The fear of punishment rather than a sense of ethics is what guides lawmakers.
It is revealing that the three British MPs facing fraud charges are trying to claim parliamentary privilege and deny that the courts have any jurisdiction over them. Similarly, Lord Paul of Marylebone argues that the rules allowed him to claim £38,000 in overnight expenses by registering as his main home a flat in which he had never slept.
One notes that in neither instance is there any denial of the actual acts for which these public figures are being investigated. Not for a moment are the three MPs saying they did not charge substantial sums of money by making the claims that others might say were economical with the truth. Lord Paul doesn’t deny that he lives in London. But the Oxfordshire flat is available for his use because it is attached to a hotel he owns and is lived in by the hotel manager. The rules allow him to claim it as his home so that he can make out he has to travel to and from London and stay overnight in town every so often to attend the House of Lords.
A parallel that comes to mind is of those years in India when holiday travel allowance paid by employers was taxed unless one went to one’s home town. People discovered miraculous new homes then. If you worked in Calcutta and had a cousin in Trivandrum, you could show Trivandrum as your home. Then, no matter where you went on holiday, the equivalent of the Calcutta-Trivandrum return fare was free of tax.
There is an element of venality in every human being. Whether that element is suppressed or encouraged depends on the circumstances. It’s not surprising that it is encouraged in Britain where MPs were quietly advised when they demanded higher salaries that they should make it up in expenses instead. A pay rise would raise a public stink whereas inflated expenses could slip through unnoticed. When the present scandal erupted last year, one MP was caught stinging taxpayers for 16 bedsheets in seven weeks while another gave himself £13,000 as interest for a non-existent mortgage. Eyebrows were raised at Gordon Brown’s own payment of £6,500 to his brother for a shared cleaner.
Prominent Indian businessmen (Lord Billimoria, for instance, whose creditors lost £70 million when Cobra Beer went into a pre-pack administration last year) must feel very much at home in this new Britain. I was staying with a banker in London in the late nineties when a life peerage was bestowed on an Indian that neither my host nor I had heard of. We looked up all the biographical reference books in his home and bank but couldn’t find him. I mentioned the mystery lord to a British journalist and he directed me to the who’s who of Conservative party (then in power) donors. An explicit list isn’t published but the information is public knowledge. It is no secret, for instance, that Lord Paul has given some £400,000 to the Labour Party, apart from £45,000 to Brown’s leadership campaign.
Honours have always also been bestowed for services rendered. But it’s only in relatively recent times that those services have become almost entirely pecuniary. Lloyd George as prime minister institutionalised the commerce with slabs of payment for the different ranks with recognised middlemen who took a cut. A British honour hasn’t been one since then which may be one reason why Winston Churchill preferred to go down in history as the Great Commoner.
Margaret Thatcher persuaded Harold Macmillan to accept an earldom late in life. It added nothing to his stature but gave Lady Thatcher a useful precedent. However, good sense prevailed ultimately and instead of making herself a countess, she revived the dignity of a baronetcy for her husband, presumably so that her son could flaunt a handle to his name.
The other scam — of the “non-dom” British subject who escapes taxes by not being domiciled abroad — illustrates the same point of legality at the expense of morality. The Tory benefactor, Lord Ashcroft, is the principal offender but as jubilant Tories counter-attack, so is Lord Paul. He says he will comply fully if a new law bars non-doms from both Houses of Parliament. Of course he will. That’s the whole point of this sorry business. Skirting close to the wind, the makers and guardians of Britain’s law are guided not by any sense of ethics but by the fear of punishment. It’s less an indictment of persons than of a system that makes thieves of us all.
