‘This is the biggest political story of the year and yet also the smallest,’ blogged Polis director Charlie Beckett on the MPs’ expenses furore that has engulfed politics for the last month. ‘While Britain plunges into recession we are arguing about whether a hard-working politician should be allowed to claim for a few hundred pounds of gardening, house repairs or plumbing.’
Beckett, whose LSE-based thinktank examines the media and its impact on society, posed a tricky moral dilemma: should a newspaper ‘cough up cash for information which was almost certainly “stolen”’? Yes, he argued, asserting that ‘in this case … the public interest defence overwhelmingly slaughters any ethical conundrum’.
‘The only people who were seeking to keep it secret were the people who benefited from the closeted, corrupt arrangement. That is, the MPs,’ he added. ‘If we waited till they unveiled it in the summer we would have gained less information and on their terms.’
Fabian Society general secretary Sunder Katwala was much more suspicious of the Telegraph’s revelations, writing on the thinktank’s Next Left blog that in some cases ‘innuendo does not seem to be backed up by the substance of the stories’. He also asked whether homophobia lay behind Telegraph allegations concerning health minister Ben Bradshaw’s mortgage payments on the home he jointly owns with his civil partner.
Far from sympathetic towards the expense-happy MPs was Joy Johnson, Ken Livingstone’s former director of media, writing on the Compass website, who declared that ‘the political class is now held in contempt’.
‘When Peter Mandelson said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” no one could have been under any illusions as to where we were heading,’ Johnson argued. ‘The rich got filthy rich but tax loopholes weren’t closed, the tax havens weren’t shut and the non-doms weren’t penalised. What we are now seeing is the logical conclusion of that philosophy.’
Demos, meanwhile, went beyond rhetoric and set up a running tab on its website tracking how much money is being paid back to the Inland Revenue by MPs. £111,020.70 at the last count.
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Talking of Demos, birthday wishes are due to the thinktank for everyday democracy which last month celebrated its 16th birthday with a bash at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. At the event, attended by a few hundred policy wonks and pundits, the organisation launched a new pamphlet, The Liberal Republic, written by director Richard Reeves and chair Philip Collins (who write on p20), as well as a shiny new website and a new cross-party advisory council.
Described as a liberal call-to-arms, The Liberal Republic urges that power should be held at the lowest possible level. ‘Here is the real political dividing line: if we depute power to ordinary people do we believe they will exercise it well? Or do we believe, if we are honest with ourselves – either the politician or the agent of the service – are usually better placed to tell people what they really want?’
Demos’s new website has generated plenty of traffic, including a comment from Polly Toynbee, clearly not impressed by the thinktank’s courting of the Tory party. The Guardian columnist posted a comment underneath Reeves’s blog post on Tory plans to ‘recapitalise the poor’, saying: ‘It’s all very well praising Cameron for promising to recapitalise the poor but it’s utterly meaningless unless he says how, how much it costs and where the money is to come from,’ adding icily: ‘Demos should not indulge Cameron’s political cunning in making fine speeches with all the right sentiments, entirely unsupported by policies that they could ever make happen. You lend credibility to the incredible.’
Reeves hit back, saying: ‘Rather than dismissing the goal of “recapitalising the poor” as ‘incredible’ simply because it comes from the mouths of Tories, we should hold them to it. Demos is not interested in making it “credible”; we’re interested in making it happen.’