Term limits for MPs – will that stem the flood of scandal?

Politicians are extraordinary people. There’s almost nothing they can’t do. They can break, with impunity, laws that govern the rest of us. They can take our money, commit fraud, tell lies, make libelous statements and break judicial injunctions, all without fear of prosecution. They can earn thousands of pounds on top of the salaries we pay them by telling businesses how to influence ministers and select committees. Or by helping them get new laws in place, or get around the old ones. That’s a bit like a serving police officer advising a burglar – for cash – of the best way to bypass window locks.
Even on those occasions where politicians go just a little too far and end up in prison, well, they can always come back. An MP only absolutely loses the right to sit in the Commons if she or he is sent to jail for 12 months or more; a peer can serve a life sentence for murder and still return to the Lords.
No wonder politicians think they’re so special. It’s because they are. It’s because Parliament allows them to be. And I’m not even talking about those who take cash for asking questions in the House; or the expenses cheats and fraudsters; or those who will introduce you to a useful minister in exchange for a wad of fifties.
Look at Tim Yeo, the now-former chair of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. He’s stepped down as chairman because there are suggestions – which he denies – that he advised an executive appearing before his committee on how to answer the questions posed by MPs. If he did, he’s seriously broken the rules. But putting that aside, it doesn’t otherwise matter what companies he’s been advising on climate change; and it doesn’t matter which boards he’s paid thousands to sit on. What matters is that Parliament lets him. So long as Yeo and other MPs ‘declare’ their earnings in a sketchy register of their business interests, everything’s hunky dory as far as the Parliamentary authorities are concerned.
But it isn’t okay. Not anymore.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to MP Patrick Mercer, or the peers embroiled in the latest cash-for-access scandal. But I think the worst has already happened for all of them. Mercer has resigned the whip and will stand down at the next election. The three Lords may be obliged to remain on the cross-benches indefinitely. So what? They’ll still be drawing their expenses.
I still wonder – four years on – about those MPs caught up in the expenses scandal. Did they believe, as they lied on forms, or ‘flipped’ their homes, or put in claims for duck-houses that they were entitled to do so? Were they, as so many claimed, ‘encouraged’ to over-claim, or cheat, by the House authorities?
Of course, most politicians aren’t corrupt. But a disquieting number do seem to end up with, at least, a bloated sense of entitlement. The early, enthusiastic convictions fade as they settle, term after term, into the rarefied world of Westminster. Is it a co-incidence that the worse expense cheats were MPs in safe seats, who’d been in the Commons for years?
Four years ago, Trevor Phillips, the then-head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, suggested term limits for MPs. His argument was that it would help achieve equal representation, bringing more women and ethnic minorities into Parliament.
The idea was greeted with apathy, although a few commentators thought the notion undemocratic, or unworkable. In fact it’s neither – especially now that we have fixed term parliaments.
If term limits help make Parliament more diverse, that can only be a good thing. If it also sweeps out complacency and entitlement, even better.
But allowing MPs to have outside business interests that earn them thousands of pounds will inevitably corrupt, or at least compromise, even the best of them. No one can dance to two tunes, or please two bosses. An MP’s salary is already £66,396 a year. On top of that, she or he receives expenses covering their office costs, staffing, homes in London and their constituency, and travel costs. In the real world, the average wage comes in at £26,664 a year.
Allowing MPs to earn – if they’re wily enough – thousands of pounds on the side because of who they might bump into in the Commons’ subsidised tearoom suddenly doesn’t look that reasonable, does it?
As Prime Minister David Cameron used to say: “We can’t go on like this”.