Corrupt Politicians, or Corrupt Politics?

Maria Miller

Facts: Maria Miller has now resigned, following an allegation of dodgy expenses from a Labour MP. She was initially told to repay £45,000 by the independent Parliamentary Commissioner, but this was later changed to £5,000 by the a committee of MPs which has ultimate responsibility. As well as the excessive claim, she was quite uncooperative in the investigation (which she apologised for to the Commons). She has now resigned because of public and media pressure. When the story broke last week she didn’t resign, and nor did David Cameron pressure her to resign – he stood by her.

She almost certainly did something wrong. I imagine that the independent Commissioner makes a more balanced finding than the MPs committee,  but I’m not in a place to judge. Her attitude in the claim was terrible, even according to the MPs Committee, but her apology for this was extremely short and went no further than it had to. David Cameron said she “did the right thing”, even though the did the bare minimum asked of her by the committee, so that’s another example of him being sub-par. 

Yes, it’s a victory against corruption that she’s resigned from cabinet, but I also imagine that she has been the target of a lot of political scheming. She’s done something wrong – but lots of other politicians do too, many of them much worse than being rude and swindling £5000 (or £45000). I didn’t know Maria Miller existed until last week, as I’m only following politics and news at a distance, but it looks like she was involved in the Leveson inquiry and also the Gay Marriage legislation: as a result, I think it’s plausible and likely that she was targetted by the media (in revenge for Leveson involvement), by some of the gay-hating Conservatives, and also by the Labour party (because that’s what opposition do – take pot shots at the other side, whether its justified or not). 

I count it as a victory if, as appears to be the case, a not-so-good politician is forced to resign by public pressure because they’ve done somethng wrong; I’m just skeptical if this was simply a case of a politician being caught out breaking the rules.

Public Pressure

It is a good reminder that people power can make a difference, which we seem to forget (I assume, because if we knew it I would hope that people do more). Public power stopped the forests being sold off a few years ago, recent Greenpeace campaigns have made Tesco change their policy on Tuna (which they had been deceitful to the point of fraudulent about) and Proctor & Gamble have recently promised not to use palm oil in their shampoo from unsustainable deforestation (though it took them a long time to admit to this, they certainly didn’t make a moral decision and buckled under pressure – the campaign had lasted a few weeks and they had ignored it for a long time, but 400,000 members of the public was sufficient). Other public campaigns have worked less well, probably more than have been succesful – but it still shows it is possible. It’s also nice to see that Number 10 underestimated this in reacting to the “scandal”.

More of us probably need to get behind protecting the NHS, stopping the government’s trampling of poor people (the penalties for people on Job Seeker’s Allowance, especially in cases where they haven’t actually done anything wrong, are atrocious), stopping the state spying with GCHQ/NSA etc, and stop Michael Gove’s crusade against education. Those are all big problems whichI think really need to be fixed. Maybe fracking too – I don’t know enough on the science, but I certainly don’t trust the government and energy companies.

Corruption

The Maria Miller story seems to just be the tip of the iceberg – a small victory against corrupt politicians.

Lobbying is terrible. Corporations (and sometimes people) with money pay politicians (treat them to nice meals, give them presents, pay them outright, offer them jobs afterwards or during, and donate to their party) to do certain things. Lobbyists spin stories to make the public think a certain way about it. One example here.

For example, banks made up a quarter of the Conservative party’s donations one year. That’s huge, and it works against the regulations which the government should put in place (especially when some of the banks have been supported and shares are owned by the state!)… but doesn’t.

[Editors note: I’m not entirely sure on the status of this. I think some of the regulations were tightened, but didn’t go far enough, and George Osbourne is fighting the bank’s corner against the EU, I think. I usually do research and give citations for stories but I haven’t bothered for this one and am doing it from memory – but feel free to search anything you want to verify as I’m fairly sure what I’m saying is correct.]

The media is probably compromised in this too. The main newspapers exist to make money through the medium of selling news – but profit is still their driver. They can’t do much that will compromise any of the corporations taking out advertisements against them (one example was a story by a Reuters journalist into dodgy dealing by a Chinese company, but the story got dropped for getting in the way of the paper’s commercial interests – but there are many examples). They are also susceptible to the same lobbying techniques as the politicians. It suits the media to work with corporations and politicians because that’s easier for them, they can scratch each other’s backs. This can be seen in media coverage of many stories, where the official line is followed quite easily and a bias is shown (for example the Mark Duggan shooting, lack of mention of the TTIP, lack of coverage of the Snowden revalations in papers other than the Guardian, many political stories, etc). They aren’t completely bought – of course not, as otherwise they stop looking like newspapers – but there is certainly a strong influence.

[Here’s an good and funny example in Russell Brand’s “Trews” series where it is clear the media is not always there to inform.]

Some of this is just the media system. I read a story somewhere which said that compared to thirty years ago, journalists now have to output four times as much for their working time as they used to. There are also more people employed in PR than journalists. Put these two together and you end up with lots of stories that are the official line of a corporation or politician printed – and you’ll noticed the stories in all the different papers are near identical, as they all follow the press release. My local paper has printed about five stories about my younger brother for his sporting success – because my mum (or his athletics club) have wrote them a press release, with all the information, some nice pictures, and in a format very easy to edit into a story. 

Lobbying simply means the rich have more power than the not-rich. Big corporations, indivials, politicians, etc. But not usually the public. There’s great work by NGOs coming together to combat this, but it’s still a very imbalanced battle.

Solution?

I can’t help but come to the conclusion that greater public funding for the politicians would be good. A lot of them (especially conservatives, but also much of Labour and some of Lib Dem) are sleazy and not very good at serving the public, and I don’t think they deserve the money either. But there is more to it than that.

The problem is private money being in politics – lobbying. I actually know more about this in American politics than English politics for some reason (although probably partly because lobbying is much worse in America than the UK, but it’s still a huge problem here). In this video, an American news commentator goes on a huge rant, worth watching, and though I don’t agree with all of it, he’s completely right when he says, “Congress is bought. Congress is incapable of making legislation of healthcare, banking, trade or taxes because if they do it they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it.“. Their hands are tied by the donors’ money. It’s a simple transaction: they donate to the party in return for decisions (legislation or public perception or whatever) to go their way (nothing controversial about that). The same way that the public donate to parties because they think the party will benefit them (or do the right thing ideologically). The difference is that the private individuals/corporations are much smaller and much richer than the public as a whole, so their influence in politics is much stronger.

In this talk (check it out), an American author/campaigner explains how in America there are effectively two stages for politicians to be elected: the second one is to get the vote from the public, but the one before that is that they need enough money to campaign for the election (American election campaigns cost much much more than the UK, much more advertising etc), so the people who fund it (again, highly concentrated in very rich individuals and corporations) get lots of control in that.

Money from private individuals interferes in a democracy. Instead of it being about the votes and influence of the public, it’s weighted much much more strongly in favour of the wealth (corporations and individuals). So the private money ought be removed, which means that there needs to be more public funding to replace and protect from the private money.

So I think a good system (which I haven’t though huge amounts about, so the detail is still to be decided, but this is the idea) is to ban politicians from having any money from private interests (their own income, donations from corporations and individuals, etc), but to give them higher salaries (say £200k or so).

I imagine the reaction to this (of at least one person) to be: “Hmm, I can see why the lobbying should be banned, but I don’t think they deserve more money“. That’s what I thought too, before I thought about it and realised I think it’s the only solution. So I’ll try to deal with that.

1. To be fair to the politicians. They are just people, and if we are telling them that they aren’t allowed to get lots of the money they are currently entitle to, and currently get, it’s only fair to give them more money in return.

2. To stop the temptation of illegal lobbying (which would become illegal under my proposal, but is currently legal). If they are already quite wealthy, they will hopefully be less likely to do dodgy deals to get more money.

3. Like I said with private lobbyists, where in return for money they expect something in return, this means that the public, as taxpayers paying for the politicians, it means we can expect more from the politicians. These politicians are usually of a certain background (wealthy and educated, often at Eton and then Oxford) and could easily earn loads of money in other careers, so that needs be to matched better in the politicians funding.

Now, I know that we like to think that politicians should do what they do because they want to help people… but that is currently far from the situation (in my opinion – there’s a lot of bad things the government and previous government did that I think clearly don’t help the people). And an argument against giving politicians more money is that they should do it out of the kindness of their hearts. But that’s an idealist argument, which I agree with in an ideal world… but we aren’t in an ideal world. The current politicians aren’t doing that much out of the kindness of their heart (bedroom tax, ruining the environment, trampling on benefits, not investing in our future with education and energy, etc), and I think that pragmatically, we can’t expect them at the moment to do it out of the goodness of their hearts and have to work with the current system we have – which would mean paying them more to deal with the problem, not just wishing the problem didn’t exist.

I also wonder – just wonder – if giving them more money would have positive effects itself. For example, psychologically speaking, if you give somebody praise, they are encouraged to work towards the praise (even if it isn’t true). If you praise a student for being clever, they work harder and become cleverer. If you tell your partner something good about them – like how tidy they leave the kitchen – then they take some pride in that and make it tidier (of course, there has to be some basis to this for it to work…);. Another example is Norwegian prisons (or Scandinavia generally). Prisons are like hotels – spacious, good TV, good exericse, good education. But as a result, prisoners actually respect society more and feel guilty about what they’ve done, and reoffending rates are lower than, say, UK or US. [This is a much bigger issue but I’ll leave it at that for now].

So maybe paying politicians more, respecting them more, and expecting more of them will result in us having a better class of politicians – because clearly our current system isn’t great and it isn’t like they are going to improve to deserve more money on thier own.

I also think parties should be publicly funded for the same reasons, but kept this post about politician payments.

Let me know what you think.

 

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