The cost of politics

Events in the past few days have brought together two distinct but connected issues over how Britain funds its politics.  The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) has recommended that MPs’ pay should be increased by £6,000 to £74,000 a year from 2016 with increases after that linked to average earnings across the economy.  This has been condemned by all the party leaders and by some MPs as incomprehensible increase at a time of austerity and, they argue, could damage Parliament’s reputation.  However, government does not have a veto and MPs will not get to vote in their pay rise.  Despite linking the pay increase to new pension arrangements, reduction in ‘resettlement payments’ if MPs lose their seats and tightening control over business costs and expenses, they are probably right but this not mean that Ipsa has got it wrong.  MPs’ pay has fallen over over  many years compared to other positions in the public sector and with MPs’ pay around the world.  Until Ipsa was set up in the wake of the expenses scandal as an independent body, MPs decided their own pay resulting in what Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy says was ‘a catalogue of fixes, fudges and failures to act’. 

The question of selecting parliamentary candidates at Falkirk and the suggested illegality of the actions of Unite has raised, yet again, the question of how political parties are funded.  In November 2011, the Committee of Standards in Public Life, chaired at the time by Sir Christopher Kelly, proposed a cap on individual donations of £10,000 but added that it would not be possible to exempt union donations so long as people were automatically affiliated to Labour without individuals having made a positive choice.  The Kelly Report also proposed that taxpayers should subsidise political parties for each vote they got.  This would remove the the rhetoric of funding with Labour attacking Tory donations from the rich and privileged and the Tories attacking Labour for being in hock to the unions.  Like MPs’ pay, this issue has rumbled on for years with both the Tories and Labour paying more heed to the rhetoric of funding than to whether public funding would remove the cash for honours, secret funding, dinners for donors and cash in envelopes.  The choice is a stark one: should political parties be funded entirely from taxation or should there be a free market for party funding with parties getting what they can from donors of whatever hue? 

Related to both these issues has been the revival of the question of whether MPs should have second jobs.  I must admit that, with the proviso that MPs declare their interests, I’ve always been in favour of this.  It isn’t that this gives MPs an understanding of the ‘real world’—it rarely does given the sort of jobs they do—but what it does do is give them an alternative perspective to the Westminster village.  We have been moving, almost inexorably, over the last forty years towards the development of the ‘professional politician’, someone who goes to university, then becomes a research assistant in Westminster and finally becomes an MP.  Their lives are political, their horizons political and their job aspirations political—narrow horizons, narrow interests and all-consuming ambitions.  They often become MPs in the mid- to late-twenties and , depending on the safeness of their constituencies, could be in the Commons for the next forty years and where their horizons narrow even further. 

So what’s the solution.  I’d double MPs’ pay and remove all the myriad expenses they claim--the exception would be second-class or economy-class travel to and from their constituencies—and publish their tax returns annually.  I would fund political parties out of taxation following Kelly’s suggestion that it should be based on the number of votes they garner.  Individuals and organisations could still make donations to political parties but these would be limited to £10,000 a year, would not be tax-deductible and would be paid to the political parties quarterly as well as monitored through Ipsa.    As far as second jobs are concerned, I’d like to see this extended—reduce Parliament to a four-day week so that MPs can do work experience on the other day.  Now that would be really popular—with the public at least!

Policing in Australia: a revisionist view

The smooth transition from a locally based ‘inefficient’ parish constable system to an efficient and professional body of law enforcers formed the basis of this ‘consensus’ view.[1] During the 1970s, historians using conflict and social control theories challenged the consensus view of widespread public acceptance. Concentrating on working-class responses, they argued that the ‘new police’ were resisted as an instrument of repression developed by the propertied classes. The ‘new police’, it was argued, were developed to destroy existing working-class culture for the purposes of imposing ‘alien values and an increasingly alien law” on the urban poor’.[2] Conflict historians argued that a preventive police system was developed in response to changes in the social and economic structure of English society. Robert Storch, the foremost proponent of this interpretation contended that, the formation ‘of the new police was a symptom of both a profound social change and deep rupture in class relations’.[3] The working-class, it was argued, questioned the legitimacy of the ‘new police’ and responded to their interference in a variety of ways ranging from subtle defiance to open and, on occasions, violent resistance.

More recently the level of support that the ‘new police’ received from the propertied classes has been questioned. Barbara Weinberger argues that opposition to the ‘new police’

...was part of a ‘rejectionist’ front ranging from Tory gentry to working class radicals against an increasing number of government measures seeking to regulate and control more and more aspects of productive and social life.[4]

Stanley Palmer also argues that conflict historians ‘have tended to ignore or down play the resistance within the elite to the establishment of a powerful police’ and have over-emphasised the threat from below.[5] While accepting that the introduction of the ‘new police’ involved a clash of moral standards, Palmer argues that it should not be exaggerated.[6] These more recent studies therefore suggest that opposition to the ‘new police’ was also, but not equally, a response of the English upper- and middle-classes.

The broad generalisations regarding public opposition or acceptance of the ‘new police’ have tended to obscure the subtleties in community responses. Opposition did exist, at times resulting from police enforcement of ‘unpopular edicts’ or attempts to ‘prevent mass meetings,’ although they were also used and supported by many people ‘as a fact of life’ in their preventive and social order capacities.[7] While these studies have concentrated predominantly on the public’s negative responses to the introduction of the ‘new police’, Stephen Inwood has considered how the police, administratively and functionally, dealt with the public. Too great a reliance on social control theories, Inwood argues, has led to over-simplification of the complex inter-relationships between the ‘new police’ and the wider community. While the ‘new police’ sought ‘to establish minimum standards of public order,’ it was not in their own interests ‘to provoke social conflict by aspiring to unattainable ideals’.[8] Inwood sees relations between the police and the public as based on a calculated pragmatism in which it was acknowledged that attempts to impose unpopular laws rigidly would ultimately meet with resistance resulting in ‘damage to the rule of law’.[9] Police administrators and the constables on their beats were required to tread carefully between the demands and expectations of ‘respectable’ society and the practical need for good relations with the working-class.[10]

While there has been a re-examination of public responses to the ‘new police’ and police responses to the public, these studies maintain that the police were, amongst particular groups, for varying reasons and at certain times, unpopular. Weinberger argues that this unpopularity stemmed from public

...suspicion of the police as an alien force outside the control of the community; resentment at police interference in attempting to regulate traditionally sanctioned behaviour; [and] objections to expense.[11]

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[1] King, H., ‘Some Aspects of Police Administration in New South Wales, 1825-1851’, Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 42, (4), (1956), p. 207.

[2] Ibid, Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888’, p. 153.

[3] Storch, R., ‘The Plague of the Blue Lotus: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 20, (1975), p. 62.

[4] Weinberger, B., ‘The Police and the Public in Mid-nineteenth-century Warwickshire’, in ibid, Bailey, V., (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, p. 66.

[5] Ibid, Storch R., ‘The Plague of the Blue Lotus: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, p. 61; ibid, Palmer S. Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850, p. 8.

[6] Storch, R., ‘Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850-1880’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 9, (4), (1976).

[7] Ibid, Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888’, p. 166; Ibid, Emsley, Clive, The English Police, pp. 5-6.

[8] Inwood, S., ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850’, London Journal, Vol. 15, (2), (1990), p. 144.

[9] Ibid, Inwood, S., ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850’, p. 134.

[10] Ibid, Inwood, S., ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850’, p. 131

[11] Ibid, Weinberger, B., ‘The Police and the Public in Mid-nineteenth-century Warwickshire’, p. 65.