Bringing the guardians to heel

Plato said fund the guardians out of taxpayers' money - but local taxpayer's money is what is needed

NOT even 2,000-year-dead Greek philosophers are safe from the fallout of the MPs’ expenses row. No sooner had Gordon Brown’s cleaning bill appeared than poor old Plato was dragged in, his thoughts on the restrictions of representatives quoted as guidance for today’s avaricious politicians. For those who missed this classical invocation, the great man’s Republic argued:

We also have to make sure the guardians do not become like sheep dogs that turn into wolves and abuse their power to harm their fellow citizens. Therefore the guardians will have no private property, they will live transparently, they will be provided for out of taxes, and they will live together communally…if they acquire private land, houses, and currency themselves, they’ll be household managers and farmers instead of guardians – hostile masters of the other citizens instead of their allies. They’ll spend their whole lives hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, more afraid of internal than external enemies, and they’ll hasten both themselves and the whole city to almost immediate ruin.

Sir Christopher Kelly and his team may feel that their services are no longer required, but not because the above is deemed comprehensive (though, to judge the tone of well-prepared pundits who quoted it, you might conclude such a thing). No, the Committee on Standards in Public Life would be fully entitled to assume that no scheme of allowances it can possibly devise can meet public expectations about the remuneration of representatives.

Even before the claims for dog food, dry rot repairs and cleaned moats emerged, the public appeared to take Plato’s strictures rather too much to heart. Some 16% of respondents in a News of the World poll last weekend opposed the payment of any expenses. Four in 10 opposed staff costs and nearly a third were against reimbursement for travel. Neither will you have to look hard to find those who unreflectively believe that MPs deserve no salary, while few of those prepared to countenance such extravagance would pick the current level or remuneration or above. And you can forget second homes: bunk beds in military-style barracks will do.

Many MPs actively resent this hostility, feeling that voters neither understand what elected representatives do, nor appreciate the burdens involved. Some have evidently concluded that since even a prudent lifestyle would glean no approval they may as well claim that which the rules allow. Of course, voters do not see the vast bulk of what their MP does. They do not watch select committees or second readings. They have no understanding of how their MP pursues an issue through the Whitehall system, or collars a minister in a division lobby. Beyond the odd glimpse in the local newspaper, the most meaningful contact between MP and constituent will be via a surgery visit or exchange of correspondence, and often the outcome of that is less than satisfactory. Too many people who have tried to contact their MP find the experience frustrating; constituency office phones go straight to voicemail and emails generate unfriendly auto responses. Though they would never admit it, many MPs find casework dispiriting and unrewarding, bracketed between ungrateful constituents and inflexible bureaucrats.

In short, the things that MPs enjoy about their jobs are those that their constituents seldom see and do not rate, while what MPs see of many of their constituents is rarely enjoyable. In this dangerous stand-off, MPs feel little compulsion to minimise their expenses, and voters, placing little value in the political class, are disinclined to commit public resources to its upkeep.

So is there a solution, or are we merely doomed to see an ever widening gulf between the governed and the governors? It would surely help if MPs had greater latitude and incentive to speak up for those they represent. Last week, 23 Welsh Labour MPs voted against a Parliamentary motion to relax restrictions on the settlement of Gurkhas in the UK. How many would have done so had they not been instructed? How would voters respond to MPs who appear to place their consciences before their parties more often?

Parliamentary discipline reflects an age of rigid and deep partisanship that no longer exists, but the grip of parties has been maintained by a centralised system with immense powers of patronage within Westminster, and control over the purse strings elsewhere. The solution to the former is a formal separation of legislature and executive, and there is little chance of that happening any time soon. But there may be more realistic reform in the latter.

Alongside the now raging inflammation that is MPs’ expenses still exists the festering sore of party funding. Each party has manoeuvred to build in an advantage for itself, but none has suggested the one change that could kill two birds with one stone. Quite simply, MPs’ should be allowed to spend on their own election campaigns only that which they raise from their own electors. In a stroke it would make MPs vastly more responsive to their local area and would provide an equitable system of funding. Caps could still exist on large donors, to stop a rich local businessman or trade union buying an election, and parties centrally could be allowed a modest budget for national campaigns. But the bulk would come from local donors, whom MPs would need to impress throughout their term of office.

The second reform would be to make MPs more accountable for their expenses by making such costs payable though a Council Tax precept, alongside those for the police and fire services. An annually published and locally payable levy, broken down into sub-headings, would act as the best constraint on those who might otherwise be tempted to pay a visit to their local John Lewis.

Through these two changes, the vast bulk of costs associated with MPs (and perhaps also AMs) would be met within the constituency, strengthening a chain of accountability that has become dangerously eroded. It would not ban MPs from holding private property or force them to live together as Plato urged, but then his concern was one of the guardians turning from sheep dogs into wolves. In this age it is the flock that have the savage intent, and who one way or another will assert their control. If the guardians want to save themselves they will come swiftly to heel.