October 13, 2009

Moving the Goal Posts

Posted in Cameron, Conservatives, Hysteria, Labour, Media, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society at 11:26 pm by Paul Sagar

I’m not going to defend individual MPs incriminated in the expenses scandal. What those MPs did was totally wrong (though let’s also be fair and remember that most MPs did in fact stay within both the spirit and letter of the rules).

Yet I am deeply uncomfortable with the imposition of retrospective rule-changes resulting in thousands of pounds being demanded from individual MPs. Here’s some reasons why I feel uncomfortable:

1. Morally, there looks to be something very fishy about saying “oh, those were the rules, but we’ve changed them now, and there’s nothing you can do about it – now please give us lots of money”. As Anne Widdecombe [I can't believe I'm going to quote her approvingly, what is the world coming to?] put it on the BBC today, if a private employer turned around to their employees and said “OK, you stayed within the rules as they were originally set and the expenses departement approved your claims, but now we’ve changed the rules and you have to pay back what you claimed”, then that employer would be up in front of an employment tribunal. And that employer would lose. I don’t really see why it’s any different for MPs, to be honest and with an eye to ethical consistency.

2. There looks like some further – pretty unsustainable – inconsistency here. From what I can tell, Jacqui Smith claimed c. £110,000 in expenses by breaking the rules. Yet she’s not being asked to pay it back. Why? The only reason I can think of is that the new regime has concluded that this is too much to ask one person to repay. Instead, they are demanding that those who made smaller claims, but which were within the rules, pay money back. This looks inconsistent, and arbitrary. And indefensible, frankly.

3. Which makes me think this is more about gesture politics than anything else. It was decided that a big show of “cleaning up Westminster” needed to be made, and this is how it’s now going to be achieved: hitting MPs where it hurts, in a very public way. But because of the 1. and 2. above, it looks more like empty gesturing designed to pander to an angry electorate, rather than simply delivering the substantial reform which is actually needed. Which is a problem because…

4. It puts MPs and Party Leaders in a pretty impossible situation. Cameron has already said that any Tory MP refusing to repay expenses will have the whip withdrawn. Brown has said he will consider doing the same for Labour. The leaders have to do this, because there is no room for complaint: if they try and point out that it’s pretty fishy to retrospectively move the goal posts in order to facilitate gesture politics, they will be instantly pilloried. This means nobody can complain that this sort of retributive justice may not be the right way to do things if we’re serious about cleaning up Westminster. Furthermore – and importantly – this means that a basic tenet of delivering justice – the right to appeal – is de facto being denied (because of the enormous personal cost of so-appealing, in the present climate). And that bothers me.

5. What bothers me even more is that, already, it looks like the re-payments are going to hit Labour MPs hardest. I’m certainly not going to deny that even post-tax, £64K a year is a very tidy sum. But even then, being hit for a bill of several thousand pounds is pretty severe. Especially if you don’t have any other source of income, except for your salary. Of course, we know which side of the House MPs  who tend to already have pots of wealth or lucrative second jobs sit on, don’t we?

Indeed, already it’s been Labour MPs who’ve been muttering about refusing to pay-back claims that were within the rules when the rules were made. This farrago has the potential to mess with Labour a lot more than the Tories (the fact that Brown has already been hauled out for a stoning only adds to this). And that bothers me, because it will be a result not of Labour having been worse expenses cheats (I think both parties were fairly equal in doing wrong, and why not check out Boy George’s dodgy – and so far, largely ignored – affairs whilst we are here) but of the playing field being uneven between them and the Conservatives. And that in itself bugs me, as well as the obvious fact I am partisan and loathe to see anything help the Tories.

To summarise: retrospective rule-changing in the case of MPs’ expenses looks morally fishy, is apparently inconsistent (both vis-a-vis rule breakers and the valid private sector comparison), is arbitrary, smacks of shallow gesture politics, makes legitimate complaint or appeal pretty much impossible from those affected, and is likely to unfairly hit one party more than the other because of general differences in abilities to pay, not because of any especially greater tendency towards wrong-doing.

Congratulations, Mr Legg, it looks like you just put together one hell of a dodgy package. But don’t mind me, I’m just a blogger and part-time philosopher who thinks about these things too much. Justice will be seen to be done, and that’s all that really matters.

Right?

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