Miliband’s hands are clean, but the Rifkind and Straw sting may still hurt

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/24/miliband-clean-rifkind-straw-sting-lobbying

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Another sting, another hammer blow to the reputation of politicians. How boneheaded and brainless can a pair of ex-foreign secretaries be, if they can’t smell a rat in a bogus Chinese company? But greed and flattery overpower the common sense of even those seasoned in wily diplomacy.

This adds fuel to the anti-politics fires burning up trust in the old parties, to the unalloyed glee of Ukip, the Greens, the SNP and any Westminster outsider. Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind made matters worse in BBC Radio 4 Today interviews that were imbued with Westminster insiderdom, trapped in that vacuum between the rulers and ruled.

What they said in their defence might receive sympathetic nods in a Commons bar or the Carlton Club, but abject contrition would have been wiser. Protesting that an MP’s pay of £67,000 isn’t enough was suicidal, when Straw charges £5,000 a day and Rifkind £5,000-£8,000 for half a day – more than trebling his parliamentary salary.

Expectations of MPs have changed since this pair were first elected. Back then, Straw often recalls, MPs rarely visited their constituencies; now woe betide any not there every weekend. Back then outside earnings went unremarked; now they are ripe for hostile scrutiny. Pious talk of the need for MPs to have worldly experience invites snorts of derision: a doctor or entrepreneur might be welcome, but not MPs taking cash for access.

Both men are suspended from their parties and shamed permanently, even if it emerges that they broke no rules. Rifkind was once chair of the standards and privileges committee, while Straw had opined on a previous case that the “spirit, not the letter” of the rules was what mattered.

A feeding frenzy against politicians was set off by the expenses scandal with those unforgettable moats and duck houses. Every MP should be ultra wary of the firestorm that greets any “peccadillo”, as Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional guru, called this episode when I spoke to him on Monday. What he means, he explains, is that these MPs’ extra thousands are chicken feed compared with the grand larceny all around us. For real economy-shaking, society-crumbling behaviour look at the banks, the FTSE chief executive pay bonanza, or the £100bn stolen from the Treasury in tax-dodging by the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and Google.

True, but beside the point. Those panjandrums and plutocrats are invisible to the public, beyond comprehension in their glass-towered seclusion, so they don’t arouse the same personal venom as those closer to the public eye. It’s a perverse symptom of gross inequality that people turn against their own public servants as the most visible of the highly paid elite they resent. An MP earning two-and-a-half times average pay arouses more wrath than the strange accounts of HSBC’s Stuart Gulliver, whom no one’s heard of.

Unfair, but the expectation now is that MPs and public officials should be priest-like in their service to the people: they should be paid less than professionals and business people. Many members of the press, often far better paid than MPs or civil servants, are motivated by political loathing of the public sector as they pursue any council chief executive or school or hospital head whose salary inches above the notional pay of the prime minister – a bad benchmark, ignoring his perks and the fortune he will earn later.

For reconomy-shaking behaviour look at the £100bn in tax-dodging by the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and Google

Ed Miliband emerges from this with the cleanest hands. He called long ago for MPs to be banned from directorships and consultancies, and for a strict cap on extra earnings. David Cameron refuses, though YouGov reports that approaching 60% of voters are against MPs having second jobs. Miliband has a good record on demanding a stop to corrupt political donations, unilaterally risking Labour’s funding base by insisting that all trade union donations must come from individual members opting in.

Straw is not his man: he’s the foreign secretary who took the country to a war in Iraq that Miliband repudiated. Yesterday’s men are the former Labour ministers caught in stings – Geoff Hoon and Stephen Byers (Patricia Hewitt was exonerated). Ex-ministers selling their wares to companies with interests in the ministries that they had run – John Reid, John Hutton and Alan Milburn – are all from the Blair era.

As for Tony Blair’s bizarre sabotage of his own good reputation by taking millions from repellent potentates, Labour hopes that is more self-harming than damaging to his old party. None of this was on Miliband’s watch. The upside of attacks on him as “anti-business” is that he is less contaminated when business is seen as the corrupter of politicians. Nonetheless, the danger is that a general sense of Westminster sleaze sticks to all.

Cameron deserves to take a hit for his cavalier attitude towards doubtful donations: they may be legal, but they stink when hedge funders parade into his fundraising balls. He once warned that lobbying was “the next great scandal waiting to happen”, but his Lobbying Act was a sham: only 1% of lobbying is caught by it. Instead, the true target turned out to be charities who now feel the chill of the acts’s ban on campaigning in the year before an election, limiting what they can spend on issues such as climate change, child poverty, fracking, hunting or housing.

The act certainly doesn’t stop Lynton Crosby’s tobacco and alcohol lobbying firm inhabiting the heart of government. After the fall of Murdoch’s man Andy Coulson, Cameron might have become more circumspect. But lobbying remains unreformed. Cameron’s indifference to how these things look is a curious blind spot for one trained in public relations.

Labour plans a clampdown on lobbying. But that’s only part of a clean-up of politics with a constitutional convention to decide on devolution of power, electoral systems and the funding of parties – the UK gives 10 times less state funding to politics than the EU average, at just 36p per voter. Voters may resist state funding, but scandals will persist without it. However, cash for lobbying is easy and popular to remedy: just ban it.

Miliband is bidding to emerge from this as Mr Clean – but the fear is that “they’re all the same” and “all snouts in the same trough” may be the only messages alienated voters glean from yet another Westminster shocker.