etc.) during the 1920s and 1930s, which were then exported to America's Universities under the guise of giving people refuge from Nazi persecution.
A sick idea is a sick idea whether or not it has been authored by people who had to run away from Nazism.
We need to return to nationalism (I use nationalism with a small 'n') because that is the only sane and sustainable method of organizing a manageable unit of society: the nation state.
The existing political doctrines, which are all predicated on Internationalism (e.g., Communism, Globalization, 'exporting democracy') and various forms of Soviet (such as the EU) have brought us to this dreadful impasse. On present trends, White Europeans will make up no more than 3 percent of the world's population within another 30 years ... at the start of the 20th century, White Europeans comprised around 30 percent of the world's population.
All other races and ethnicities already have natural homelands (some the size of Continents), and are under no pressure to depart from these ... except for economic reasons. Since the early 1960s, Europeans have witnessed an ever increasing list of non-economic reasons for escaping their own homelands. That in itself is proof of the insanity too many of us feel we must now subscribe to, just to get along.
The going's on with MP's fraudulent expenses is yet another symptom of our generalized and communal loss of respect. We hate ourselves, and each other, because that is what the incessant daily propaganda tells us to do. We have been targeted in a pre-meditated psychological war where we are taught to cooperate in our own demise and destruction. The Television is their weapon of choice, and Hollywood + New York are the military bases of our enemy.
It is time we utterly destroyed those who author such bile as they are doing this with the aim of killing us off. If you understand the theories of Antonio Gramsci and all those pseudo-theories that followed, which came from the sick minds of just eight (8) Frankfurt School ideologues---the so-called Birmingham School, properly known as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with Stuart Hall as the resident big mouth, later adapted these for British consumption---you will have some idea of why the "long march through the institutions" has now reached Westminster; turning many of our elected representatives into thieving scum who have nothing but contempt for those who they legally represent.
The House of Common?!
If these MPs think it's all over it isn't. And this is not the start I was looking for - Gorbals is merely a scapegoat. They still don't get it do they.
So - to sum up yesterday: Failure is still rewarded with huge pensions and a peerage. They really don't get it do they?
What we want to see is large numbers of sitting MPs deselected by their parties and then a general election called immediately and not next year. The voters need an opportunity to take a huge new broom to Parliament and to sweep away some of the dead wood littering the corridors of that rotten institution.
Anything less than this is mere window dressing.
Big Deal!
The late, unlamented Adolf Hitler was fond of children & kind to dogs & Al Capone (when the Syph wasn't frazzling his brain) was an incredibly cordial, 'hail fellow, well met' kinda guy!
I never voted for Gordon Brown. We don't have democracy in this country any more than they had it in Stalinist Russia or under the Nazis in Germany. The people in charge are the 'people in charge' and always will be - their own interests far outweigh any responsibility they may feel toward the citizens of this country.
"And ideal form of Government is Democracy tempered by Assassination." I'm beginning to think Voltaire was right! Heads do need to roll, if only to prove that 'they' got the message. But I'm not naive enough to believe it would bring about the changes needed.
While Michael Brown may have been weeping for democracy the rest of them were weeping for getting caught.
All of the previous deficits to our so-called democracy remain in place:
The Executive will continue to dominate the Legislature; a bankrupt and unequal voting system will remain in place; local democracy will continue to be the plaything of Whitehall; unaccountable quangocracy will continue to flourish; terror laws will continue to be misused; public, er, 'service' bodies will continue to apologise every time they make a mistake - telling us lessons have been learned - and we will continue to be ripped off at every turn.
Some time in the next twelve months we will get an election offering us the, er, 'choice' between two neoliberal parties.
Pass me the prozac!
You are joking right? When would 'reform' imply electing a speaker from the government ranks? The last thing we need is a Labour Speaker to be compliant again to the New(labour)Order.
The Speaker should have been from the main or secondary opposition last time and should be this time.
The rules were set up so that they could be stretched to the limit but without actually being broken. The whole system is rotten to the core. A few heads rolling will not solve maters. Corruption is so institutionalised that cleaning up parliament would be beyond Hercules who managed to clean out a pretty filthy stables. The "honourable" member -maybe one or two but the rest!!!
The economy and the body politic are now smoking ruins. You can call it an apocalypse or you can fool yourself and call it an "opportunity." Either way, Britain is now a third-world country, both economically and politically.
All this other fuss is keeping our minds off the real issue.
We need a Single Transferable Vote in place NOW - before we go to the Polls again.
From all the Comments arising from this expose of what we always suspected it would seem that The People of England have at last Spoken.
But the people have decided and Parliament has responded, it has gone through a terrible truama, had to re-examine itself and now change is afoot.
This is a celebration of democracy, in other countries the troops would have been out on the streets to protect an unbending dictatorship.
In context, today is a bright day for democracy :-)
Remember 1997, when things were going to get better? What happened to Parliamentary reform? Part of the problem is still first-past-the-post which allows the kind of massive majority Labour has, & prevents the rise of real alternative platforms. First-past-the-post led to the anomalous re-election of Major in 1992, which in turn led to the widespread disaffection that led to Blair's vast majority, which he in turn squandered.