THE MOTHER OF ALL BRITISH SCANDALS

By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
May 25, 2009

'DEMOCRACY," said Winston Churchill, "is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried from time to time." Well, the Mother of Parliaments in London -- where Churchill experienced historic victories and defeats -- is testing his theory to the limits.

Britain's biggest-ever political scandal began when The Daily Telegraph acquired a disk listing the expense-allowance claims of all "honorable members" (as they used to be called) of Parliament.


Gordon Brown: $8,000 was paid to his brother.

Details of what every MP had spent and claimed back from the taxpayer have been released day by day over the last two weeks -- and they are far more explosive than the gunpowder Guy Fawkes smuggled into the cellars under Parliament in 1605. In fact, they may cause something of a revolution in the way Parliament is run.

Sometimes, the sums were large, the benefits luxurious. A government minister, one of the richest men in the House of Commons, claimed $150,000 from the taxpayer to finance the mortgage on a "second home." (He already had seven.) A leading Tory repaired the moat around his stately home on expenses.

Sometimes, the claims were trivial and comically embarrassing: tampons, diapers, the repair of leaky pipes, ice-cube trays ($2.50), hair straighteners ($150) and Scotch eggs ($1.25). Taxpayers unknowingly rented two pornographic movies for the husband of another Cabinet minister. A Tory spokesman on "skills and education" hired an electrician to change his light bulbs. (Cost to the taxpayer? About $225.)

The worst claims bordered on the fraudulent -- and some stepped over that border. One MP claimed mortgage-interest payments of about $17,000 on a house that had no mortgage. Another took $55,000 in expenses on a necessary "second home" near Parliament, when his primary home was only a few hundred yards away.

Many MPs "flipped" -- i.e., changed their homes from primary to secondary in order to receive second-home allowances. One MP flipped three times and got more than $150,000 of public money.

Maybe the scandal's worst feature was how high and wide it went. Dubious or dodgy claims were made by Cabinet members, backbenchers and members of parties large and small.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed $8,000 to pay for his brother to clean his London apartment. My favorite example, though, is the case of Sinn Fein MPs from Northern Ireland who claimed about $750,000 in expenses to attend a Parliament that they refuse to attend on principle.

All of this represents a major crisis for British democracy. Will the Mother of Parliaments pass Churchill's test and prove less worse than all the other forms of government?

Well, MPs have taken some steps toward reforming the situation, forcing out the speaker -- the single most important parliamentary official -- for the first time in 300 years on the grounds that he and his colleagues connived in the greediness by approving the dodgy claims.

MPs also talk about placing Parliament under some external regulator. Brown says the body can't be run any more like "a gentleman's club." That's a pretty obvious attempt to suggest the scandal is really the fault of stuffy, old-fashioned, establishment, well, Tory types.

In fact, the problem is the lack of MPs with gentlemanly standards -- and the idea of an external regulator is bad and unconstitutional. A sovereign Parliament can't be run by some overmighty civil servant. But it can be "transparent." If MPs are compelled to disclose all income, the media will compel them to act like gentlemen.

What MPs haven't yet faced up to is that the voters want more than reform; they want the wholesale sacking of MPs found with their hands in the till -- and prison for those in up to their armpits.

If the main party leaders, Labor's Brown and the Conservative Party's David Cameron, don't respond to this bitter public mood by forcing many resignations, the voters will either vote for other parties or for independent "reformers" -- or not vote at all. So the party leaders will respond.

The result will be parties with many new MPs -- almost new parties, in fact -- committed to reforming not only Parliament but also the wider political system. In the least worst system of government, scandal equals reform.

John O'Sullivan, a former Post editorial- page editor, is a Hudson Institute fellow.