TRUST IS an essential ingredient of politics in a representative democracy, since voters rely on those they elect to conduct public affairs responsibly and accountably. Such a vision has been dealt a rude blow in the United Kingdom by the scandal over MPs’ expenses which culminated yesterday in the resignation of House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin.
The Office of Speaker has symbolised parliamentary integrity, probity and fairness for centuries. His departure reveals that a failure to reform its procedures for paying MPs and his own lamentable incompetence in handling this crisis have substantially diminished the legitimacy he was supposed to uphold.
Along the way there has been ample room for popular hilarity and growing contempt as revelations about ghost mortgages, lavish redecorations, cleaning of moats and purchase of manure have tumbled out from the pages of the Daily Telegraph. It is a classic scoop for the newspaper. But the fact that it came ahead of the publication under Freedom of Information legislation of similar information this summer makes it all the more surprising that Mr Martin resisted change for so long.
And he was not the only one to do so. The more general reforms in the self-regulatory system of parliamentary fees and allowances announced yesterday by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, following discussions with other party leaders, have also been long in coming. Their announcement as a reaction to these revelations, not ahead of them, will reinforce popular assumptions that they have been forced out of a reluctant political class which now makes Mr Martin a scapegoat. These sweeping changes will transform the system of payments, putting it in the hands of an independent commission based on more transparent rules and procedures. Mr Brown hopes this will help restore the credibility of politics by making it more like other parts of British public life and more in touch with ordinary people’s lives.
It will take more than a procedural revolution to repair the damage done by this affair. It seems to confirm a much longer coarsening of political standards in British public life, which shows up in the collapse of trust in political parties and institutions. The trend can be found elsewhere in Europe too, including in Ireland. British MPs are in fact paid considerably less than here, so that this system was seen by many of them as compensation. Members of the Oireachtas are very well paid in comparison, but are more tightly regulated. There are similar concerns about how members of the European Parliament are paid.
A number of MPs will resign or be deselected by their constituency organisations, while more of them will have difficulty being re-elected. And while this affair has discredited all political parties it has tended to reinforce Mr Brown’s indecisive reputation and given a boost to Conservative leader David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg. Mr Brown will struggle even harder to restore the reputation of normal politics concerned with protecting ordinary living standards on which he has tried to stake his reputation since 2007.