HOW CAN WE REBUILD DEMOCRACY? FOUR VIEWS There's no need to change

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 24, 2009 | by JAMES CUSICK

THE US congressman, Dick Armey, once remarked that three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves and politicians. All three, he advised, needed supervision.

Politicians never seem to let historians down when it comes to the scale of reform required after each "rotten" era has thrown up its special signature. Similarly, criminals fi nd clever ways to evade the law, and then the law eventually catches up.

But what you don't find after a spectacular robbery or the unearthing of a massive fraud scheme, are calls to change the currency, demands for the banking system to be overhauled, cries for monetary systems to be re-fashioned. Instead there's a reality based on the fact that people get caught, need to be punished, and the punishment will somehow act as a deterrent. Sure, the banks will check the locks on their new safes, maybe order some new theft- proof models, and their vigilance will be improved. The focus of the wrongdoing however remains on those who took the money, not how or why the "system" allowed them to walk into the bank and take cash they knew wasn't rightly theirs to take.

Yet after more than two weeks of expenses revelations from row upon row of dishonourable members of our parliament, there's a serious danger that we're about to blur the crucial distinction between the system and the perpetrators, and in so doing avoid keeping our sight on what has to happen next.

The bottom line is that MPs, a lot of MPs, got caught. They got caught because they thought they would never get caught. That assumption has over these last weeks unveiled a scale of arrogance and misjudgement that has led many to believe there must be something rotten at the core of Britain's parliamentary system that now must be changed.

Into the clean-up mix has come calls for a written constitution, the abolition of the monarchy and a charter for a viable republic, reform of the House of Lords, time for a proper system of representative voting, a refashioning of power devolved away from the centre, a reduction in the number of MPs, the simple abolition of all allowances and a hike in the pay of poor MPs. And suggestions that parliament needs to reassert its authority and begin "reconnecting" British politics to the people it represents.

That all of these calls aren't new, have been around for ages, have been debated and examined, have elements already evolving into the UK's system of government, seems to be lost in the shouts of revolution and reform that, we're told, reflect the public's appetite for radical change. Except the public don't want political review, they want a fi ring squad or something close to it.

The electorate wants their suspect representatives deselected, thrown out, dumped by their parties and to have charges brought against them. MPs who have evidently manipulated the system of allowances for their own gain, should no longer be in the Commons. Period.

Good lawyers, however, know that the one thing that can disorient a jury is for them to be snowed under with information and options. Whether by accident or intent, we are in danger of being "snowed" with proposals that are inherently long term in their ability to deliver a systematic change in the way politics functions in the UK. A long-term solution isn't what's needed for those MPs caught with their hands in the public till. If the clean-up comes with a long- term price tag that insists a malfunctioning culture is to blame, with individual absolution warranted and blame lessened, then we'll miss doing to the offenders what they have been doing to us for years.

By all means laugh at duck houses, moat cleaning, money for trouser presses, dog food, boutique hotels, tree care experts, mock Tudor beams. But don't laugh at the culture that left MPs thinking they were due all this stuff.

There's a high correlation between the rise of the hyper-bonuses in the City over the last decade and the parallel belief among certain MPs that they might miss the wealth train and so should begin taking what they could get irrespective of any sense of fairness.

LOOSELY applied rules that were supposed to be about need and the ability to do their jobs as public servants, were by-passed in the name of greed. The we'reall-in-this-together culture at Westminster saw those at the top able to protect themselves from investigation and offer bribes and threats to those who exposed so-called misjudgements.

The same one-rule-for-us, another-for-them system is currently on show, with Cabinet ministers seemingly immune, while backbench and lower order MPs are being lined up as the scapegoats to join Speaker Martin in a sham of a clean-up.

Instead of reviews and system revisions and cries of a new reform act, why not use powers that already exist? Gordon Brown has enough "evidence" to act, but instead he's playing for time by asking for more evidence, more reviews, more investigations. And around him, playing for time looks endemic.

Rather than time and clemency, there should be a cull. A cull of those - Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet, it shouldn't matter - who have got rich on taxpayers' money, whether it's by fl ipping, cheating or lying about where their first home is, or trying to furnish their humble residences with the best John Lewis can provide.