POLITICIANS

Are we worth corrupting?

JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE, MP

Mr Auberon Waugh has argued in these columns (3 January) with conviction—and convincingly—that it is the patronage of the Prime Minister which constitutes the worm of corruption in the British political system today. Certainly the fiction (it is a fiction) that the average MP will follow his whip to the gates of hell and through them is re- sponsible for much of the public cynicism about Parliament. Yet the critics, Mr Waugh among them, overlook one important limitation on the MP'S independence: he is not elected to be independent. He is elected, as I fear Mr Waugh will discover at Bridg- water, as the local standard-bearer of the 'ins' or the 'outs', and in the expectation that he will vote to keep his own side 'in' and the other side 'out'.

Now of course it is true that over the entrance-door of the office of every Minister, however humble, is inscribed in letters of gold 'abandon conscience, all ye who enter here', for private consciences and public portfolios cannot go together. And con- sequently there is always the danger—which under Mr Wilson has become a reality— that governments will take to the stifling of rebellions by the creation of jobs. But while Mr Waugh and the Select Committee on Members' Interests come to very different conclusions about what creates political bribery, they both seem to take it for granted that bribery is the mark of a decadent political system. I wondek whether they are right. For bribery, surely, is the tribute paid to those who have influence by those who lack it.

Our select committee quoted, with evident satisfaction, the conclusion of Mr Andrew Roth, that grand inquisitor of Members' outside interests, that ours 'is undoubtedly the cleanest Parliament in the world'. But neither the committee nor its critics have stopped to consider whether this might be, quite simply, because the British MP has no real influence worth corrupting.

Well, does he? One can think of instances where an individual MP has induced Govern- ment to take action on behalf of some op- pressed and previously unnoticed minority interest or to rectify an administrative abuse. But these are cases where, almost by definition, there is no prospect of financial advantage to the member concerned. The type of case with which the committee was most concerned—and indeed which led directly to its appointment—is the case where a foreign government recruits the support of an MP either through a PR agency or through the judicious use of VIP travel facilities.

The truth is that in matters of British foreign policy, and in matters where the financial interest of individual businesses are concerned, the ability of single NPs, or small groups of MPS, to influence government decisions by interventions on the floor of the

House is non-existent. Certainly the develop- ment of a groundswell of parliamentary opi-

nion, particularly when it is not confined to one side of the House, can influence govern- ment decisions. But the numbers necessarily involved are way beyond the purse of any PR organisation yet imagined.

Happily, no doubt, for its members, our select committee was not troubled with such fundamental agnosticism. It accepted, with simple faith, that members could deflect the course of good government, and could do so from motives of personal gain. It was purely concerned with ways of ensuring that the whole business was conducted above board. And here it ran into a lot of trouble.

The former arrangements were quite in- defensible. If you were a part-time director of a public company, receiving an honorar- ium of perhaps £500 a year, you were ex- pected to declare your interest whenever matters relating, not merely to the company in question, but also to the industry in which it operated, were under discussion. The com- mittee quite rightly points out that a substantial shareholding—which according to the current practice did not have to be declared—may be a far more important con- sideration than an outside directorship. Few trade union-sponsored Nips dream of declar- ing their 'interest' even though many of them have been threatened with loss of sponsorship (amounting in some cases to loss of seat) if they fail to vote on matters such as prices and incomes policy in accordance with union views—a threat which would never be uttered by the types of 'interest' represented on the Tory side.

In the end, therefore, the committee decided, rather predictably, that the whole

matter of declaration of interest should be left to the sense of propriety of individual members, although they also recommended

an extension of the definition of an interest to include participation in sponsored trips abroad, and substantial shareholdings, and said that interests should be declared in questions as well as in speeches, and in lob- bying behind the scenes.

The committee has been roundly berated in the press for its pains. Yet the critics have not paid much attention to what are surely the real matters for public concern : the limitations apparently imposed on Members by the existence of their outside interests, and the extent to which such outside in- terests may be advanced improperly behind the scenes.

The most depressing document in the whole report is the memorandum submitted by Mr John Osborne. Mr Osborne is a director of his family steel company : he is also an me generally respected on both sides of the House both for his integrity and for his knowledge of the subjects on which he speaks. Yet he had to tell the committee that

'it seems to be a bitter fact of life that I can talk about the steel industry, its future and its technology with ease anywhere but in the House of Parliament'. If he does talk about the industry about which he is perhaps uni- quely well qualified to speak on the floor of the House it appears that he is liable to be accused by other steel firms in the private sector of trying to further the interests of his own company to the disadvantage of others, or else by employees of the state sector of denigrating the British Steel Cor- poration on behalf of the private sector as a whole.

'Is this', Mr Osborne asks, 'a desirable state of affairs?' Of course it is not. Yet the committee has no remedy to offer. Even if a register of interests were established, it would not help Mr Osborne: his interest is already well known. The only answer is an end to the artificially fermented public squeamishness about the whole imaginary threat to public standards of conduct.

The committee was not apparently much worried by Mr Osborne's memorandum. What did worry them was the possibility of MPs and Ministers being cajoled in private by colleagues who did not reveal their motives of self-interest. Here it seems to me that an important distinction ought to be made between the invitation one receives to partake of hospitality at the House, and the representation of a cause before a party committee or a Minister. If an MP receives an invitation from one of his colleagues to meet the chairman and officials of the Frothblowers' Association and fondly imagines that the colleague is motivated by nothing more substantial than the purity of his admiration for the frothblowers' art then he is surely too naïve to represent voters in a a kindergarten.

The promoting of an interest before a party committee or before a Minister is a different matter altogether. This is where a backbench SIP really can hope to influence decisions, at any rate when his party is in power, and this is when his colleagues should be entitled to know whether or not he has a personal interest in the outcome. Under the existing code of conduct there was no obliga- tion whatsoever upon us to reveal an in- terest, and this is perhaps the one instance where the new recommendations tackle a genuine problem and ought to rectify a genuine weakness in the rules.

For the rest I am afraid I cannot see that the committee has added much to the sum of human happiness. If they have in- creased anxieties about potential conflicts of interest they will only have added to the difficulty of attracting into Parliament men with continuing experience of industry: but for this situation the main responsibility rests with those—from the present Prime Minister in his days of Opposition downwards—who have tried to stir up public alarm in the first place.

If there is corruption in British public life today it is to be found, not at West-

minster, but in the local authorities. All too often 'the defence of local industries' is little better than a euphemism for the award of contracts to the builders and contractors with seats on the Council. But this points the moral: the existence of corruption is a manifestation of the real power to influence decisions. That is why those who are con- cerned about the effectiveness of the West-

minster system of democracy as we enter the 1970s should be concerned, not about the evidence of corruption, but about its absence.