When politicians - and our political leaders especially - are held in low esteem by the citizens, our voters, democracy itself can start to fray at the edges. Britain has long had a tradition of honourable public service and a very low level of corruption, but things have changed in the last 30 years.
In the 1980s and 90s, there were cash for questions scandals, bribes for sending weapons to Iraq and privatising public assets for Òloads of moneyÓ Ð as the culture of greed was let off the leash. Since 1997 we have had ministers forced to resign on a number of occasions Ð not going voluntarily or honourably, but reluctantly after media exposure and pressure, and frequently being rehabilitated and put back in office a couple of years later.
There has been endless spin churned out by faceless ministerial "special advisers" to chosen media buddies culminating in the appalling emails of recent weeks. There were the allegations of cash for Honours and many of Tony Blair's chums finding themselves in the House of Lords. And now we have four members of the House of Lords allegedly accepting cash from lobbyists to secure changes to legislation and access to ministers.
Some MPs too have lucrative "consultancies", often former ministers now paid large sums by sectors of industry which they used to cover in their ministerial roles. And then, of course, we have the MPs' expenses row with highly paid ministers having ornamental fireplaces fitted to their "second" homes and having windows of posh London homes cleaned at a cost to the taxpayer of hundreds of pounds per year. (I may say I was astonished by all this and had no idea that such "expenses" could and have been claimed.)
Much of this is thankfully is now changing, or soon to be changed, but it should never have happened in the first place. The rules about outside interests for MPs, for second jobs and consultancies, and on the supposed expenses have been hopelessly feeble and inadequate. There has been too much secrecy too - a British disease.
Many of these issues I am glad to say have been investigated and reported on by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee of which I am proud to have been a member for the last six years. It really is a splendid committee with a superb group of Members from all parties and a brilliant Chairman in Dr Tony Wright MP. We have battled away year after year to try to clean up our politics at every level. Our messages have been loud and clear and are starting to be noticed but not all acted upon just yet.
This brings me to my last and most serious point. Tony Wright MP also chairs an All Party Parliamentary Group on constitutional affairs which looks at political issues more widely. It has been of serious concern that election turnouts in Britain are considerably lower than they are in other European countries. Tests of opinion also show that in Britain there is a degree of disillusion with politics which has grown since the 1980s. A recent comparative test showed Britain with around 57% confidence in "political outcomes", compared with well over 80% in some Scandinavian countries for example. In 2001 too the general election turnout was only 59%, with 41% of the people not voting at all. This was increased slightly in 2005 partly by the free availability of postal vote.
However, academic research by a University Group reporting to the Committee showed that the only factor which showed up strongly in this decline of voter turnout was the increasing similarity between the political parties. The people rightly have spotted that the leaders of all three major parties essentially agree on their economic philosophy and in effect are denying choice to the electorate.
I have long argued that for democracy to be really meaningful, the parties should be distinct and offer a real choice of very different policies. A genuine traditional Labour Party with a more traditional Conservative Party, what I call a one nation patriotic Conservative Party and perhaps a third party supporting neo-liberal free market capitalism would provide a much more meaningful choice for voters at election time. There are many socialist inside the Labour Party and many traditional Conservatives in Parliament too. That being said, the leaderships of all three parties seem still to be committed to free market, globalised capitalism even when it is visibly collapsing before our eyes.
In the 25 years after the Second World War, we got out economic policies right. Since those arrangements were abandoned we have had four major recessions, with the present one likely to be the worst for 80 years. Now is the time for the political parties to offer real choices on economic policy at election time and see voters flooding back to the polls.
Kelvin Hopkins MP
