Seeking political hope beyond money and influence

By Simon Barrow

Christmas and New Year may be a time for giving, but in the political world there’s little room for sentiment, and it has been taking that’s featured on the agenda in recent weeks.

Given the noted commitment of party fixers to ‘risk management’, you’d have thought that a high degree of prudence by MPs and ministers over expense procedures would have been second nature. Likewise with the handling of donations to their Westminster machines. But this has not quite been so.

The currency of routine power and influence (which comforts itself that ‘corruption’ is only something that happens in the weakened states of Africa) can rapidly descend into operational complacency. Then, rather as young people reared in an affluent, risk-averse culture are tempted to seek an adrenalin boost through recklessness with stimulants, motor vehicles and extra-curricula antics, so some politicians throw caution to the wind over hot money, dubious relationships and internal wrangles.

All three have been involved (along with police investigators) in the latest controversies about un-reported corporate and trade union contributions to Peter Hain's Labour deputy leadership campaign expenses (reported on 8 January 2008), businessman David Abrahams giving £663,975 to Labour through proxies, Scottish MSP Wendy Alexander’s more modest £900 blunder, the issue of deputy PM Harriet Harman’s campaign expenses, and other incursions.

Few seriously doubt Gordon Brown’s probity in all this; not even David Cameron, in spite of his inflated rhetoric aimed at squeezing political capital out of what still amount to serious lapses of judgement, custody and care among the government’s troops. Mr Abrahams’ donations were unlawful because people must use their own names when giving more than £5,000 to a political party. Opposition parties have criticised Mr Brown's insistence that he knew nothing about the third-party arrangements. He’s damned if he did, and failed if he didn’t.

The outcome ought to be more accountability and more transparency – of the kind that our parliamentarians are often demanding of people in other parts of the world, and which was singularly lacking when the 1980s era of forced privatization ended up with political decisions-makers sitting in the boardrooms of companies they had helped create (lest we forget). A comparable commitment to re-examine the overall regimes of party funding would be no bad thing either, provided that didn’t involve an evasion of consequences from the immediate issues.

Nor should it mean that the taxpayer is automatically dragooned into bankrolling the party system. Political parties are civic bodies given legitimacy by being run principally for and by ordinary people. The rules should be about limiting the distorting power and influence of big money interests, not allowing them off the hook. Otherwise the trend for representative politics to be downgraded by a market freest to the few with greatest leverage will continue to undermine the quest for democratic fairness.