Jury Team Commentary

Former Ministerial Adviser in the Cabinet Office and founder of the Jury Team, Sir Paul Judge, writes to The Times editor to explain why events of the past week have laid the floor open-wide for a new breed of independent politicians

We should perhaps not be surprised by the consequences of our current political party system (leading article, “Roll of dishonour”, April 13th). Even in the early 18th century John Arbuthnot, mathematician and polymath, said: “All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies”, and soon afterwards Samuel Johnson stated that “faction seldom leaves a man honest, however it might find him”.

Our current politics are more damaged than even Arbuthnot or Johnson could have imagined. In the 18th century Parliament was a proud institution that held the monarch and his or her ministers to account.

Nowadays the current party political system has turned the UK’s Parliament into a talking shop that provides negligible scrutiny as it is peopled by career politicians who depend for their advancement on a small and increasingly distant set of oligarchical leaders.

The arrogance that has developed in the party cultures has led to personal behaviours and attitudes on issues such as expenses and conflicts of interest that would be unacceptable in any other walk of life. Politicians are seen as more interested in winning elections than in improving the lot of the people or the state of the nation. Many manipulate rather than respect their electorate.

MPs are now largely in Parliament as their primary career rather than to provide objective oversight of the Government. The party whipping system has generally reduced the House of Commons to a contented club that overwhelmingly accepts the Government’s proposals with little scrutiny. The Government is run by ministers appointed for party political reasons who have little background in their subject or in management and are, anyway, moved elsewhere before they can implement their proposals.

In this culture it is sadly not surprising that party officials, often with the encouragement of their political masters, become more obsessed with furthering the interests of their party than the interests of the nation and its people.

I founded the new political movement — the Jury Team — in order to allow us to move on from the sterile party political arguments by encouraging new independent people to enter Parliament. We need our ministers to be concentrating on the national rather than the party interest. We need MPs who are remunerated based on the well-developed Civil Service systems. They must have expenses that, like those for other employees, are wholly, necessarily and exclusively for the benefit of the organisation — will HM Revenue & Customs be investigating whether this is true for MPs? There should be an independent politicians complaints commission like the Independent Police Complaints Commission: why did Bob Quick have to resign for one inadvertent error when the Home Secretary has clearly flouted the spirit of the common and tax law on expenses but still declares this to be “fair and reasonable” with no redress?

We need to move on from the party system. As the former Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, said in 2004: “We should be breaking away from the party whip.” Until we do we should not be surprised that our politicians spend most of their efforts fighting each other in order to win elections rather than focusing on the concerns of the people who elected them.

Sir Paul Judge

(This letter is reprinted from The Times letters page of Friday 17th April 2009)

We can comfortably predict that the stream of expense stories will continue. But how does the Jury Team propose to solve this problem?

While it would be pleasant to be able to discuss something else today, I am finding it hard to ignore this weekend’s round of expense-abuse revelations. Apparently, the contagion may now have bedded down deep inside the Cabinet, infecting Alistair Darling and perhaps even the PM. I am determined to write on something constructive today, so instead of once more irately decrying the behaviour of our MPs and their gobsmacking justifications (“I haven’t broken any rules!”), I take now as a good time to recall the redress the Jury Team is seeking on this issue.

I think we have all come to realise that the current expenses system in Parliament would be deemed completely unacceptable in any charitable, commercial or public organisation. Nowhere else is it within the rules for employees to claim such substantial housing expenses when other more reasonable housing options are available. Nowhere else is it within the rules that such excessive personal purchases manifested in the now notorious “John Lewis List” can be charged to the company (UK plc). Nowhere else is it within the rules for employees to bring their relatives onto the office payroll with such ease, and with such little scrutiny. Furthermore, nowhere else is it the employee that chooses the terms by which their expenses are managed, and even by which they are scrutinised. To put it mildly, the MP expense regime is an anomaly in modern Britain.

The Jury Team solution is simple. Our second proposal recommends that MPs, ministers and their political staff be paid in line with civil service pay-scales. As a typical example of the current difference, if an MP is travelling abroad on Parliamentary business he may claim up to twice as much money in subsistence expenses as the civil service Class A standard subsistence rate. But why does an MP require twice as much money as a high ranking civil servant to ‘subsist’ while working abroad? The answer is far from obvious; yet, such apparently arbitrary distinctions between the civil servant and politician pay-scales abound on issues like pension provision, “resettlement grants” and travel expenses.

These distinctions in pay, if they are allowed to stand, need to be justified; however, we at the Jury Team believe they cannot be in a manner which the majority of the British public would find acceptable. Given the clarity and equity of the civil service pay-scale, and its accordance with the sense of public morality that has been so offended by the ongoing revelations regarding MP expenses, we believe this to be the neatest solution to the enduring MP expense anomaly.

Martin

“Rarely have so many politicians ducked and run for cover…utterly compelling” The Daily Telegraph

This clip neatly illustrates our current problems with the party whip. It’s from the soon to be released and highly controversial DVD, “the Ministry of Truth” with Dom Joly (a.k.a. The Professor). Bedevilled by legal issues, the Ministry have promised more clips/trailers as the lawyers come round to favour the public interest. More info at www.ministry-of-truth.net.