John Humphrys on Radio4's Today program interviewed Patrizio Nissirio (from Italian news agency Ansa) and Sebastian Berger (from German newspaper Rheinischer Merkur) to ask if the MPs' scandal had damaged the reputation of the "mother of parliaments". The plea in his voice was to say: "tell us that we're bad, but still much better than you lot", which, of course, is a way of proving how good the system is. Rather like the fringe anabaptists who had to commit terrible sins to prove that they knew they had been saved. One felt the palpable relief in the studio when Berger, the German journalist, said the abuses were "peanuts". Point proven.
But this fails to understand the nature of the MPs expenses scandal, which, in the UK context, really is a crime against legitmacy. Political crimes --- crimes against legitimacy --- are always relative to what provides the legitimacy of a political order. The esteem in which the UK parliament is held in Europe is because it is seen as being founded on honor, trust, a devotion to public service and gentlemanly behaviour.
To design a political system on that basis is unthinkable in France, Germany or Italy which take much more seriously David Hume's dictum that: " in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good."
Hume is not saying that everyone actually is governed by private interest in public life, but that the system of checks on those who have power should take a very pessimistic view of what power does to people---as Helena Kennedy asked during the Convention on Modern Liberty, "what is it in the water at the Home Office?". Indeed, the suggestion is that only by being properly pessimistic about the way power can be abused can we hope to create the sort of public sphere that is not dominated by private interest.
But the "mother of parliaments" was meant to be different. It was supposed to be able to perform that quasi-divine trick of being "self-regulated". The gentlemanly magic of honor was meant to be a better way than the Humean---a sort of ideal to which others might aspire and which Britain had uniquely "mothered".
This is the reason that hypocrisy is a political crime in Britain---more than anywhere else, the legitimacy of the political system is prefaced on trust, and hypocrisy is the demonstration that it is missing. So what is a crime against legitimacy in Britain need not be one in Germany or Italy. And this is also why Flippergate is a real crisis: it shows that the basis of legitmacy no longer holds. This is what turns it into a system crisis, not the BBC temptation to see just a series of corruptions so small that they can comfort us that they prove we have the best system.
