- Guy Aitchison is a contributing editor at openDemocracy and writes regularly for its UK blog, OurKingdom -

The Labour politician and intellectual Richard Crossman once described the British constitution, with a sovereign Parliament at its centre, as a “rock” against periodic “waves of popular emotion”.

As MPs reflect on the recent expenses scandal during their 82-day summer break, many will be tempted to congratulate themselves for once again weathering the storm of public outrage.

At the height of the crisis the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition were competing with each other to propose ever-more radical constitutional solutions to the catastrophic loss of trust precipitated by the Telegraph’s revelations of MPs’ shameless, and in many cases fraudulent, abuse of taxpayers’ money. Gordon Brown called for “a written constitution”, David Cameron for giving “power to the powerless” and Nick Clegg, whose party has long been calling for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system, demanded change in “100 days”.

The impulse of all three party leaders to respond to the furore with promises of democratic reform showed they understood public anger was about more than simply duck houses, moats, dry rot, and other abuses of expenses, however petty or extravagant: it was symptomatic of a much deeper disconnect between the public and politicians that has been building for years.

The problem comes from an over-centralised and antiquated British state whose monarchical constitution is totally unsuited to represent the interests of a modern pluralist society. Parliament itself is a creature of the executive that has permitted the systematic erosion of rights and freedoms under a barrage of illiberal legislation and failed to prevent disastrous decisions like the Iraq war.

Our absurdly unjust electoral system means that, when the Prime Minister exercises his royal power to call an election, the effective choice of voters is confined to two parties born out of ancient class antagonisms but now purged of ideology by party managers chasing “floating voters” in the handful of marginal constituencies that determine who wins.

Local government meanwhile lacks independence or any meaningful power with 90% of its funding coming from the centre. In these circumstances it’s no wonder the public feels alienated and cut off from the political system with so many choosing not to vote (40% in recent general elections).

But now that the two main party leaders have shown signs they understand the problem, where is the revolution we’ve been promised? Unfortunately, there’s every indication that much of what was said in the heat of the crisis was mere rhetoric aimed at appeasing angry voters until the whole thing blows over.

Cameron has quietly dropped his earlier talk of reform emphasising the victory of his party in a general election as the best solution to the democratic crisis. The comfortable victory of the Tories in the recent by-election in Norwich North will only strengthen defenders of the status quo within his party, despite the abysmal 45% turnout.

The Prime Minister, meanwhile, served up a pathetic Constitutional Reform Bill in the last few days of Parliament which makes a few tweaks to the House of Lords without taking us much further towards a democratic second chamber. There’s apparently talk from inside Number 10 of a possible referendum on the voting system at the next election, but the only alternative to first-past-the-post being muted is the unproportional AV system which would do nothing to ensure the seats a party has fairly reflects the number of votes it receives.

It’s almost impossible to feel inspired by such weak proposals for reform aimed at party advantage and offered in a controlling and calculating spirit without popular involvement. It’s clear that if we’re going to seize the political moment opened up by the expenses crisis and secure the kind of modern constitutional democracy polls consistently show voters want then we cannot rely on politicians to do this for us.

What is needed is a popular force of opinion outside Parliament demanding change at the next election. This means citizens meeting together in living rooms, pubs and town-halls across the country to discuss the kind of democracy we want before joining together independently of parties, corporate media and the formal structures of political power, to pressure parties and candidates at the next election.

In the coming weeks the Rowntree Trusts will be launching an open politics network that aims to help galvanise such a movement. It will assist citizens to organise, draw up and articulate a clear demand for change at the next election, reinforced by the involvement of thousands across the country. If it succeeds, we, the people, will exercise a moral hold over the next Parliament and make real change happen. The alternative is a return to business as usual with an angry and helpless electorate even more alienated from a political system they feel does not represent them - and politicians smug and insulated in their “rock”.

Probity is Britain's new watchword. After filleting the bankers over their salaries and bonuses and excoriating MPs for fiddling their expenses we've now turned our attention to the antics of journalists.

The News of the World (NOTW) has frequently embarrassed politicians, vicars, footballers and celebrities, but the Sunday red-top is currently itself the target of an expose by a broadsheet.

According to a report in The Guardian, reporters at the "News of the Screws" worked with private investigators to access "two or three thousand" private mobile phones belonging to celebrities, MPs and public figures.

Those private investigators apparently intercepted voicemail messages and gained access to personal data such as itemised phone bills and bank statements.

But  police have said they have no plans to reopen a 2005 investigation that led to the jailing of two men, News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and a private investigator, for hacking into the phones of staff working for the royal family.

That raises the question as to whether that decision should be taken by an independent body rather than a policeman choosing not to rake over the coals of a fellow copper's report.

While the police ponder, the Press Complaints Commission has once again proved to a be a less than an effective regulator.

Rupert Murdoch has "nothing to say at all" on the story, while former NOTW editor Andy Coulson, who is now the Conservative Party communications chief apparently knew nothing. Funny how journalists and ex-journalists get all tongue-tied when they are being asked to give answers rather than the other way round.

The Daily Telegraph has been criticised for paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for buying information that allowed it to gain access to MPs' expenses claims, but at least the right-wing broadsheet could claim a public interest defence.

Not so the alleged NOTW fishing operation of celebrity tittle-tattle, which tells us much about the agenda of many of our national newspapers.

A committee of MPs is due to re-examine the phone-hacking scandal, but maybe Britain's newspaper reading public could take the matter into their own hands. On Merseyside, 20 years after the Hillsborough stadium disaster, nobody buys the Sun newspaper over the way the tabloid covered the death of 96 football fans.

That's probably an idiot's utopian idea, so in the meantime how should Britain regulate its press? And under what circumstances is electronic surveillance permissable?

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

“All political careers end in failure,” the late British Conservative Enoch Powell famously said. And perhaps all political cycles end in scandal.

The outcry in Britain over politicians’ expenses that has claimed ministerial scalps and threatens the survival in office of Prime Minister Gordon Brown reflects more than just anger over taxpayer-funded duck houses.

Parliamentarians have become scapegoats for a deeper malaise combining the twilight of the Labour Party’s long reign, the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and the shaming of the City of London’s financial titans.

This is not to belittle abuses of the public purse by individual lawmakers. But they do not fully explain the nervous breakdown that has gripped Britain in the last month.

Seen from abroad, many Britons seem to feel their country has been politically, financially and morally devalued. It is easier to vent frustration at MPs having their moats or tennis courts cleaned at public expense than to accept that Britain has been on a binge for a decade and faces a long, costly hangover.

Bits are falling off Gordon Brown’s fag-end government in the same way that befell John Major’s hapless last Conservative cabinet in the 1990s and James Callaghan’s washed-up minority Labour administration in the 1970s.

Parties that stay long enough in power get lazy, sleazy and accident-prone. Remember the political funding scandals that tainted the sunset years of Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in France, and of Helmut Kohl in Germany. Or the “back to basics” sex scandals and bonfire of mad cows that did for Major.

What makes the current mood in Britain particularly toxic is the cocktail of political brown-out and economic distress.

In the last 18 months, house prices have tumbled in a country where home-ownership is central to wealth. The pound has lost a quarter of its value against the euro, as Britons discover when they go abroad. Banks have been nationalised or propped up by the state. Unemployment has surged. Government debt has gone through the roof and taxes are rising.

Britons who own homes, shares and/or private pension savings are worth less and face an enormous bill for the clean-up. Many home-buyers who joined the party late have “negative equity” — they owe more in mortgage than their house is now worth. Consumers are groaning under unsustainable debts.

There is also a dawning awareness that after 25 years of deregulation and fast fortunes, Britain is going to have to do something other than financial capitalism to earn an honest living in the coming years.

Financial Times economic commentator Martin Wolf put it starkly when he wrote that the UK had “a strong comparative advantage in the world’s most irresponsible industry” and needed to diversify away from finance. The bill for rescuing banks will be comparable to the fiscal costs of a big war, he said.

Such introspection does not come easily to a proud old nation fond of lecturing foreigners, especially continental Europeans, on how to run their economies.

The French, Germans and Italians can be forgiven a smirk of “schadenfreude” (pleasure at others’ misfortune) after years of being hectored — not least by Gordon Brown — about economic reform, deregulating financial services and labour markets, privatising pensions and modernising the welfare state. But they should not feel too smug, since most are facing an even deeper recession than Britain this year.

Now that politicians have replaced bankers as public hate figures, it is safer for British party leaders to outbid each other with proposals for reforming parliament than to tell the public the ugly truth. Whoever wins the next election, most Britons will earn less, pay more tax, retire later on a smaller pension and enjoy less public spending on schools, hospitals and transport.

The bankers will cost Britons far more than the politicians. It will make the cost of removing dry rot and changing chandeliers in MPs’ second homes look like small change.
(editing by David Evans)

- Gavin MacFadyen is Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, a non-profit training charity, who advance education for, and public understanding of investigative journalism. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Whether the press, or even the police (if Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin has his way) succeed in unmasking the person who leaked MPs’ expense details to the Daily Telegraph, one thing which remains troubling in this story is the alleged exchange of money for those 1.2 million-or-so damning documents.

Journalist Heather Brooke, whose five-year struggle to obtain details on MPs’ expenses set this story running in the first place, described last week a “black market” created by the parliamentary culture of secrecy around this topic.

Disclosure of these documents has been delayed and delayed under Freedom of Information legislation, and was due for publication in late summer (albeit in redacted, and it is argued, selective form), before the Telegraph swooped.

There has been some speculation about how much (if anything) a story like this might have cost the newspaper but in any case, this story isn’t taking place in a vacuum.

Across the Web there are no shortage of Websites soliciting material from those who would blow the whistle on wrongdoing – who offer to line the pockets handsomely, should an exclusive be considered sufficiently newsworthy.

Regardless of the ethical rights and wrongs of “cheque-book journalism”, the existence of a black market in public interest information is a function of the lack of adequate legal protection for whistleblowers in the UK. And this in turn does violence to our civic life, and the fundamental principals of our democracy.

Most people would argue that doing your duty in the public interest should be reward enough. While this is a laudable notion, the truth of the matter is that often whistleblowers in the UK suffer career-threatening and life-changing consequences as a result of disclosure.

While we have legislation in this area, in the form of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, there is no obligation within this legislation, upon employers (or professional bodies) to implement an internal whistle-blowing procedure. Moreover, the provisions of the Act are complicated, with some restraints on external disclosure.

So what happens in practice when people blow the whistle on issues of serious public interest?

Last month, Margaret Haywood, a nurse who filmed abuse of patients at a Sussex hospital for a BBC Panorama documentary (broadcast in 2005), was struck off the Nursing and Midwifery Council. It was argued that she had breached the confidentiality of the patients whose interests she was serving, by filming without consent.

Likewise, back in 2007, David Keogh and Leo O’Connor were convicted, having tried to blow the whistle on conversations between former Prime Minister Tony Blair and president George W. Bush concerning the battle of Falluja in Iraq – information which the prosecution admitted at the time contained no “actual damage” to national security.

Present legislation is clearly insufficient to deal with the realities of whistle blowing in practice, as is evident in the lack of support available to many who seek to serve wider society by their disclosures.

Yet whistleblowers are a fundamental element in the protection of the public interest.

Without adequate support, abuse of power (from the fiddling of expenses, to the manufacture of reasons for waging war), threatens to constrain our freedoms yet further.

- Justin Fisher is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Magna Carta Institute at Brunel University. The opinions expressed are his own. -

The expenses crisis is well and truly engulfing Westminster, with equal anticipation and dread about future revelations. Labour was quite reasonably aggrieved that the initial stories all seemed to be about their MPs.

Perhaps this was naive – governing parties are obviously more interesting than their rivals – but the fear was that this crisis would be indelibly linked with Labour and Labour alone. Yet perhaps they needn’t have worried – the Telegraph was keeping its powder dry and today’s stories about some Conservative MPs are possibly even more damaging.

Claiming for a bathplug may raise a titter and seem petty – claiming for repairs to a swimming pool is of a wholly different order – at least as far as the public is concerned.

But before we rush to condemn all MPs, or insist that they must live like paupers in future, let’s step back a little. It is clear that some MPs have made extortionate claims. These claims were apparently within the rules, but they do appear to any reasonable person to have gone beyond the bounds of moral acceptability. Equally, the apparent practice of “flipping” second homes to maximise allowances is unacceptable and should not have been permitted.

But those examples should not be used to damn all MPs. The level of expenses claimed by most MPs may well seem extraordinary to the general public. But the job of an MP is itself extraordinary. MPs are expected to work both at Westminster and in their constituencies, which for many MPs is beyond a reasonable commute.

In fact, MPs are much better these days at serving constituents’ needs – they deal with far more issues in their constituencies than was previously the case. All of that costs money and we are better served for it. MPs who live beyond a reasonable commute to Westminster require a second home, and it is not unreasonable that they should be given some financial support. And, of course, second homes need things like bathplugs – just like first homes do.

But this is a crisis nevertheless, and Labour is worried. But it doesn’t, I think, necessarily mark the death knell for New Labour, though there may be some casualties. First, Labour is likely to perform poorly in next month’s elections. But it was going to do badly anyway. Second, the difference between these sleaze allegations and those of the 1990s is that they affect both main parties, not just the one.

However unfairly, the most recent revelations may lead voters to think that “they’re all as bad as each other”. That’s bad news for the Conservatives, but better news (at least temporarily) for the smaller parties. Third, with a general election now a year away, there are signs that the worst of the recession may be over (and more importantly, there are signs that people perceive things to be getting better). That’s good news for the government.

But things are looking far less good for Gordon Brown. There are some very public stirrings of revolt against his leadership, which will be amplified after the June elections if Labour performs as badly as expected. So, the irony is that Labour could be led into the next election in reasonable position following an upturn in perceptions of the economy. But it may not be led by the man who feels he deserves the credit, but by another key figure in the New Labour project.

- John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship and former editor of the New Statesman. His new book, “Freedom for Sale”, will be published by Simon and Schuster in September. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Squalid is the adjective that best describes the approach of our not-so-honourable members of parliament to their own expenses. But what about the journalism that has helped to all but destroy what remaining trust the public had in its elected representatives?

Some legitimate questions have been raised about the tactics deployed by the Daily Telegraph in buying in the information, apparently a CD from a mole inside parliament which had been touted around newspapers for months.

Cheque-book journalism is a time-honoured tactic of British newspapers, often revealing tawdry stories about celebrities that have little to do with free expression and more to do with prying into people’s private lives.

But in this instance, the Telegraph has surely acted in the public interest. Indeed, all the facts surrounding the case suggest that the newspaper has – far from undermining our democracy – helped to enhance it.

MPs, it should be remembered, fought tooth and nail to try to exempt themselves and the details of their 88-pence bath plugs and black glittered toilet seats from the public gaze. When they forced to publish the information, they sought to time the release to coincide with the summer holidays. Then, instead of dealing with the issues in hand, the stock response of some parliamentary authorities was to call in the police to investigate wrongdoing and to attempt to change the rules by ensuring the expenses will not be published in future.

My critique of the British press is somewhat different to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s who, in one of his valedictory speeches as prime minister, described the British media as “feral”. Certainly there are many valid concerns around standards, around accountability (journalists’ expenses chits would also make for amusing reading), and around attention spans in the 24-hour news culture.
But by far the worst trait of the modern-day profession is a lack of fearless investigation.

One former reporter turned government press officer once told me how shocked he was, when moving across into the state sector, how little the public actually knew about what was being done in their name. Editors are frightened by the UK’s draconian libel laws; they are concerned about their day-to-day budgets, and they are interested mainly in “quick hits” rather than difficult holding the powerful to account.

And what of the media’s purported role as an “advocate of democracy”? I have heard this one thrown around in recent days. This school of thought argues that journalism has a “responsibility” to “promote” our democratic norms.

No it does not. It must act professionally, but one of its main preoccupations should be putting into the public domain information that the authorities would rather people do not know. It is then for readers or viewers to draw their own conclusions about the quality of our public representatives. Respect is not an entitlement. It is a reward for principle, duty – and good behaviour.