Scandal fatigue
Here’s a prediction: The Sunday Times’ big ‘MPs for hire’ scandal is going to be a damp squib. No one’s going to care. Sure, it’ll be all over the news for a few days, and Labour might take a temporary hit in the polls, but in the long term the effect will be zilch. The public profile of MPs literally can’t get any worse than it is at the moment anyway. The papers could reveal tomorrow that Alistair Darling feasts on human flesh in weekly satanic rituals and most people’s reaction would still most likely be ‘What do you expect? They’re probably all at it.’
If this is how things pan out it would certainly be understandable. The greed and venality of (a large number of) MPs is well-established already thanks to the expenses scandal; the Sunday Times investigation hardly adds much to that. But this story isn’t just about greed. It’s also about the fact that senior politicians are willing and able to use their influence to help companies manipulate the legislative system to their advantage, and that’s a far more serious issue than mere greed. Stephen Byers claimed to have helped National Express get out of an unprofitable multimillion pound rail contract and to have amended food labelling regulations at the behest of Tesco. Corporations manipulating the political system to make things easier for themselves isn’t a new phenomenon either, but it matters a hell of a lot more. MPs milking the expenses system has certainly done a lot to destroy what little public faith remained in our political system, but it doesn’t actually undermine the democratic process itself. MPs taking money from corporate lobbyists and doing their bidding, on the other hand, does exactly this.
We’re so hung up on the value of personal integrity as a society that I think we sometimes forget there are worse things than hypocrisy. Politics is about far more than putting your own house in order, (a point made by Reuben a few months back), and as such corruption that affects how our laws are made is a lot more damaging than moat-cleaning or a couple of softcore porn films. Real world consequences are what matter, not whose snout is deepest in the trough.
