It's worth reading the editorial in today's Mail. It's a furious denunciation of a venal political class that has given up on even the pretence of reforming Parliament. It's as if the last few months of flipping, moats and duck houses have taught us nothing, with potentially disastorous implications for our democracy, as the Mail points out. The Parliamentary Standards Bill MPs rushed through in time for their 82-day holiday creates an independent body to monitor expenses but it will be up to Parliament itself to consider any punishment. The plans for a legally binding Code of Conduct were removed from the Bill by MPs with the connivance of Jack Straw.
The parallel with the failure to properly reform the banking system is striking. Self-regulation is still the watchword. Any threat of serious sanction for lying and corruption has been carefully and deliberately avoided. Like the bankers they so obediently service, politicians will return to business as usual at the earliest possible opportunity. The comfortable victory of Chloe Smith in Norwich North today only confirms this sense. The Tory landslide it heralds makes the prospect of serious democratising change less and less likely by the day. Smith, the first Tory MP to have come of voting age under New Labour, seems friendly and she certainly looks good on TV but listen to what she has to say and she seems capable of little more than Cameronian doublespeak. She may have defeated Labour in the polls, but her arrival confirms the victory of Blairism.
This brings me to a fascinating report on politicians I was given by a friend who works for a PR company (I'll link to it if I can find it). It shows the "top" PPCs for each party i.e those that are most likely to win their seats. There is little to tell the Labour and the Tory ones apart. Nearly all of them seem to have spent their lives in politics. Of the 7 Labour ones, at least 5 went to Oxford (it could be more - it doesn't say where the others went). Of those 5, three studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the same subject as Cameron and Miliband (to name but two possible future PMs). I hope to do a proper analysis of the report soon because it's extremely enlightening. I mention it here because it shows how the problem of an elite, detached and professionalised political class - which the Mail, especially Peter Oborne, does such a great job highlighting - is going to get much worse following the next election when a new wave of party clones is brought in. Relying on politicans to give us an open responsive democracy really does seem a lost cause.
In her victory speech, Smith claimed she will be as "honest" as Ian Gibson. As honest, that is, as an MP who claimed thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money for a "second home" inhabited by his daughter which he then sold to her at knock down rate. Plus ca change, eh?
