To read some of the responses to my earlier comment on the MPs expenses scandal, you would think I had leapt to their defence. So let me repeat, the parliamentary expenses system is, indeed, corrupt and, like much else in our political system, needs to be reformed. My main point was that popular anger at the parlous state of our society in general is being displaced on to the issue of MPs expenses, which taken on its own, apart from the background against which it has emerged and compared with everything else that is wrong, from climate change to the great recession, is of slight importance. The speed with which almost everyone who has contributed to the discussion has moved from the specifics of expenses to the wider problems of deracinated parties, disproportional representation, cosy elite consensus and so on, suggests that they agree.
It is, however, important to keep a sense of proportion. Gerry Hassan speaks of the near "Italianisation" of British politics. By this, I presume he is referring to the Tangentopoli scandal that in 1992-3 that brought down the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties and led to a radical reform of the Italian electoral system (ironically, replacing the purest form of PR by what the Italians describe as "il sistema inglese", with 75 per cent of the seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate elected by the "first-past-the-post" method). This in turn transformed Italian politics into something closer to the relatively stable bipolar competition between coalitions of the centre-left and centre-right familiar elsewhere in Europe. It also paved the way for the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, with his media empire and his very own political party, the success of Ugo Bossi's Lega Nord and the rehabilitation of Italian fascism under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, now Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies.
In the sense that Britain has entered a period of political turmoil that seems likely to transform the political landscape, I agree with Gerry. But in other respects, the comparison with Italy in the 1990s is ill-judged. We are not, for example, plagued by the Mafia, which in 1992 carried out the spectacular murder of Judge Falcone, his wife and several bodyguards as they drove along the autostrada from the airport in Palermo to the centre of the city, and followed this up with other bomb outrages, targeted both on individuals and on historic buildings like the Uffizi art gallery in Florence, and intended to intimidate the public authorities and ordinary citizens alike.
And nothing that has emerged in the last week about the squalid and self-serving activities of some of our MPs comes anywhere near the Tangentopoli crisis that rocked Italy in 1992-3. "Tangentopoli", which might roughly be translated as "Bribesville" or "Wadsworth", originally referred specifically to Milan where the scandal broke, but soon came to refer to a system of kickbacks that pervaded the whole country and involved almost every political party in routine and thoroughly corrupt dealings with businesses, large and small, designed mainly to fill party coffers and embed clientelist politics, but incidentally lining personal pockets. The scale of corruption that was revealed by investigating magistrates over the next year or so make the pilfering of public funds by our MPs look decidedly petty.
Britain does, however, resemble Italy in one respect. Both nations do a very good line in hypocrisy. When Italy's investigating magistrates called for a return to public legality, they were cheered by the very same citizens who, in their own lives, were happy to engage in clientelism, nepotism and tax evasion. Much the same applies to many of those in this country who denounce MPs for abusing the expenses system. Journalists are notorious for their lavish expense accounts; solicitors, more exposed to temptation than most of us, are frequently convicted of embezzlement; even trade union officials have been known to make fraudulent expense claims or to use corporate credit cards to pay for personal purchases.
To judge by what has been revealed so far, the nest-feathering conducted by some of our MPs - though how large a proportion of the total they are remains to be seen - falls into the category of "white collar crime". It is, at most, a symptom of what is wrong with our society, not a cause. Indeed, I have my doubts about whether it is even a symptom, for the underlying cause of the problem is not the philosophy of neo-liberalism that has governed public policy these last thirty years, but the reluctance of successive Tory and Labour governments to implement the recommendations of the Salaries Review Body, together with the Freedom of Information Act, which has forced the details of the expense account system into the open. (The Daily Telegraph merely pre-empted publication by paying someone for a CD containing details of all relevant receipts, including some which had not formed the basis of expense claims).
Stuart Weir objects to the analogy I drew between the current bout of media muckraking and seventeenth-century witch-hunting. Of course, like fairies, Father Christmas and God, witches are, or were, imaginary beings. But imagination is a potent force in both personal and social life. When people generally, including clerics and rulers, believed in the existence of witches, they frequently attributed society's ills to the malign activities of women (and occasionally, men) who were in league with the devil. As Arthur Miller makes clear in his play, "The Crucible", from time to time the witch-finding mentality can take hold of modern societies, with fatal and tragic consequences. We need to keep our heads and beware of those who would have us governed by "sea-green incorruptibles".
